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Posts tagged ‘Social Media’

Facebook Has Admitted Its Error, But Its ‘Fact Checkers’ Are Still Complicit in Censorship

By: Mark Hemingway | January 08, 2025

Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn over a new leaf on the social media censorship — but some in the media don’t seem happy about giving up the power to silence people.

Mark Hemingway

Visit on Twitter@heminator

Tuesday morning, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta’s social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads would be eliminating their heavy-handed censorship policies and moving towards a “community notes” model for policing content like X. This includes terminating their “third party factchecking program” where the company paid legacy media organizations to “fact check” content on the site and then used those judgments to censor content.

At this point there’s little reason to believe that Mark Zuckerberg can do much to atone for what he did to suppress speech and damage conservative publications. However, on the surface level this is a significant PR victory for free speech and, unsurprisingly, Facebook’s fact checking partners are not taking it well. Aaron Sharockman, the executive director of PolitiFact which is one of Facebook/Meta’s original fact checking partners going back eight years, just posted this defensive letter on X. Some of the highlights:

The decision to remove independent journalists from Facebook’s content moderation program in the United States has nothing to do with free speech or censorship. Mark Zuckerberg could not be less subtle. …

Facebook and Meta solely created the penalties that publishers faced and the warning labels and overlays that users saw. It was Facebook and Meta that created a system that allowed ordinary citizens to see their posts demoted but exempted politicians and political leaders who said the very same things. In case it needs to be said, PolitiFact and U.S. fact-checking journalists played no role in the decision to remove Donald Trump from Facebook. …

When we make an error, there is a process to correct those mistakes. And there is also a process to make sure Facebook and Meta receive the corrected information. That’s how the information cycle is supposed to work.

If Meta is upset it created a tool to censor, it should look in the mirror.

PolitiFact has been a thoroughly dishonest and contemptible organization since its inception, but this is a particularly dishonest and self-serving excuse, even for them. And I happen know what I’m talking about. After years of detailed reporting on the dishonesty of so called “fact checkers,” the publication I worked for, The Weekly Standard, made the decision to become, like PolitiFact, one of Facebook’s official fact checking partners. And I can tell you a few things about this arrangement that, if you care about free speech and journalistic integrity, will make your blood boil.

The first is that Facebook paid it’s fact checking partners for participating in this program — in PolitiFact’s case, Meta supplied more than 5 percent of their annual revenue. In practice, this meant that news organizations such as PolitiFact, USA Today, and, yes, The Weekly Standard, participating in this program were taking a large sum from one of the country’s largest and most influential corporations. This was a massive conflict of interest, considering these same publications were also tasked with covering Facebook neutrally when it came up in the news. Which was a lot.

Already news organizations were skittish about Facebook because the death of print media and the subscription model meant they were heavily dependent on Facebook for steering traffic their way to make money on digital advertising. Taking money directly from Facebook meant they had you over a barrel in multiple ways. If there was cause to criticize Facebook’s policies about censoring content or any other matter, doing so meant these publications were biting the hand that fed them.

The second is that the inception of Facebook’s fact checking program was explicitly political and intended to suppress right-leaning news by design. Here’s an excerpt from Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by an author named Hemingway:

Soon after the [2016] election, BuzzFeed was reporting, “Facebook employees have formed an unofficial task force to question the role their company played in promoting fake news in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s victory in the US election last week.” The group was operating in open defiance of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said the idea that Facebook had unfairly tilted the election in Trump’s favor was “crazy.” Zuckerberg had already faced criticism earlier, in May 2016, when Gizmodo reported, “Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential ‘trending’ news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project.”

By December 2016, Zuckerberg had caved. Facebook adopted a new policy of trying to combat the alleged “fake news” that troubled Facebook’s left-wing employees. The tech giant would start paying media outlets to “fact-check” news on the site. With media revenue steadily declining — in no small part because Facebook had radically disrupted the traditional journalistic business models — once reputable news organizations signed up to participate in the fact-checking program. Media outlets that were supposed to be objectively covering Facebook were now on Facebook’s payroll, given the power to determine all the news that was fit to print.

Whether or not the tech companies wanted to admit it, much of Silicon Valley’s anger over Trump’s victory was about their inability to control American opinion.

Third, the idea that PolitiFact or any of Facebook’s media fact checking partners were blameless for participating in Facebook’s censorship and stifling free speech is such a dubious and offensive argument it’s incredible anyone would attempt to make it.

In the summer of 2018, the Weekly Standard’s participation in the Facebook’s fact checking program led to far and away the most awkward staff meeting in the eight years that I worked there. I wrote about this episode at length (and in this book), but essentially what happened is that the young journalist The Weekly Standard employed who wrote fact checks for Facebook openly said he was uncomfortable with the responsibility:

He explained that whenever he did one of his fact checking columns, part of his gig involved going into a special portal in Facebook’s backend created for its fact checking mercenaries, where he entered details about his fact check. When he entered a claim of “false,” he was asked to enter the URL of the story where he found the claim – at which point Facebook, according to their own press releases, would then kill 80 percent of the global internet traffic to that story. Our fact checker explained this was making him uncomfortable. Some of these fact checks were complicated, and he felt his judgment wasn’t absolute.

It was a record scratch moment in the staff meeting. After a beat, I spoke up and said something to the effect of “you mean to tell me, that a single journalist has the power to render judgment to nearly wipe a news story off of the internet?” Where our publication had once taken pride in challenging the dishonesty and bias of the corporate media, it dawned on me — and more than a few others in the room — that whatever influence our failing publication had was now being leveraged to act as part of a terrifyingly effective censorship regime controlled by a hated social media company run by one of the world’s richest men.

Suffice this anecdote to say, this all culminated in one editor at the magazine raising his voice — in defense of Facebook — in a way that made everyone in the room rather uncomfortable. Imagine you’re a writer at a conservative magazine and confronting the fact you’re participating in a program where a centi-billionaire pays a bunch of legacy media hacks to disproportionately censor politically inconvenient opinions on the right. I knew it was bad, but I was pretty alarmed to realize not all of my colleagues found this intolerable. But by this point The Weekly Standard was hemorrhaging subscribers and was shut down a few months later. Alas, the more animated editor in that meeting doesn’t appear to have learned from the episode.

After the closure of The Weekly Standard, alumni from that magazine started a new publication known as The Dispatch. Despite what had happened at our ill-fated previous employer, becoming a Facebook fact checking partner was one easy way for a new publication to get revenue, I guess. Anyway, it wasn’t long before this new arrangement prompted controversy. A Dispatch fact check claimed two advertisements from the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List claimed “partly false information.”

The allegedly false information was that the Susan B. Anthony List was claiming Joe Biden and the Democrat Party supported late-term abortion. It didn’t matter that this claim wasn’t even particularly debatable as Biden and the Democrat Party clearly support late-term abortion.

After a lot of online blowback — at the time, one of the marquee names at The Dispatch was David French, an alleged evangelical pro-life stalwart turned Kamala Harris voter — the publication promised to review and correct their error. Despite the public promise, you should not be surprised to learn that, either through negligence by The Dispatch or Facebook, the “process to make sure Facebook and Meta receive the corrected information” touted above got no results. Susan B. Anthony List and its election ads were banned from Facebook in the critical weeks right before the 2020 election, which was decided by a mere 40,000 or so votes.

Mind you, this is all based on my comparably limited experience with a censorship program whose flaws were readily apparent to anyone. It would be impossible to muster enough contempt for an organization such as PolitiFact, who by their own admission did thousands of fact checks for Facebook to enable their direct censorship of ordinary citizens and important political voices alike.

Like I said, I find Mark Zuckerberg’s motivations suspect, to say nothing of the restitution he owes conservative publications like this one that told the truth only to be suppressed and censored. But regardless of how we arrived at this point, Facebook’s statement that what they were doing was wrong and the termination of their fact checking program are important concessions to the reality that ordinary Americans believe in and want free speech.

I imagine it’s hard to accept that you’ve been the villain all along, but Sharockman and PolitiFact don’t get to have it both ways. PolitiFact concedes they took Facebook’s money, but that doesn’t mean they share any responsibility for Facebook justifying censorship with the services they provided? No, PolitiFact knew full well they were providing the bullets for Facebook’s gun, and they were happy to do it because they liked who Facebook was aiming at.

We’ll see if Facebook follows through with its promise to be less censorious, but it’s impossible to read Sharockman’s hackneyed justifications without looking forward to the day where self-appointed fact checkers are irrelevant to what Americans are allowed to say.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator

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Business, censorship, Free Speech, Political

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Clouds Form Over Bluesky: “Trust and Safety” Head Embraces Canadian-Style Speech Limits

By: Jonathan Turley | December 18, 2024

After the election, liberal pundits and media have attempted to rally the public in a shift from X to Bluesky, a smaller site that is viewed as a safe space for the left. I have been critical of the move as a retreat deeper into the liberal echo chamber after an election that showed how out-of-touch many of these writers were with the majority of voters. They would be better served engaging with a broader swath of public opinion. Today, one of the top Bluesky officials embraced Canadian-style speech controls and rejected more robust views of free speech as the model for the site. Bluesky has long been criticized as a site built on the concept of “safe spaces” in higher education for those triggered by opposing views. Many of those leaving Twitter long for the “good ole days” of when all social media platforms engaged in extensive censorship to exclude or marginalize opposing voices. This week, Aaron Rodericks, the head of trust and safety at Bluesky, confirmed the worst fears of the site. Bluesky has been hammered with complaints from conservatives and libertarians that they have been subject to not only death threats on the site but also blocked from posting. Some have demanded even more aggressive measures to block or suppress conservative or libertarian views deemed threatening or demeaning. Liberal pundits have heralded the site as allowing them to “breathe again” without hearing the type of opposing views allowed on X.

Rodericks espoused the type of anti-free speech rationalizations that are addressed in my recent book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.” He insisted that there are alternative views of free speech than the type of “absolutism” supported by figures like myself.

Rodericks juxtaposed what he called “free speech absolutism” against the more enlightened Canadian model, adding, “I think it just comes down to philosophies of free speech.”

He explained:

“Being Canadian shapes a lot of my perspective. There’s enough of the American perspective in the world on a day-to-day basis. For example, in the Canadian constitution… you have rights and freedoms, but they’re not unequivocal.”

It was a chilling reference for many in the free speech community since free speech is in a free fall in Canada. As we have previously discussed, there has been a steady criminalization of speech, including even jokes and religious speech, in Canada. The country has eviscerated the right to free speech and association.

Yet, that is apparently the model for Bluesky. Rodericks repeats the doublespeak of the anti-free speech movement in claiming that he just wants to create a space where all are welcomed but excluding those who are not welcomed:

“I’m glad that [critics] consider it a safe space and ideally it can be a safe space for them as well. The whole point of Bluesky is for it to be safe and welcoming to all users. I think the issue is some people are defining their identity by opposition to others and how well they can harass others and deny their existence. Bluesky may not be the right place for them.”

Not surprisingly, Rodericks used to work at trust and safety for Twitter before he was fired by Elon Musk. He has also sued Musk over a tweet. At issue is Musk’s response to the criticism of his firing Rodericks’s team by noting, “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.” That would seem clearly protected opinion under the First Amendment, but, of course, for the former censors of Twitter, it should not be allowed.

We have previously discussed the censorship standards at Twitter. For example, former Twitter executive Anika Collier Navaroli testified on what she repeatedly called the “nuanced” standard used by her and her staff on censorship. Toward the end of the hearing, she was asked about that standard by Rep. Melanie Ann Stansbury (D., NM). Her answer captured precisely why Twitter’s censorship system proved a nightmare for free expression.

Navaroli then testified how she felt that there should have been much more censorship and how she fought with the company to remove more material that she and her staff considered “dog whistles” and “coded” messaging. She said that they balanced free speech against safety and explained that they sought a different approach:

“Instead of asking just free speech versus safety to say free speech for whom and public safety for whom. So whose free expression are we protecting at the expense of whose safety and whose safety are we willing to allow to go the winds so that people can speak freely.”

Rep. Stansbury responded by saying “Exactly.”

The statement was reminiscent of that of former CEO Parag Agrawal. After taking over as CEO, Agrawal pledged to regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.” Agrawal said the company would “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.”

The same standard seems to be at play at Bluesky as controversial figures like Rodericks decide which views are deemed harassing or amount to a denial of the existence of others. They will be shown, Canadian style, why “Bluesky may not be the right place for them.”

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

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Social Media

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‘Block Community Notes We Don’t Like’: Harris Campaign Caught Red-Handed Manipulating X To Censor Criticism

By: Reddit Lies | October 30, 2024

Reddit Lies

In part one of this investigation into how Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign is deceptively manipulating online platforms, it was revealed that the campaign is operating a Discord server that directs hordes of volunteers to use their social media accounts to deceptively push election propaganda. The goal is to artificially manufacture consensus by making pro-Kamala Harris messages on social media appear more popular than they are, and it is often done in violation of the Terms of Service of the social media platforms. In more extreme cases, they are encouraging people to skirt election laws and using these “astroturfing” campaigns to spread disinformation they think will help win the upcoming election.

Yesterday’s report documented how the Harris-Walz campaign has seen great success in manipulating Reddit’s algorithm, but that isn’t the only social media site they’re manipulating. The campaign has also been targeting Elon Musk’s X, perhaps the most influential site for political news. One particular goal, according to a user of the Harris-Walz campaign Discord server, is to get campaign volunteers to swarm the site and “block [community notes] we don’t like.”

Prior to Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the site’s management was known for capriciously removing information and regularly banning users in a way that employed a double standard that heavily disfavored conservative opinion. Musk, a major free speech advocate, sought to institute a more neutral way to deal with misleading tweets, and the “Community Notes” system was born.

Select users who signed up for the program could propose notes to be added to tweets showing that the information was wrong, misleading, or required important context. Other users can then read the proposed notes and vote on whether they are accurate or needed, and if the proposed notes get enough favorable votes, they get appended to the post permanently.

However, throughout this campaign Harris-Walz official accounts have been remarkable conduits for disinformation and have regularly provided dishonest presentations of the Trump-Vance campaign. The Harris campaign’s X accounts have been so bad that even CNN fact checker Daniel Dale, who has been very harsh on Trump for several years, wrote an entire column highlighting the errors and dishonesty.

Despite this, virtually none of the false and misleading tweets from Kamala Harris’ campaign have Community Notes appended to them. One likely explanation for this discrepancy is that the Harris campaign is directing volunteers on its Discord server to vote down Community Notes even when those notes accurately say the campaign is being deceptive.

In the example below, after a @KamalaHQ tweet claimed Trump referred to Americans who don’t support him as “dangerous people,” Timothy Durigan, an employee of the Democratic National Committee, urges campaign volunteers to vote down a Community Note that accurately pointed out the Kamala campaign was taking Trump’s remark out of context. Trump was actually speaking about those in the American government responsible for leaking information related to Israel’s war plans:

In the “twitter-community-notes” channel found on the Harris-Walz Discord, paid Democrat staffers are also writing dubious Community Notes on X to undermine GOP and Trump messaging. They then encourage volunteers to rate them positively.

Unsurprisingly, these notes are often filled with half-truths, misleading information, or lies, such as explaining how Joe Biden’s son’s brain tumor must have been due to his service in Iraq.

The Harris-Walz server even has a “Twitter (X) Community Notes Training” module, which describes how users can quickly bump up their Community Notes “Rating Impact,” which allows them to write their own Community Notes with a high enough status. They also describe “problems” with Community Notes, such as Joe Biden being tagged in “inaccurate Community Notes,” and how users can rate them negatively.

Since X’s Community Notes upvoting system is designed to mitigate political bias far better than Reddit’s, the Harris-Walz campaign’s attempt to manipulate Community Notes on X hasn’t been as successful.

One Harris-Walz Discord user lengthily expressed his frustrations at the bias mitigation system used by Community Notes (CNs), which was implemented to prevent user manipulation:

While their attempts to abuse Community Notes on X were largely ineffective, it is still a gross violation of X’s Terms of Service, which prohibits artificially amplifying information.

Other Astroturfing Operations

The Harris-Walz Discord server provides access to an app called “Reach” which gives its users access to a database of “entertaining” Harris-Walz campaign content.

X has also introduced “Radar,” a feature that lets users see post volumes on specific topics. Using messaging guidance from three Reach posts, I found evidence of hundreds of astroturfing profiles for the Harris campaign on X. The same search was done on Google with one of the images, suggesting broader reach. While the Google data is larger, it is also likely incomplete while the X data is complete. The scale of this operation continues to grow.

Users can connect their own personal social media accounts to the Reach app, so they can easily repost memes, videos, and other content that promotes the ideals of the Harris-Walz campaign.

While topics relating to current events routinely trend on Reddit and X, other platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram, gear themselves towards entertaining content. To target these platforms, the campaign is also using Reach. Unfortunately for them, the content they provide pretty much resembles your liberal aunt’s Facebook timeline.

To people who have spent years online learning the nuances of meme culture, this is fundamentally repulsive. It embodies the inauthentic nature of the modern internet, which has seemingly replaced the “old net” in the last two decades.

Their reaction to the now infamous Man Enough to Vote for Harris ad speaks for itself:

Not only do they love flamboyant actors masquerading as American “men,” they also enjoyed actively promoting it during a football game, boosting their post with unrelated hashtags that happened to be trending at the time. This is yet another shady tactic used to bump up social media posts inauthentically, shamelessly employed by official Harris-Walz volunteers.

But at this late stage in the campaign, it would appear spreading inauthentic content and deceptive messages is all the Harris campaign can do.

The author runs the popular Twitter account @reddit_lies.

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censorship, Crime, Political

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Desperate Democrats Are Pushing Yet Another Version of the Russia Collusion Hoax

By: John Daniel Davidson | September 06, 2024

John Daniel Davidson

Visit on Twitter@johnddavidson

The Biden administration’s announcement this week that the Justice Department is taking action against alleged Kremlin-run websites and Russian state media employees as part of an effort to crack down on Russian “misinformation” ahead of the election should raise red flags — huge, obvious red flags.

The biggest red flag is the timing of the indictment and accompanying announcement, just as mail-in ballots in some states are sent out and two weeks before in-person voting begins in some states. The only possible reason for the DOJ to announce this now, and to frame it as a Russian election meddling scheme designed to boost former President Donald Trump, is to paint Trump and his supporters as agents of a hostile foreign power, or at the very least to imply that Trump’s support is fake, paid for by Moscow. In other words, the timing of the indictment itself represents an egregious form of election meddling by our own Justice Department, whose longstanding policy is not to file indictments that could potentially influence an election. Yet that’s the entire purpose of the indictment announced this week.

We’ve seen this playbook before from Democrats. Hand-waving about “Russian disinformation” and “election interference” by the DOJ and the U.S. intelligence community is of course a well-worn election interference tactic — and arguably a far more potent than anything that’s ever come from Moscow.

First it was the outlandish claim in 2016 that Donald Trump was actually a secret Russian agent and that he colluded with Moscow to win the White House. An entire FBI investigation was based on the discredited and patently ridiculous Steele dossier. The initial election meddling allegation was based on nothing more than $100,000 or so in Facebook ads purchased by Russian entities with the aim of sowing division among the American electorate. And from that thin reed, an entire narrative emerged that Russia not only meddled in our election, but that Trump colluded with Moscow in the effort.

The entire U.S. intelligence community was mobilized first against Trump’s campaign and then against his administration in what amounted to an Executive Branch rebellion against the duly elected president of the United States. For years, outlandish claims of Trump-Russia collusion hobbled the Trump White House before eventually fizzling out with the denouement of the Mueller investigation, which turned up zero evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

But Democrats and the deep state didn’t give up. Desperate to pry Trump out of office in 2020, the FBI and the intelligence community interfered in our elections yet again. First, they prepped social media companies like Facebook and Twitter that any negative stories about Hunter Biden in the runup to the election should be considered Russian disinformation or obtained via illegal hacking. When the New York Post broke the news of Hunter Biden laptop in October 2020, the big social media companies did as they had been told and throttled the story.

Not only that, but dozens of “former” intelligence officials (coordinated and cajoled by none other than the current secretary of state, Anthony Blinken) issued an open letter claiming the Hunter Biden story had “all the hallmarks” of a Kremlin disinformation operation — even though the CIA and FBI knew at the time, and had known for over a year, that the laptop and its contents were authentic.

Now they’re back with a warmed-over version of the same tired tactic. Call it the Russia collusion hoax 3.0. According to the DOJ indictment, the so-called “malign influence operation” involved two Russian nationals who worked for RT, formerly known as Russia Today, a state-run media outlet. These RT employees allegedly ran a series of “covert projects” that included funneling $10 million to a Tennessee-based company called Tenet Media, which was founded in 2022 by founded by Liam Donovan and his wife, Lauren Chen.

Chen is a right-wing Turning Points USA provocateur of sorts who made videos for The Blaze (which has since cut ties with her) and proffered what were meant to be edgy conservative takes on social media. The scheme Chen and Donovan allegedly ran was to fund other right-wing(ish) commentators like Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, and Benny Johnson without disclosing that their company was “funded and directed” by RT. Rubin, Pool, and Johnson all released statements Wednesday insisting they were deceived by Tenet and are victims of this Russia propaganda plot.

In the end, it appears that the scheme wasn’t all that successful. According to the indictment, the RT employees running the project grew frustrated that the social media influencers they had paid through Tenet weren’t sharing Tenet’s videos or promoting the company enough. According to Johnson, the contract his lawyers negotiated last year with Tenet was “a standard, arms-length deal, which was later terminated.”

But the details of the indictment aren’t the big takeaway from this story, even if the allegations prove true. The big takeaway is the timing of all this. Biden’s DOJ is once again promoting a false narrative of Russian election meddling designed to benefit Trump, and doing so in the runup to the November election. They want to portray Trump support online as fake, funded and directed by foreign enemies in Moscow, and thereby paint Trump as a Putin lackey — yet again.

Sorry, but we’ve seen this movie before. Yes, Moscow might have hatched a half-baked scheme to fund right-wing social media influencers without their knowledge, just as Moscow spent $100,000 on Facebook ads in 2016 to sow division. Foreign powers trying to meddle in our elections is concerning, but it’s also not earth-shattering. A lot of nations do it. None of it has ever amounted to much and compared to what our own federal agencies have done, it doesn’t even rate.

What’s far more concerning is the way our own Justice Department and federal intelligence agencies are meddling in the election. The plain truth is that by announcing this indictment now, inserting it into the news cycle, and knowing the corporate media will do its part to portray online Trump support as inauthentic and funded by Russia, Biden’s DOJ is meddling in the election in a far more serious way than Tenet or RT or anyone in Moscow could ever hope to do.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Political

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This Country Cannot Afford A Weak Supreme Court Decision On Internet Censorship

BY: JOY PULLMANN | MARCH 21, 2024

JOY PULLMANN

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOYPULLMANN

The Biden administration attempted to distract the Supreme Court from the voluminous evidence of federal abuse of Americans’ speech rights during oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri Monday. It sounded like several justices followed the feds’ waving red flag.

“The government may not use coercive threats to suppress speech, but it is entitled to speak for itself by informing, persuading, or criticizing private speakers,” said Biden administration lawyer Brian Fletcher in his opening remarks. He and several justices asserted government speech prerogatives that would flip the Constitution upside down.

The government doesn’t have constitutional rights. Constitutional rights belong to the people and restrain the government. The people’s right to speak may not be abridged. Government officials’ speaking, in their official capacities, may certainly be abridged. Indeed, it often must be, precisely to restrict officials from abusing the state’s monopoly on violence to bully citizens into serfdom.

It is obviously un-American and unconstitutional for the government to develop a “hit list” of citizens to mute in the public square through secret pressure on communications monopolies beholden to the government for their monopoly powers. There is simply no way it’s “protected speech” for the feds to use intermediaries to silence anyone who disagrees with them on internet forums where the majority of the nation’s political organizing and information dissemination occurs.

/18 Read the email below… pic.twitter.com/4e4X1XRsjw
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) March 20, 2024

NEITHER THE TIMES NOR ANY OTHER MAJOR NEWS OUTLET HAS EVER ACKNOWLEDGED THE WHITE HOUSE SOUGHT TO CENSOR ME AND MAKE TWITTER BAN ME AT A SECRET MEETING IN APRIL 2021.

Never. Not one. Not once. https://t.co/w7AXxKv4qd
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) March 10, 2024

Bullying, Not the Bully Pulpit

What’s happening is not government expressing its views to media, or “encouraging press to suppress their own speech,” as Justice Elena Kagan put it. This is government bullying third parties to suppress Americans’ speech that officials dislike.

In the newspaper analogy, it would be like government threatening an IRS audit or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) investigation, or pulling the business license of The Washington Post if the Post published an op-ed from Jay Bhattacharya. As Norwood v. Harrison established in 1973, that’s blatantly unconstitutional. Government cannot “induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”

Yet, notes Matt Taibbi, some justices and Fletcher “re-framed the outing of extravagantly funded, ongoing content-flagging programs, designed by veterans of foreign counterterrorism operations and targeting the domestic population, as a debate about what Fletcher called ‘classic bully pulpit exhortations.’”

Every Fake Excuse for Censorship Is Already Illegal

We have laws against all the harms the government and several justices put forth as excuses for government censorship. Terrorism is illegal. Promoting terrorism is illegal, as an incitement to treason and violence. Inciting children to injure or murder themselves by jumping out windows — a “hypothetical” brought up by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and discussed at length in oral arguments — is illegal.

If someone is spreading terrorist incitements to violence on Facebook, law enforcement needs to go after the terrorist plotters, not Facebook. Just like it’s unjust to punish gun, knife, and tire iron manufacturers for the people who use their products to murder, it’s unjust and unconstitutional for government to effectively commandeer Facebook under the pretext of all the evils people use it to spread. If they have a problem with those evils, they should address those evils directly, not pressure Facebook to do what they can’t get through Congress like it’s some kind of substitute legislature.

It’s also ridiculous to, as Jackson and Fletcher did in oral argument, assume that the government is the only possible solution to every social ill. Do these hypothetically window-jumping children not have parents? Teachers? Older siblings? Neighbors? Would the social media companies not have an interest in preventing their products from being used to promote death, and wouldn’t that be an easy thing to explain publicly? Apparently, Jackson couldn’t conceive of any other solution to problems like these than government censorship, when our society has handled far bigger problems like war, pandemics, and foreign invasion without government censorship for 250 years!

Voters Auditing Government Is Exactly How Our System Should Work

Fletcher described it as a “problem” that in this case, “two states and five individuals are trying to use the Article III courts to audit all of the executive branch’s communications with and about social media platforms.” That’s called transparency, and it’s only a problem if the government is trying to escape accountability to voters for its actions. The people have a fundamental right to audit what their government is doing with public positions, institutions, and funds! How do we have government by consent of the governed if the people can have no idea what their government is doing?

Under federal laws, all communications like those this lawsuit uncovered are public records. Yet these public records are really hard to get. The executive branch has been effectively nullifying open records laws by absurdly lengthening disclosure times — to as long as 636 days — increasingly forcing citizens to wage expensive lawsuits to get federal agencies to cough up records years beyond the legal deadline.

Congress should pass a law forcing the automatic disclosure of all government communications with tech monopolies that don’t concern actual classified information and “national security” designations, which the government expands unlawfully to avoid transparency. No justice should support government secrecy about its speech pressure efforts outside of legitimate national security actions.

Government Is So Big, It’s Always Coercive

Fletcher’s argument also claimed to draw a line between government persuasion and government coercion. The size and minute harassment powers of our government long ago obliterated any such line, if it ever existed. Federal agencies now have the power to try citizens in non-Article III courts, outside constitutional protections for due process. Citizens can be bankrupted long before they finally get to appeal to a real court. That’s why most of them just do whatever the agencies say, even when it’s clearly unlawful.

Federal agencies demand power over almost every facet of life, from puddles in people’s backyards to the temperature of cheese served in a tiny restaurant. If they put a target on any normal citizen’s back, he goes bankrupt after regulatory torture.

As Franklin Roosevelt’s “brain trust” planned, government is now the “senior partner” of every business, giving every “request” from government officials automatic coercion power. Federal agencies have six ways from Sunday of getting back at a noncompliant company, from the EEOC to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to the Environmental Protection Agency to Health and Human Services to Securities and Exchange Commission investigations and more. Use an accurate pronoun? Investigation. Hire “one too many” white guys? Investigation.

TikTok legislation going through Congress right now would codify federal power to seize social media companies accused of being owned by foreign interests. Shortly after he acquired X, Elon Musk faced a regulatory shakedown costing him tens of millions, and more on the way. He has money like that, but the rest of us don’t.

Speech from a private citizen does not have the threat of violence behind it. Speech from a government official, on the other hand, absolutely does and always has. Government officials have powers that other people don’t, and those powers are easily abused, which is exactly why we have a Constitution. SCOTUS needs to take this crucial context into account, making constitutional protections stronger because the government is far, far outside its constitutional bounds.

Big tech companies’ very business model depends on government regulators and can be destroyed — or kneecapped — at the stroke of an activist president’s pen. Or, at least, that’s what the president said when Facebook and Twitter didn’t do what he wanted: Section 230 should “immediately be revoked.” This is a president who claims the executive power to unilaterally rewrite laws, ignore laws, and ignore Supreme Court decisions. It’s a president who issues orders as press releases so they go into effect months before they can even begin to be challenged in court.

Constitutionally Protected Speech Isn’t Terrorism

If justices buy the administration’s nice-guy pretenses of “concern about terrorism,” and “once in a lifetime pandemic measures,” they didn’t read the briefs in this case and see that is simply a cover for the U.S. government turning counterterrorism tools on its own citizens in an attempt to control election outcomes. This is precisely what the First Amendment was designed to check, and we Americans need our Supreme Court to understand that and act to protect us. Elections mean nothing when the government is secretly keeping voters from talking to each other.

The Supreme Court may not be able to return the country to full constitutional government by eradicating the almost entirely unconstitutional administrative state. But it should enforce as many constitutional boundaries as possible on such agencies. That clearly includes prohibiting all of government from outsourcing to allegedly “private” organizations actions that would be illegal for the government to take.

That includes not just coercive instructions to social media companies, but also developing social media censorship tools and organizations as cutouts for the rogue security state that is targeting peaceful citizens instead of actual terrorists. Even false speech is not domestic terrorism, and no clearheaded Supreme Court justice looking at the evidence could let the Biden administration weaponize antiterrorism measures to strip law-abiding Americans of our fundamental human rights.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

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Dark Money Group Peddles Viral Disinformation to Frame GOP Senate Candidate as Clueless Elite

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | FEBRUARY 21, 2024

TRISTAN JUSTICE

VISIT ON TWITTER@JUSTICETRISTAN

A left-wing dark money group masquerading as a Midwestern newspaper selectively clipped the announcement speech for a Wisconsin Senate candidate to frame the businessman as a heartless, clueless elite.

Eric Hovde launched his campaign to unseat Democrat incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin Tuesday. Heartland Signal, a political newspaper based in Chicago, published a 44-second segment from Hovde’s speech when he addressed the crisis on the U.S. southern border.

“It’s not just a humanitarian crisis for our country,” Hovde said. “But do you know how many lives are lost on that journey to get here? How many people’s life savings have been wiped out by the human trafficking cartels? And they’ve lost 100,000 children that they can’t account for.”

“Let me assure you,” Hovde added, “more than a few of them have ended up being sexually trafficked. I know this all too well. My brother and I have homes all over the world, and we have three in Central America that deal with issues like this.”

Heartland Signal, a leftist digital website backed by Democrat donors, posted the clip on X with the caption, “Hovde says he understands the tragedy of children being trafficked through Central America because he owns three homes there.”

Announcing his bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Wisconsin, Republican Eric Hovde says he understands the tragedy of children being trafficked through Central America because he owns three homes there. pic.twitter.com/LsQhPWvpAc
— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) February 20, 2024

The post received more than 383,000 views before a community note was attached to offer accurate context.

“‘Hovde Homes’ are shelters the Hovde Foundation has built around the world to support children – including those who have been trafficked,” the note reads. “They are not residential homes as this post suggests.”

The Midwestern news group published a follow-up post offering the right context. That post, however, received a fraction of the views of its misleading post.

Misleading tweet: 383,000 views
Devastating correction: 4,800 views
They do it on purpose. pic.twitter.com/1noKDDLksr
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) February 21, 2024

Heartland Signal was recently purchased by Future Now Action, a left-wing activist group. Hovde faces four GOP opponents in the Wisconsin Republican Senate primary that concludes Aug. 13 to challenge the two-term Democrat incumbent elected in 2012. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, the state’s other U.S. senator, narrowly captured a third term two years ago by roughly 27,000 votes in the hotly contested swing state that dramatically expanded mail-in voting in 2020.

Immigration is a top issue going into the 2024 election, with Democrats on defense after spending four years turning control of the U.S. border over to international criminal cartels. Last week, House Republicans formally impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for dereliction of his constitutional duties.

On Tuesday, more than a dozen conservatives in the upper chamber penned a letter to demand that GOP Senate chief Mitch McConnell prepare for the Mayorkas impeachment trial.

“It is imperative that the Senate Republican conference prepare to fully engage our Constitutional duty and hold a trial,” they wrote.

The Republican Senate leader faced humiliation this month following the defeat of a border amnesty and mass migration bill.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.

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Biden Cried ‘Book Ban,’ Then Pressured Amazon to Ban His Opponents from World’s Biggest Bookstore

BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | FEBRUARY 09, 2024

KYLEE GRISWOLD

VISIT ON TWITTER@KYLEEZEMPEL

Democrats and their accomplices in the media have expended an awful lot of ink, breath, and energy trying to convince voters that people on the right want to “ban books.” The leftist firestorm attacks concerned parents working to eradicate pornography and other age-inappropriate books from taxpayer-funded schools and libraries. These works include titles such as All Boys Aren’t Blue, which contains descriptions of rape, incest, and pedophilia, and Gender Queer, which shows graphic depictions of oral sex, masturbation, and homosexual acts.

Democrat activists have come out in full-throated defense of explicit sexual content for children and likened conservatives who oppose it to Nazis who want to burn books. Last month, MSNBC host Joy Reid grilled the co-founder of Moms for Liberty about why parents should have any say in how their tax dollars are used and argued that kids who identify as LGBT “feel seen” by stories about child rape.

One Democrat governor ironically argued that Republican efforts to shield children from age-inappropriate content are “castrating them.” President Joe Biden has also smeared Republicans for “banning books,” and even announced during “pride month” that he would appoint a “book ban coordinator” to make sure schools weren’t removing filth from their shelves.

That’s why it was so ridiculous to learn this week that all while Democrats were shrieking about pornography “book bans,” the Biden White House was actively “pressuring” Amazon, the world’s largest bookseller, to nuke books that raised concerns about experimental Covid-19 shots. It’s a pretty good bet that’s not the only topic the White House pressured Amazon to ban, either. According to internal documents and emails subpoenaed by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, senior Biden official Andy Slavitt, who pressured Facebook to censor speech, was pushing Amazon to ban books disagreeing with Democrat policies.

Because Slavitt didn’t like the “concerning” results that turned up when he searched Amazon books for “vaccines,” he emailed the corporation on March 2, 2021, to ask to whom Biden officials could speak about “the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon.” The vaccine debate was, and is still, ongoing. But the White House was mad that Amazon didn’t slap a warning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention onto books that stepped out of line from the government’s Covid claims.

At first, Amazon opted not to manually censor books. But as House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan wrote on X, it wasn’t “out of any commitment to free speech, but because doing so would be ‘too visible’ to the American public and likely to spur criticism from conservative media.” Amazon noted it was already taking heat for censoring Ryan T. Anderson’s book on the transgender debate, When Harry Became Sally, the month prior. The White House fired back, irritated that Amazon didn’t editorialize its book product pages with context tags, the way X and Facebook propagandist “fact-checkers” do. As Jordan pointed out, the administration couldn’t have Americans thinking for themselves.

Biden’s team was so demanding that by the time Amazon met with White House officials the next week, the company’s No. 1 question was, “Is the Admin asking us to remove books?” And the demands apparently worked. March 9, the same day as Amazon’s meeting with administration officials, it opted not to “promote” books the Democrat administration didn’t like. Just a few days later, it said it was looking into other steps “to reduce the visibility” of books that ticked off the Biden regime.

So just to be clear, at the same time the propaganda press and Democrats were crying “book ban” because rightly concerned parents were trying to eradicate taxpayer-funded gay porn from school libraries, the Biden administration was colluding with the world’s biggest bookstore to bury non-leftist viewpoints from sight.

While media hacks and radical Democrats were crying “book ban” because parents wanted gay porn out of school libraries (but still available to be shipped straight to your door), Biden was colluding with the biggest bookseller to nuke conservative views from orbit. https://t.co/7LrzeCtSzJ
— Kylee Griswold (@kyleezempel) February 5, 2024

Since we’re talking about Amazon, here’s another thing. Democrats, who claim to be mad that you don’t want your kid waltzing into the library and willy-nilly snagging a picture book about one little boy giving another little boy a blow job, can effortlessly nab a copy of any of these books with the click of a button and have them Amazon “Primed” to their doorsteps overnight. These graphic books aren’t “banned” in any sense of the word.

Meanwhile, Democrats are willing to exert undo pressure from the highest office in the land to ensure mainstream viewpoints it doesn’t like are as difficult as possible to find — or nuked from Amazon’s mega bookstore altogether. Maybe there is such a thing as a “book ban.” But it’s not on gay porn for kiddos.

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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Censorship-Industrial Complex Enlists U.K. ‘Misinformation’ Group Logically.AI To Meddle In 2024 Election

BY: LEE FANG | JANUARY 29, 2024

LEE FANG

Brian Murphy, a former FBI agent who once led the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, reflected last summer on the failures of the Disinformation Governance Board — the panel formed to actively police misinformation. The board, which was proposed in April 2022 after he left DHS, was quickly shelved by the Biden administration in a few short months in the face of criticism that it would be an Orwellian state-sponsored “Ministry of Truth.”

In a July podcast, Murphy said the threat of state-sponsored disinformation meant the executive branch has an “ethical responsibility” to rein in the social media companies. American citizens, he said, must give up “some of your freedoms that you need and deserve so that you get security back.”

The legal problems and public backlash to the Disinformation Governance Board also demonstrated to him that “the government has a major role to play, but they cannot be out in front.”

Murphy, who made headlines late in the Trump administration for improperly building dossiers on journalists, has spent the last few years trying to help the government find ways to suppress and censor speech it doesn’t like without being so “out in front” that it runs afoul of the Constitution. He has proposed that law enforcement and intelligence agencies formalize the process of sharing tips with private sector actors — a “hybrid constellation” including the press, academia, researchers, nonpartisan organizations, and social media companies — to dismantle “misinformation” campaigns before they take hold.

More recently, Murphy has worked to make his vision of countering misinformation a reality by joining a United Kingdom-based tech firm, Logically.AI, whose eponymous product identifies and removes content from social media. Since joining the firm, Murphy has met with military and other government officials in the U.S., many of whom have gone on to contract or pilot Logically’s platform.

Logically says it uses artificial intelligence to keep tabs on over 1 million conversations. It also maintains a public-facing editorial team that produces viral content and liaisons with the traditional news media. It differs from other players in this industry by actively deploying what they call “countermeasures” to dispute or remove problematic content from social media platforms.

The business is even experimenting with natural language models, according to one corporate disclosure, “to generate effective counter speech outputs that can be leveraged to deliver novel solutions for content moderation and fact-checking.” In other words, artificial intelligence-powered bots that produce, in real-time, original arguments to dispute content labeled as misinformation.

In many respects, Logically is fulfilling the role Murphy has articulated for a vast public-private partnership to shape social media content decisions. Its technology has already become a key player in a much larger movement that seeks to clamp down on what the government and others deem misinformation or disinformation. A raft of developing evidence — including the “Twitter Files,” the Moderna Reports, the proposed Government Disinformation Panel, and other reports — has shown how governments and industry are determined to monitor, delegitimize, and sometimes censor protected speech. The story of Logically.AI illustrates how sophisticated this effort has become and its global reach. The use of its technology in Britain and Canada raises red flags as it seeks a stronger foothold in the United States.

Logically was founded in 2017 by a then-22-year-old British entrepreneur named Lyric Jain, who was inspired to form the company to combat what he believed were the lies that pushed the U.K. into voting in favor of Brexit, or leaving the European Union. The once-minor startup now has broad contracts across Europe and India, and has worked closely with Microsoft, Google, PwC, TikTok, and other major firms. Meta contracts with Logically to help the company fact-check content on all of its platforms: WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.

The close ties to Silicon Valley provide unusual reach. “When Logically rates a piece of content as false, Facebook will significantly reduce its distribution so that fewer people see it, apply a warning label to let people know that the content has been rated false, and notify people who try to share it,” Meta and Logically announced in a 2021 press release on the partnership.

Meta and Logically did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

During the 2021 local elections in the U.K., Logically monitored up to “one million pieces of harmful content,” some of which they relayed to government officials, according to a document reviewed by RealClearInvestigations. The firm claimed to spot coordinated activity to manipulate narratives around the election, information they reported to tech giants for takedowns.

The following year, the state of Oregon negotiated with Logically for a wide-ranging effort to monitor campaign-related content during the 2022 midterm elections. In a redacted proposal for the project, Logically noted that it would check claims against its “single source of truth database,” which relied on government data, and would also crack down on “malinformation” — a term of art that refers to accurate information that fuels dangerous narratives. The firm similarly sold Oregon on its ability to pressure social media platforms for content removal.

Oregon state Rep. Ed Diehl has a led push against the state from renewing its work with Logically for the election this year. The company, he said in an interview, violates “our constitutional rights to free speech and privacy” by “flagging true information as false, claiming legitimate dissent is a threat, and then promoting “counter-narratives” against valid forms of public debate.

In response, the Oregon secretary of state’s office, which initiated the contract with Logically, claimed “no authority, ability, or desire to censor speech.” Diehl disputes this. He pointed out that the original proposal with Logically clearly states that its service “enables the opportunity for unlimited takedown attempts” of alleged misinformation content and the ability for the Oregon secretary of state’s office to “flag for removal” any “problematic narratives and content.” The contract document touts Logically as a “trusted entity within the social media community” that gives it “preferred status that enables us to support our client’s needs at a moment’s notice.”

Diehl, who shared a copy of the Logically contract with RCI, called the issue a vital “civil rights” fight, and noted that in an ironic twist, the state’s anti-misinformation speech suppression work further inflames distrust in “election systems and government institutions in general.”

Logically’s reach into the U.S. market is quickly growing. The company has piloted programs for the Chicago Police Department to use artificial intelligence to analyze local rap music and deploy predictions on violence in the community, according to a confidential proposal obtained by RCI. Pentagon records show that the firm is a subcontractor to a program run by the U.S. Army’s elite Special Operations Command for work conducted in 2022 and 2023. Via funding from DHS, Logically also conducts research on gamer culture and radicalization.

The company has claimed in its ethics statements that it will not employ any person who holds “a salaried or prominent position” in government. But records show closely entrenched state influence. For instance, Kevin Gross, a director of the U.S. Navy NAVAIR division, was previously embedded within Logically’s team during a 2022 fellowship program. The exchange program supported Logically’s efforts to assist NATO on the analysis of Russian social media.

Other contracts in the U.S. may be shrouded in secrecy. Logically partners with ThunderCat Technologies, a contracting firm that assists tech companies when competing for government work. Such arrangements have helped tech giants conceal secretive work in the past. Google previously attempted to hide its artificial intelligence drone-targeting contracts with the Defense Department through a similar third-party contracting vendor.

But questions swirl over the methods and reach of the firm as it entrenches itself into American life, especially as Logically angles to play a prominent role in the 2024 presidential election.

Pandemic Policing

In March 2020, as Britain confronted the spread of Covid-19, the government convened a new task force, the Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU). The secretive task force was created with little fanfare but was advertised as a public health measure to protect against dangerous misinformation. Caroline Dinenage, the member of Parliament overseeing media issues, later explained that the unit’s purpose was to provide authoritative sources of information and to “take action to remove misinformation” relating to “misleading narratives related to COVID-19.”

The CDU, it later emerged, had largely outsourced its work to private contractors such as Logically. In January 2021, the company received its first contract from the agency overseeing the CDU, for £400,000, to monitor “potentially harmful disinformation online.” The contracts later swelled, with the U.K. agency that pertains to media issues eventually providing contracts with a combined value of £1.2 million and the Department of Health providing another £1.3 million, for a total of roughly $3.2 million.

That money went into far-reaching surveillance that monitored journalists, activists, and lawmakers who criticized pandemic policies. Logically, according to an investigation last year in the Telegraph, recorded comments from activist Silkie Carlo criticizing vaccine passports in its “Mis/Disinformation” reports.

Logically’s reports similarly collected information on Dr. Alexandre de Figueiredo, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Figueiredo had published reports on the negative ways in which vaccine passports could undermine vaccine confidence and had publicly criticized policies aimed at the mass vaccination of children. Despite his expertise, Logically filed his tweet in a disinformation report to the government. While some of the reports were categorized as evidence of terms of service violations, many were, in fact, routine forms of dissent aired by prominent voices in the U.K. on policies hotly contested by expert opinion.

The documents showing Logically’s role were later uncovered by Carlo’s watchdog group, Big Brother Watch, which produced a detailed report on the surveillance effort. The CDU reports targeted a former judge who argued against coercive lockdowns as a violation of civil liberties and journalists criticizing government corruption. Some of the surveillance documents suggest a mission creep for the unit, as media monitoring emails show that the agency targeted anti-war groups that were vocal against NATO’s policies.

Carlo was surprised to even find her name on posts closely monitored and flagged by Logically. “We found that the company exploits millions of online posts to monitor, record and flag online political dissent to the central government under the banner of countering ‘disinformation,’” she noted in a statement to RCI.

Marketing materials published by Logically suggest its view of Covid-19 went well beyond fact-checking and veered into suppressing dissenting opinions. A case study published by the firm claimed that the #KBF hashtag, referring to Keep Britain Free, an activist group against school and business shutdowns, was a dangerous “anti-vax” narrative. The case study also claimed the suggestion that “the virus was created in a Chinese laboratory” was one of the “conspiracy theories’’ that “have received government support” in the U.S. — despite the fact that a preponderance of evidence now points to a likely lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the origin of the pandemic.

Logically was also involved in pandemic work that blurred the line with traditional fact-checking operations. In India, the firm helped actively persuade patients to take the vaccine. In 2021, Jain, the founder and CEO of the company, said in an interview with an Indian news outlet that his company worked “closely with communities that are today vaccine hesitant.” The company, he said, recruited “advocates and evangelists” to shape local opinion.

Questionable Fact-Checking

In 2022, Logically used its technology on behalf of Canadian law enforcement to target the trucker-led “Freedom Convoy” against Covid-19 mandates, according to government records. Logically’s team floated theories that the truckers were “likely influenced by foreign adversaries,” a widely repeated claim used to denigrate the protests as inauthentic.

The push to discredit the Canadian protests showed the overlapping power of Logically’s multiple arms. While its social media surveillance wing fed reports to the Canadian government, its editorial team worked to influence opinion through the news media. When the Financial Times reported on the protest phenomenon, the outlet quoted Murphy, the former FBI man who now works for Logically, who asserted that the truckers were influenced by coordinated “conspiracy theorist groups” in the U.S. and Canada. Vice similarly quoted Joe Ondrak, Logically’s head of investigations, to report that the “Freedom Convoy” had generated excitement among global conspiracy theorists. Neither outlet disclosed Logically’s work for Canadian law enforcement at the time.

Other targets of Logically are quick to point out that the firm has taken liberties with what it classifies as misinformation.

Will Jones, the editor of the Daily Sceptic, a British news outlet with a libertarian bent, has detailed an unusual fact-check from Logically Facts, the company’s editorial site. Jones said the site targeted him for pointing out that data in 2022 showed 71 percent of patients hospitalized for Covid-19 were vaccinated. Logically’s fact-check acknowledged Jones had accurately used statistics from the U.K. Health Security Agency, but tried to undermine him by asserting that he was still misleading by suggesting that “vaccines are ineffective.”

But Jones, in a reply, noted that he never made that argument and that Logically was batting away at a straw man. In fact, his original piece plainly took issue with a Guardian article that incorrectly claimed that “COVID-19 has largely become a disease of the unvaccinated.”

Other Logically fact-checks have bizarrely targeted the Daily Sceptic for reporting on news in January 2022 that vaccine mandates might soon be lifted. The site dinged the Daily Sceptic for challenging the evidence behind the vaccine policy and declared, “COVID-19 vaccines have been proven effective in fighting the pandemic.” And yet, at the end of that month, the mandate was lifted for health care workers, and the following month, all other pandemic restrictions were revoked, just as the Daily Sceptic had reported.

“As far as I can work out, it’s a grift,” said Daily Sceptic founder Toby Young, of Logically. “A group of shysters offer to help the government censor any criticism of its policies under the pretense that they’re not silencing dissent — God forbid! — but merely ‘cleansing’ social media of misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.”

Jones was similarly dismissive of the company, which he said disputes anything that runs contrary to popular consensus. “The consensus of course is that set by the people who pay Logically for their services,” Jones added. “The company claims to protect democratic debate by providing access to ‘reliable information,’ but in reality, it is paid to bark and savage on command whenever genuine free speech makes an inconvenient appearance.”

In some cases, Logically has piled on to news stories to help discredit voices of dissent. Last September, the anti-misinformation site leaped into action after British news outlets published reports about sexual misconduct allegations surrounding comedian and online broadcaster Russell Brand — one of the outspoken critics of government policy in Britain, who has been compared to Joe Rogan for his heterodox views and large audience.

Brand, a vocal opponent of pandemic policies, had been targeted by Logically in the past for airing opinions critical of the U.S. and U.K. response to the virus outbreak, and in other moments for criticizing new laws in the European Union that compel social media platforms to take down content.

But the site took dramatic action when the sexual allegations, none of which have been proved in court, were published in the media. Ondrak, Logically’s investigations head, provided different quotes to nearly half a dozen news outlets — including Vice, Wired, the BBC, and two separate articles in The Times — that depicted Brand as a dangerous purveyor of misinformation who had finally been held to account.

“He follows a lot of the ostensibly health yoga retreat, kind of left-leaning, anti-capitalist figures, who got really suckered into Covid skepticism, Covid denialism, and anti-vax, and then spat out of the Great Reset at the other end,” Ondrak told Wired. In one of the articles published by The Times, Ondrak aired frustration on the obstacles of demonetizing Brand from the Rumble streaming network. In an interview with the BBC, Ondrak gave a curious condemnation, noting Brand stops short of airing any actual conspiracy theories or falsehoods but is guilty of giving audiences “the ingredients to make the disinformation themselves.”

Dinenage, the member of Parliament who spearheaded the CDU anti-misinformation push with Logically during the pandemic, also leapt into action. In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, she sent nearly identical letters to Rumble, TikTok, and Meta to demand that the platforms follow YouTube’s lead in demonetizing Brand. Dinenage couched her official request to censor Brand as a part of a public interest inquiry, to protect the “welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behaviour.”

Logically’s editorial team went a step further. In its report on the Brand allegations published on Logically Facts, it claimed that social media accounts “trotting out the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ refrain” for the comedian were among those perpetuating “common myths about sexual assault.” The site published a follow-up video reiterating the claim that those seeking the presumption of innocence for Brand, a principle dating back to the Magna Carta, were spreading a dangerous “myth.”

The unusual advocacy campaign against Brand represented a typical approach for a company that has long touted itself as a hammer against spreaders of misinformation. The opportunity to remove Brand from the media ecosystem meant throwing as much at him as possible, despite any clear misinformation or disinformation angle in the sexual assault allegations. Rather, he was a leading critic of government censorship and pandemic policy, so the scandal represented a weakness to be exploited.

Such heavy-handed tactics may be on the horizon for American voters. The firm is now a member of the U.S. Election Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center, the group managed by the Center for Internet Security that helps facilitate misinformation reports on behalf of election officials across the country. Logically has been in talks with Oregon and other states, as well as DHS, to expand its social media surveillance role for the presidential election later this year.

Previous targets of the company, though, are issuing a warning.

“It appears that Logically’s lucrative and frankly sinister business effectively produced multi-million pound misinformation for the government that may have played a role in the censorship of citizens’ lawful speech,” said Carlo of Big Brother Watch.

“Politicians and senior officials happily pay these grifters millions of pounds to wield the red pen, telling themselves that they’re ‘protecting’ democracy rather than undermining it,” said Young of the Daily Sceptic. “It’s a boondoggle and it should be against the law.”

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and LeeFang.com.

Lee Fang is an investigative reporter. Find his Substack here.

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In Canada, School Board Members With Traditional Values Get Tormented Out Of Elected Office

BY: TERESA MULL | JANUARY 22, 2024

Large board table surrounded by empty chairs.

TERESA MULL

Francine Champagne was elected to her local school board in Canada in November 2022. By November 2023, she had been fired from her university teaching job and suspended from Winnipeg’s Louis Riel School Division (LRSD) board so many times — without pay — and with endless suspensions in sight, that she was forced to resign as a trustee of the board.

Champagne’s “crime”? A few posts she made on her personal Facebook page. One said, “Make men masculine again, make women feminine again, make children innocent again.” Another read, “To identify is to live a lie.” The third post was a link to the Stop the World Control website, which, Champagne explained, “included information on the sexualization and grooming of children, the United Nations’ agenda and the WHO’s ‘educational’ material.”

It’s important to remember that Champagne was elected to her position. She beat out an incumbent candidate who’d been on the board for decades and received votes from 2,817 people who determined she was the best voice to represent them and oversee the education of their children. What’s more, freedom of speech is enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

According to Champagne, her first six months on the LRSD board were positive. She visited numerous schools, attended district events, and built “an excellent rapport” with administrators, teachers, and the community. But then she ventured to ask that the board discuss a statement the board chairwoman, Sandy Nemeth, had posted on LRSD’s social media platforms declaring that LRSD fully supports LGBT resources in their schools.

“I simply asked during one of our meetings if we could talk about the stance of each trustee, because we never had addressed the issue,” said Champagne. “[Nemeth] immediately shut me down and told me harshly that she made the decision to emit a statement on behalf of the trustees, and that the diversity policy was not up for discussion. That was the end of that.”

It was, indeed, the beginning of the end for Champagne. Shortly after the dust-up with the board chair, Nemeth herself informed Champagne — during “Pride Month,” of course — that she had breached the LRSD code of conduct for her “hateful” posts that didn’t align with LRSD’s diversity policy.

Phony pretext in hand, the witch hunters set to work destroying Champagne’s life, starting, predictably, by attacking her in the press. Just five days after Nemeth’s confrontation, screenshots of the “hateful” posts appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press alongside an article about Champagne being “anti-trans” and “anti-LGBTQ.”

The next day, the LRSD board suspended Champagne for three months, and that same week, she lost her job.

The nightmare had just begun. Nemeth told the CBC that the decision to suspend Champagne “came after the realization of some incredibly unfortunate — and I will define unfortunate to mean disrespectful, hateful — comments on her Facebook page specifically indicating transphobia, homophobia, and just a general complete lack of [respect] for the LGBTQ community.”

“Because Champagne was democratically elected by the community, there is no provision within the Public Schools Act for the board to remove her,” Nemeth added. “However, the board can and will continue to suspend Champagne if she fails to sign and uphold the code of conduct.”

The board continued to issue suspension after suspension and went so far as to ban friends and supporters who showed up to board meetings to defend Champagne permanently from LRSD property. One community member noted in a letter to the LRSD board, “You are doing to her what you accuse her of doing to you, and that is bullying and discrimination.”

Champagne is a devout Catholic who expressed having “no fear” during her ordeal. “People are constantly calling me, emailing me, praying for me,” she said. “And I feel very peaceful inside just knowing that I’m standing on God’s truth.”

After determining that the LRSD work environment had “become unbearable” and that “it would be unsafe and unhealthy to work in an environment where intolerance reigns,” Champagne issued a statement of resignation and told her side of the story the media had largely ignored.

“I was no longer able to afford the legal fees towards the appeal process and other matters,” she said. “I surely did not become a school trustee with the intention of entering a legal battle. My objective was to focus on education (the 3Rs) and the molding of healthy minds, but political activism seems to take precedence. For all the reasons listed above, I will be forced to leave the board, and not of my own volition.”

Responding to Champagne’s letter of resignation, the LRSD board danced on her grave with nauseating sanctimony.

“Since June 6, 2023, the school board has endeavoured to hold a colleague accountable for words and deeds that caused great harm to students, staff, and members of our community while also working to reassure our community of our commitment to safe and caring working and learning environments,” they wrote. “The board extends appreciation to everyone in LRSD and beyond for their messages and demonstrations of support. We want to reassure you that actions and language that cause harm will never be tolerated, and decisive action will always be taken against anyone who attempts to spread baseless, malicious, deceitful and vengeful lies about our students, staff, and families.”

“The board accuses me of being harmful for trying to protect the children from all of this,” Champagne said. “In psychology, this is called gaslighting or projection. Unreal! The board has made its intentions clear: traditional views will not be tolerated.”

As Champagne’s martyrdom testifies to the power of the woke mob, Monique LaGrange continues to fight. Like Champagne, LaGrange was democratically elected and expelled as a trustee for refusing to apologize for posting a meme to her Facebook page or to undergo sensitivity training.

According to The Democracy Fund which is representing LaGrange in a lawsuit against the Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools, the meme “depicted two side-by-side photographs, one of children holding swastika flags and the other of children holding pride progress flags. The meme … included a caption stating, ‘brainwashing is brainwashing.’”

“I was elected to stand up and protect our children, and that is what I am doing,” LaGrange said.

“Our society is messed up, but God will fix this,” concluded Champagne, “all in His perfect timing.”

Teresa Mull is an assistant editor of the Spectator World, a policy adviser for education at the Heartland Institute, and author of “Woke-Proof Your Life.”

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Education, Political

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State Of Texas Joins the Federalist, Daily Wire in Suing the Federal Censorship-Industrial Complex

BY: JOY PULLMANN | DECEMBER 06, 2023

JOY PULLMANN

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOYPULLMANN

The U.S. State Department is violating the U.S. Constitution by funding technology to silence Americans who question government claims, says a lawsuit filed Tuesday by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas.

The three are suing to stop “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history,” says the lawsuit. It exposes federal censorship activities even beyond the dramatic discoveries in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case, Murthy v. Missouri (also known as Missouri v. Biden).

This lawsuit alleges the State Department is illegally using a counterterrorism center intended to fight foreign “disinformation” instead to stop American citizens from speaking and listening to information government officials dislike. Other recent investigations have also found government counterterrorism resources and tactics being used to shape American public opinion and policy.

Through grants and product development assistance to private entities including the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard, the lawsuit alleges, the State Department “is actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press.”

This is just the latest in a series of major investigations and court cases in the last year to uncover multiple federal censorship efforts laundered through private cutouts. The “Twitter Files,” a series of investigative journalist reports, uncovered that dozens of federal agencies pressured virtually all social media monopolies to hide and punish tens of millions of posts and users.

Missouri v. Biden found this federal censorship complex has included government officials changing the content moderation and user policies of social media monopolies through threats to destroy their business models. House of Representatives investigations have uncovered U.S. national security and spy agencies creating “private” organizations to circumvent the Constitution’s prohibition on federal officials abridging Americans’ speech. These false-front organizations deliberately avoid creating records subject to transparency laws and congressional oversight, public records show.

Congressional investigations in November revealed that federal officials have specifically targeted The Federalist’s reporting for internet censorship.

In which Sean Davis was censored for saying the best evidence against the integrity of the election was the fact that Democrats/media/Big Tech were censoring anyone who observed their censorship efforts related to the election. pic.twitter.com/r6NdbnSx1f
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) November 7, 2023

The U.S. Justice Department is even about to put a U.S. citizen in prison for sharing election jokes on Twitter.

‘Coordinating the Government’s Efforts to Silence Speech’

The Fifth Circuit refrained from stopping the State Department’s participation in the “vast censorship enterprise” that Murthy v. Missouri uncovered because, the court said, it hadn’t seen enough evidence of that agency’s involvement. This new lawsuit from Texas, The Federalist, and The Daily Wire provides such evidence.

Even though Congress and the Constitution have banned the federal government from silencing Americans, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) has morphed into “the lead in coordinating the government’s efforts to silence speech,” the lawsuit says. The lawsuit names as defendants the U.S. State Department, GEC, and multiple department officials including Secretary of State Antony Blinken. GEC originated as a counterterrorism agency created by an executive order from President Obama.

Through GEC, the State Department evaluated more than 365 different tools for scrubbing the internet of disfavored information, the lawsuit says. The department also pays millions to develop multiple internet disinformation “tools.” It also runs tests on censorship technologies and awards government prize money to those most effective at controlling what Americans say and hear online, the lawsuit says.

[LISTEN: Margot Cleveland Breaks Down Explosive New Federalist Lawsuit Against State Department]

State then shares these censorship technologies with companies, favored media outlets, academics, and government agencies. It markets these government-funded censorship technologies to Silicon Valley companies including Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. The tools included “supposed fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology,” the lawsuit says.

At least two of the censorship tools the State Department has funded, developed, and awarded have targeted The Federalist and The Daily Wire, the lawsuit says. NewsGuard and GDI wield these tools developed with government assistance to deprive government-criticizing news outlets, including The Federalist and The Daily Wire, of operating funds.

They do this by rating conservative outlets poorly, falsely claiming these outlets purvey “disinformation” and are “unreliable.” That deprives leftists’ media competitors of high-value ad dollars from the big companies that use these rating systems. Such companies include YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Best Buy, Exxon Mobil, Kellogg, MasterCard, and Verizon.

“Advertising companies that subscribe to GDI’s blacklist refuse to place ads with disfavored news sources, cutting off revenue streams and leaving the blacklisted outlets unable to compete with the approved ‘low risk’ media outlets — often legacy news,” the lawsuit says.

Boosting Disinformation While Claiming the Opposite

Ratings companies like NewsGuard and GDI base their low ratings of outlets like The Federalist at least in part on politically charged “fact checks” of a tiny percentage of the outlets’ articles. While these companies’ full ratings criteria are secret, in December 2022 GDI published a top 10 list of its most favored and most disfavored news outlets. The Federalist and Daily Wire appear on GDI’s 10 “riskiest” list.

All of the outlets on GDI’s “least risky” list have helped spread some of the government’s biggest disinformation operations in the last decade. Those include the Russia-collusion hoax and Hunter Biden laptop stories, which influenced national elections in favor of Democrats. The 10 “least risky” outlets have also widely published notable misinformation such as claims that Covid vaccines prevent disease transmission, the Covington student insult hoax, and evidence-free claims that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a serial gang rapist.

This federal censorship-industrial complex’s numerous disinformation operations include the Hamilton 68 effort. In contrast, The Federalist not only reported all these stories accurately from the beginning but for most led the reporting pack that proved it. GDI rated The Daily Wire’s “risk level” as “high” and The Federalist’s “risk level” as “maximum.”

While technologies and enterprises the State Department promotes push corporate media’s biggest purveyors of propaganda, they also “blacklist” The Federalist and Daily Wire, the lawsuit says, “negatively impacting Media Plaintiffs’ ability to circulate and distribute their publications to both current and potential audiences, and intentionally destroying the Media Plaintiffs’ ability to obtain advertisers.” Microsoft, for example, uses NewsGuard technology “to train Bing Chat.”

The lawsuit is filed in the U.S. federal court for the Eastern District of Texas. It seeks a court declaration that the State Department’s funding, testing, pressuring, and promoting of internet censorship tools is unconstitutional and an order that it end.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “The Read-Aloud Advent Calendar,” “The Advent Prepbook,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

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censorship

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Meet NewsGuard: The Government-Backed Censorship Tool Billed As An Arbiter Of Truth

BY: LEE FANG | NOVEMBER 15, 2023

LEE FANG

In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool.

In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” His written pitch highlighted a “separate product” — beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge browser — “for internal use by content-moderation teams.” Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous content.

Read NewsGuard’s email and RealClearInvestigations’ response about RCI’s reporting here.

How would the company determine the truth? For issues such as Covid-19, NewsGuard would steer readers to official government sources only, like the federal Centers for Disease Control. Other content-moderation allies, Crovitz’s pitch noted, include “intelligence and national security officials,” “reputation management providers,” and “government agencies,” which contract with the firm to identify misinformation trends. Instead of only fact-checking individual forms of incorrect information, NewsGuard, in its proposal, touted the ability to rate the “overall reliability of websites” and “’prebunk’ COVID-19 misinformation from hundreds of popular websites.”

NewsGuard’s ultimately unsuccessful pitch sheds light on one aspect of a growing effort by governments around the world to police speech ranging from genuine disinformation to dissent from officially sanctioned narratives. In the United States, as the “Twitter Files” revealed, the effort often takes the form of direct government appeals to social media platforms and news outlets. More commonly the government works through seemingly benign non-governmental organizations — such as the Stanford Internet Observatory — to quell speech it disapproves of.

Or it pays to coerce speech through government contracts with outfits such as NewsGuard, a for-profit company of especially wide influence. Founded in 2018 by Crovitz and his co-CEO Steven Brill, a lawyer, journalist, and entrepreneur, NewsGuard seeks to monetize the work of reshaping the internet. The potential market for such speech policing, NewsGuard’s pitch to Twitter noted, was $1.74 billion, an industry it hoped to capture.

Instead of merely suggesting rebuttals to untrustworthy information, as many other existing anti-misinformation groups provide, NewsGuard has built a business model out of broad labels that classify entire news sites as safe or untrustworthy, using an individual grading system producing what it calls “nutrition labels.” The ratings — which appear next to a website’s name on the Microsoft Edge browser and other systems that deploy the plug-in — use a scale of zero to 100 based on what NewsGuard calls “nine apolitical criteria,” including “gathers and presents information responsibly” (worth 18 points), “avoids deceptive headlines” (10 points), and “does not repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content” (22 points), etc.

NewsGuard ratings list — IMAGE CREDITNEWSGUARD

Critics note that such ratings are entirely subjective — The New York Times, for example, which repeatedly carried false and partisan information from anonymous sources during the Russiagate hoax, gets a 100 percent rating. RealClearInvestigations, which took heat in 2019 for unmasking the “whistleblower” of the first Trump impeachment (while many other outlets including the Times still have not), has an 80 percent rating. (Verbatim: the NewsGuard-RCI exchange over the whistleblower.) Independent news outlets with an anti-establishment bent receive particularly low ratings from NewsGuard, such as the libertarian news site Antiwar.com, with a 49.5 percent rating, and conservative site The Federalist, with a 12.5 percent rating.

As it stakes a claim to being the internet’s arbiter of trust, the company’s site says it has conducted reviews of some 95 percent of news sources across the English, French, German, and Italian web. It has also published reports about disinformation involving China and the Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas wars. The model has received glowing profiles in CNN and The New York Times, among other outlets, as a viable solution for fighting fake news.

NewsGuard product offerings — IMAGE CREDITNEWSGUARD

NewsGuard is pushing to apply its browser screening process to libraries, academic centers, news aggregation portals, and internet service providers. Its reach, however, is far greater because of other products it aims to sell to social media and other content moderation firms and advertisers. “An advertiser’s worst nightmare is having an ad placement damage even one customer’s trust in a brand,” said Crovitz in a press release touting NewsGuard’s “BrandGuard” service for advertisers. “We’re asking them to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to talk about the problem,” Crovitz told reporters.

How NewsGuard Starves Disfavored Sites Of Ad Clients

NewsGuard’s BrandGuard tool provides an “exclusion list” that deters advertisers from buying space on sites NewsGuard deems problematic. But that warning service creates inherent conflicts of interest with NewsGuard’s financial model: The buyers of the service can be problematic entities too, with an interest in protecting and buffing their image.

A case in point: Publicis Groupe, NewsGuard’s largest investor and the biggest conglomerate of marketing agencies in the world, which has integrated NewsGuard’s technology into its fleet of subsidiaries that place online advertising. The question of conflicts arises because Publicis represents a range of corporate and government clients, including Pfizer — whose Covid vaccine has been questioned by some news outlets that have received low scores. Other investors include Bruce Mehlman, a D.C. lobbyist with a lengthy list of clients, including United Airlines and ByteDance, the parent company of much-criticized Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok.

NewsGuard has faced mounting criticism that rather than serving as a neutral public service against online propaganda, it instead acts as an opaque proxy for its government and corporate clients to stifle views that simply run counter to their own interests. The criticism finds support in internal documents, such as the NewsGuard proposal to Twitter, which this reporter obtained during “Twitter Files” reporting last year, as well as in government records and discussions with independent media sites targeted by the startup.

And although its pitch to Twitter (now Elon Musk’s X) “never went anywhere,” according to Matt Skibinski, the general manager of NewsGuard, his company remains “happy to license our data to Twitter or any platform that might benefit.” Coincidentally (or not), X comes in for criticism in NewsGuard’s latest “misinformation monitor” headlined: “Blue-Checked, ‘Verified’ Users on X Produce 74 Percent of the Platform’s Most Viral False or Unsubstantiated Claims Relating to the Israel-Hamas War.”

Bullying Consortium News After Foreign Policy Critiques

Meanwhile, one of the sites targeted by NewsGuard earlier, Consortium News, has filed a lawsuit against it claiming “First Amendment violations and defamation.”

Beginning last year, users scanning the headlines on certain browsers that include NewsGuard were warned against visiting Consortium News. A scarlet-red NewsGuard warning pop-up said, “Proceed With Caution” and claimed that the investigative news site “has published false claims about the Ukraine-Russia war.” The warning also notifies a network of advertisers, news aggregation portals, and social media platforms that Consortium News cannot be trusted.

But Consortium News, founded by late Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Robert Parry and known for its strident criticism of U.S. foreign policy, is far from a fake news publisher. And NewsGuard, the entity attempting to suppress it, Consortium claims, is hardly a disinterested fact-checker because of federal influence over it. NewsGuard attached the label after pressing Consortium for retractions or corrections to six articles published on the site. Those news articles dealt with widely reported claims about neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and U.S. influence over the country — issues substantiated by other credible media outlets. After Consortium editors refused to remove the reporting and offered a detailed rebuttal, the entire site received a misinformation label, encompassing over 20,000 articles and videos published by the outlet since it was founded in 1995.

IMAGE CREDITNEWSGUARD VIA CONSORTIUM NEWS

The left-wing news site believes the label was part of a pay-for-censorship scheme. It notes that Consortium News was targeted after NewsGuard received a $749,387 Defense Department contract in 2021 to identify “false narratives” relating to the war between Ukraine and Russia, as well as other forms of foreign influence.

Bruce Afran, an attorney for Consortium News, disagrees. “What’s really happening here is that NewsGuard is trying to target those who take a different view from the government line,” said Afran. He filed an amended complaint last month claiming that NewsGuard not only defamed his client, but also acts as a front for the military to suppress critical reporting.

“There’s a great danger in being maligned this way,” Afran continued. “The government cannot evade the Constitution by hiring a private party.”

Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, observed that in previous years, anonymous social media accounts had also targeted his site, falsely claiming a connection to the Russian government in a bid to discredit his outlet.

“NewsGuard has got to be the worst,” said Lauria. “They’re labeling us in a way that stays with us. Every news article we publish is defamed with that label of misinformation.”

Both Lauria and Afran said that they worry that NewsGuard is continuing to collaborate with the government or with intelligence services. In previous years, NewsGuard had worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. It’s not clear to what extent NewsGuard is still working with the Pentagon. But earlier this year, Crovitz wrote an email to journalist Matt Taibbi, defending its work with the government, describing it in the present tense, suggesting that it is ongoing:

For example, as is public, our work for the Pentagon’s Cyber Command is focused on the identification and analysis of information operations targeting the U.S. and its allies conducted by hostile governments, including Russia and China. Our analysts alert officials in the U.S. and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online. We are proud of our work countering Russian and Chinese disinformation on behalf of Western democracies.

The company has not yet responded to the Consortium News lawsuit, filed in the New York federal court. In May of this year, the Air Force Research Lab responded to a records request from journalist Erin Marie Miller about the NewsGuard contract. The contents of the work proposal were entirely redacted.

Asked about the company’s continued work with the intelligence sector, Skibinski replied, “We license our data about false claims made by state media sources and state-sponsored disinformation efforts from China, Russia and Iran to the defense and intelligence sector, as we describe on our website.”

Punishing An Outlet That Criticized A NewsGuard Backer’s Pharma Clients

Other websites that have sought to challenge their NewsGuard rating say it has shown little interest in a back-and-forth exchange regarding unsettled matters. Take the case of The Daily Sceptic, a small publication founded and edited by conservative English commentator Toby Young. As a forum for journalists and academics to challenge a variety of strongly held public-policy orthodoxies, even those on Covid-19 vaccines and climate change, The Daily Sceptic is a genuine dissenter. Last year, Young reached out to NewsGuard, hoping to improve his site’s 74.5 rating.

In a series of emails from 2022 and 2023 that were later forwarded to RealClearInvestigations, NewsGuard responded to Young by listing articles that it claimed represent forms of misinformation, such as reports that Pfizer’s vaccine carried potential side effects. The site, notably, has been a strident critic of Covid-19 policies, such as coercive mandates. Anicka Slachta, an analyst with NewsGuard, highlighted articles that questioned the efficacy of the vaccines and lockdowns. The Daily Sceptic, for example, reported a piece casting Covid-19 lockdowns as “unnecessary, ineffective and harmful,” citing academic literature from Johns Hopkins University.

Rather than refute this claim, Slachta simply offered an opposing view from another academic, who criticized the arguments put forth by lockdown critics. And the Hopkins study, Slachta noted, was not peer-reviewed. The topic is still, of course, under serious debate. Sweden rejected the draconian lockdowns on schools and businesses implemented by most countries in North American and Europe, yet had one of the lowest “all-cause excess mortality” rates in either region.

Young and others said that the issue highlighted by NewsGuard is not an instance of misinformation, but rather an ongoing debate, with scientists and public health experts continuing to explore the moral, economic, and health-related questions raised by such policies. In its response to NewsGuard’s questions about the lockdown piece, Young further added that his site made no claim that the Hopkins paper was peer-reviewed and added that its findings had been backed up by a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Yet to NewsGuard, Young’s site evidently posed a misinformation danger by simply reporting on the subject and refusing to back down. Emails between NewsGuard and the Daily Sceptic show Young patiently responding to the company’s questions; he also added postscripts to the articles flagged by NewsGuard with a link to the fact checks of them and rebuttals of those fact checks. Young also took the extra step of adding updates to other articles challenged by fact-checking non-governmental organizations. “I have also added postscripts to other articles not flagged by you but which have been fact checked by other organisations, such as Full Fact and Reuters,” Young wrote to Slachta.

That wasn’t enough. After a series of back-and-forth emails, NewsGuard said it would be satisfied only with a retraction of the articles, many of which, like the lockdown piece, contained no falsehoods. After the interaction, NewsGuard lowered The Daily Sceptic’s rating to 37.5/100.

“I’m afraid you left me no choice but to conclude that NewsGuard is a partisan site that is trying to demonetise news publishing sites whose politics it disapproves of under the guise of supposedly protecting potential advertisers from being associated with ‘mis-’ and ‘disinformation,’” wrote Young in response. “Why bother to keep up the pretence of fair-mindedness John? Just half my rating again, which you’re going to do whatever I say.”

NewsGuard’s Skibinski, in a response to a query about The Daily Sceptic’s downgrade, denied that his company makes any “demands” of publishers. “We simply call them for comment and ask questions about their editorial practices,” he wrote. “This is known as journalism.”

The experience mirrored that of Consortium. Afran, the attorney for the site, noted that NewsGuard uses an arbitrary process to punish opponents, citing the recent study from the company on misinformation on the Israel-Hamas war. “They cherry-picked 250 posts among tweets they knew were incorrect, and they attempt to create the impression that all of X is unreliable,” the lawyer noted. “And so, what they’re doing, and this is picked up by mainstream media, that’s actually causing X, formerly Twitter, to now lose ad revenue, based literally on 250 posts out of the billions of posts on Twitter.”

The push to demonize and delist The Daily Sceptic, a journalist critic of pharmaceutical products and policies, reflects an inherent conflict with the biggest backer of NewsGuard: Publicis Groupe.

Publicis client Pfizer awarded Publicis a major deal to help manage its global media and advertising operations, a small reflection of which is the $2.3 billion the pharmaceutical giant spent on advertising last year.

The NewsGuard-Publicis relationship extends to the Paris-based marketing conglomerate’s full client list, including LVHM, PepsiCo, Glaxo Smith Kline, Burger King, ConAgra, Kellogg Company, General Mills, and McDonalds. “NewsGuard will be able to publish and license ‘white lists’ of news sites our clients can use to support legitimate publishers while still protecting their brand reputations,” said Maurice Lévy, chairman of the Publicis Groupe, upon its launch of NewsGuard.

Put another way, when corporate watchdogs like The Daily Sceptic or Consortium News are penalized by NewsGuard, the ranking system amounts to a blacklist to guide advertisers where not to spend their money.

“NewsGuard is clearly in the business of censoring the truth,” noted Dr. Joseph Mercola, a gadfly voice whose website was ranked as misinformation by NewsGuard after it published reports about Covid-19’s potential origin from a lab in Wuhan, China.

“Seeing how Publicis represents most of the major pharmaceutical companies in the world and funded the creation of NewsGuard, it’s not far-fetched to assume Publicis might influence NewsGuard’s ratings of drug industry competitors,” Mercola added, in a statement online.

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations.

Lee Fang is an investigative reporter. Find his Substack here.

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censorship, Political

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What Congress Should Ask The FBI Agent Involved In Censoring Hunter Biden Laptop Story

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | SEPTEMBER 20, 2023

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

On Friday, the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Elvis Chan, the lead FBI agent involved in mass social media censorship, to appear for a September 21, 2023 deposition. Last week’s subpoena followed Chan’s failure to appear for a scheduled voluntary interview to face questioning about the federal government’s role in burying the Hunter Biden laptop story in the month before the 2020 election.

While that scandal is much bigger than Chan, he is first in line to untangling the truth about how the government interfered in the 2020 election by running an info op to convince voters the Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. Given Chan’s testimony in the civil lawsuit brought by Missouri and Louisiana and several individual plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, as well as since-uncovered documents from Facebook, the importance of questioning Chan cannot be overstated.

What Chan Said

In Missouri v. Biden, the plaintiffs sued the Biden administration and numerous agencies and government officials, including the FBI and Chan. They alleged the federal defendants violated the First Amendment by, among other things, coercing and significantly encouraging “social-media platforms to censor disfavored [speech].” After filing suit, the plaintiffs filed a motion for a preliminary injunction and then obtained an order allowing for expedited discovery.

Since then, the district court has entered a preliminary injunction barring several federal agencies from coercing tech giants into censoring speech. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals narrowed the injunction but upheld many of the lower court’s legal conclusions. The Supreme Court is currently considering the Biden administration’s motion for a stay of the injunction.

What matters to the House’s subpoena of Chan is what the expedited discovery in Missouri v. Biden uncovered. It included the plaintiffs’ deposition of Chan. In his deposition, Chan testified he was one of the “primary” FBI agents who communicated with social media companies about so-called “disinformation.”

Specifically, “During the 2020 election cycle, Chan coordinated meetings between the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and at least seven of the major tech giants, including Meta/Facebook, Twitter, Google/YouTube, Yahoo!/Verizon Media, and Microsoft/LinkedIn,” with meetings occurring weekly as the election neared.

In questioning Chan, the plaintiffs’ attorneys pushed him on several points related to the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop, forcing Chan to acknowledge the FBI regularly raised the possibility of “hack and dump” operations with senior officials at the various tech companies. Those discussions included the FBI warning of a potential hack-and-leak occurring in advance of the 2020 election, much like the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hack and WikiLeaks release of internal emails.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs also quizzed Chan on the identity of the government officials who discussed “hack-and-dump Russian operations” with the tech giants. Chan identified Section Chief Laura Dehmlow, along with four FBI officials who attended Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) meetings. Chan named Brady Olson, William Cone, Judy Chock, and Luke Giannini as some of the individuals who had discussed the supposedly impending hack-and-leak operation. Chan claimed not to recall, though, whether anyone within the FBI suggested he raise the possibility of Russian hack-and-dump operations with the tech giants.

That Chan and others warned big tech of the potential for a pre-election hack-and-dump operation is huge. As Chan also testified, the government had no specific intelligence suggesting there were plans for such an operation. Nonetheless, the warnings prompted Twitter and Facebook to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story following The New York Post’s story breaking.

FBI Played Social Media Companies

While the government had no reason to believe a hack-and-leak operation was in the works, several of the FBI agents involved in warning the social media companies knew Hunter Biden had abandoned his laptop at a computer repair store and that the material on the laptop was genuine. That includes Chan, Demhlow, and at least three other individuals connected to the FBI’s FITF.

Chan did not reveal these details in his Missouri v. Biden deposition. Instead, Dehmlow informed the House of these facts during her deposition. Among other things, Dehmlow testified that soon after The New York Post broke the Biden laptop story, somebody from Twitter asked the FBI whether the laptop was real. An analyst in the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division confirmed, “Yes, it was.’” An FBI lawyer on the call then immediately interjected, “No further comment.”

Dehmlow further testified that several individuals on the FBI’s FITF knew the laptop was real, including then-FITF Section Chief Brad Benavides and the unit chief. Dehmlow then confirmed that after the call with Twitter, the FBI had internal deliberations about the laptop and that later when Facebook asked about the authenticity of the laptop, Dehmlow responded, “No comment.”

During his deposition in the Missouri v. Biden case, Chan confirmed Dehmlow’s representation that in response to the Facebook inquiry, she had replied, “No comment.” Chan, however, then claimed he was not aware of any other inquiries from social media companies concerning the Hunter Biden laptop.

Was Chan Telling the Truth?

Last month, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan revealed his committee had obtained internal documents from Facebook that call into question Chan’s testimony. “I spoke with SSA Elvis Chan (FBI San Francisco) on 15 October 2020, as a follow up to the call with the Foreign Influence Task Force on 14 October,” one Facebook document read, contradicting Chan’s claim that he knew of no other inquiries from social media companies.

“I asked SSA Chan whether there was any update or change. . . as to whether the FBI saw any evidence suggesting foreign sponsorship or direction of the leak of information related to Hunter Biden as published in the New York Post story,” Facebook’s memorandum continued. According to Facebook’s internal document, Chan stated “that he was up to speed on the current state of the matter within the FBI and that there was no current evidence to suggest any foreign connection or direction of the leak.” Chan further assured Facebook “that the FBI would be in contact if any additional information on this was developed through further investigation.”

Chan’s claim to Facebook that he was “up to speed on the current state of the matter” also seemingly conflicted with Chan’s testimony in the Missouri v. Biden case that he had “no internal knowledge of that investigation,” and “that it was brought up after the news story had broke.” It is also difficult to reconcile Chan’s claim — that the laptop was only brought up after the Post ran the story — with Dehmlow’s testimony that several individuals on the FITF knew the laptop was real, including an FBI analyst.

What the House Should Ask Chan

The House should explore these inconsistencies with Chan and further quiz him on both Dehmlow’s testimony and the Facebook documents. Chan should also be quizzed on with whom else he discussed the potential for a hack-and-leak operation.

We know from Chan’s Missouri v. Biden deposition that he had served as the supervisor for the Russia-adept cyber squad that investigated the DNC server hack before the San Francisco office handed it to FBI headquarters. Chan testified in that deposition that he would have discussed national security cyber-investigations involving Russian matters with Sean Newell, a deputy chief at the DOJ National Security Division who had also worked on the DNC hack. Chan should be pushed further on whether Newell or anyone else who worked on the DNC hack had raised the issue of a 2020 hack-and-release repeat.

If so, the question then becomes whether they knew of the existence and authenticity of the Biden laptop. That question proves significant because it appears the hack-and-leak narrative was peddled to the social media companies to prime them to censor the laptop story. So, knowing who knew the laptop story was accurate but still fed the hack-and-leak hysteria will point to the players responsible for interfering in the 2020 election by silencing the truthful reporting of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Chan may refuse to testify, however, even pursuant to a subpoena, or the Department of Justice may direct Chan not to submit to congressional questioning, forcing Republicans to enforce the subpoena in court. We’ll know tomorrow if either scenario plays out or if Chan comes clean with what he knows.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—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. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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YouTube Punishes Channel For ‘Harmful And Dangerous’ Video Quoting Hillary Clinton

BY: JOY PULLMANN | SEPTEMBER 06, 2023

JOY PULLMANN

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOYPULLMANN

YouTube recently demonetized a video it had previously approved consisting entirely of quotes of Republicans and Democrats alleging election vulnerabilities and crimes, the video’s creator confirmed to The Federalist Tuesday. Matt Orfalea showed The Federalist a June 7 email from YouTube saying his video was “suitable for all advertisers” after “manually reviewing.”

A YouTube spokesman Tuesday, however, told The Federalist the video was just a few months later banned from providing its creator ad revenue because it contained “demonstrably false claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral process.” The spokesman did not answer The Federalist’s question of exactly what information in the video was “demonstrably false.”

With no other notification from YouTube, on Aug. 21, Orfalea found a notice inside his channel saying a YouTube reviewer had decided the video depicted or encouraged “harmful or dangerous acts” and presented “situations that may endanger participants.” The video consists entirely of quotes from Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, a few TV reporters, and some other Republicans and Democrats publicly contesting election results from 2016 to 2020.

YouTube demonetized and then deleted this same video before, in November 2022. At that time, YouTube also demonetized and deleted similar videos on Orfalea’s channel, including videos that weren’t public, says Racket journalist Matt Taibbi, who commissioned the videos. For these transgressions, YouTube gave Orfalea’s channel a strike, three of which result in a permanent ban from the platform.

Those banned videos also simply clipped accurate news quotes of both Republicans and Democrats making “stolen election” and “election interference claims,” Orfalea and Taibbi say. Taibbi says he “argued to Google” last year that the now-twice-banned video “could not possibly be violative of any ‘misinformation’ guideline, as it was comprised entirely of ‘real, un-altered clips of public figures making public comments.’”

“[T]hese videos are factual,” Taibbi wrote on Nov. 18, 2022. “There are no statements taken out of context. No editing games were played to make it appear someone is saying something he or she did not. This was the point of the exercise, to show what was actually said, when, and by whom.”

In July 2021, YouTube also demonetized Orfalea’s channel over a Starbucks commercial parody, notifying Orfalea, “We think it violates our violent criminal organizations policy.” His channel was later remonetized.

Then, in June of this year, Orfalea says, he re-uploaded the “Trump vs Hillary” video to YouTube to verify the company’s June 2 claim it had ended its “elections misinformation policy” after banning “tens of thousands” of videos. Immediately after the upload, the video was demonetized, Orfalea said, but after he appealed to YouTube, he received the June 7 email saying a human reviewer had lifted the demonetization.

Then, sometime between June 7 and Aug. 21, the video was demonetized again. YouTube says it has closed Orfalea’s appeal of its reversal.

“In the past (for [example], when my channel was demonetized) I always received notifications from YT about it BUT I received no notification about this,” Orfalea told The Federalist via email.

In an Aug. 31 livestream, Orfalea showed in his YouTube analytics that demonetization cut his video income by 90 percent. The analytics traffic curve also suggests the video’s reach might have been artificially reduced.

“In the last 6-8 months — hell, the last 2-3 months — the landscape for non-corporate media businesses has tightened dramatically,” Taibbi noted last week. “Independent media content is increasingly hard to find via platform searches, even when exact terminology, bylines, or dates are entered by users. Social media platforms that once provided effective marketing and distribution at little to no cost are now difficult to navigate even with the aid of paid boosting tools.”

Recommendations generated by YouTube algorithms drive 70 percent of what people see on the world’s largest video platform. More Americans use YouTube than even use Facebook, at 81 percent in 2021.

YouTube parent company Google controls 92 percent of the world’s search results. Wall Street Journal and other investigations have found that Google alters its search results in ways that benefit leftists. So does YouTube’s current criteria for hiding information, which effectively takes the political left’s side on controversial topics under the guise of stopping “misinformation.”

Google also demonetized The Federalist from ad revenue in 2020 in conjunction with a foreign left-wing pressure organization.

Recent lawsuits from multiple states’ attorneys general, as well as on behalf of individuals such as journalist Alex Berenson and doctors Aaron Kheriaty and Jay Bhattacharya, have discovered that social media companies, including YouTube, ban information Democrats dislike from the internet at the behest of federal officials. The lawsuits found this censorship affects hundreds of millions of Americans and targets not just false information but true information.

Federal courts adjudicating this lawsuit also found, as plaintiffs’ lawyer John Sauer testified to Congress two weeks ago, “close connections and cooperation between federal national-security officials and the mass-surveillance and mass-censorship enterprise.”

“This isn’t just about statements from individual has-beens like Hillary Clinton, but official bodies like the DHS and the FBI,” Taibbi noted in 2022. “Just like Trump, those official organizations have repeatedly engaged in a form of ‘election denial,’ warning that upcoming elections will be packed full of efforts by foreign countries to ‘amplify doubts about the integrity of U.S. elections’ and to ‘hinder candidates perceived to be particularly adversarial” to countries like China and Russia, by ‘spreading disinformation.’”

YouTube’s spokesman didn’t answer these Federalist questions:

What brought this video to the “human reviewer’s” attention — was it a complaint from a government official, an algorithm or AI scanning method YouTube uses, or something else?
What information, specifically, in the video does YouTube consider “harmful or dangerous”?
Did the human reviewer find any false information in the video? If so, what?
Orfalea says he’s appealed YouTube’s decision and hasn’t gotten an answer yet. How soon should he expect that response? What are typical YouTube response times for complaints like this?

By press time, the spokesman had not responded to a follow-up email noting the lack of response to these questions.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her latest ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her several books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

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6 Takeaways from the Biden Admin’s Court Quest to Keep Censoring Americans Online

BY: JOY PULLMANN | AUGUST 14, 2023

JOY PULLMANN

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOYPULLMANN

On Thursday afternoon, three Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges heard Biden administration arguments to let government keep pressuring social media monopolies to ban ideas they don’t like from the internet. On July 4, a lower court had ordered the Biden administration to cease what it called “arguably … the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” The Fifth Circuit paused that injunction on July 14 and heard oral arguments against it on Aug. 10 in Missouri v. Biden.

In this major case likely to hit the U.S. Supreme Court, the Biden administration is fighting to stop American citizens from sharing messages government officials don’t like. This case uncovered reams of White House and other high-level officials threatening internet monopolies with the end of their entire business model if they didn’t ban speech by Democrats’ political opponents.

“It’s far beyond the scope of what people realize,” says a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Zhonette Brown, of the public interest firm New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA).

Internal documents Twitter divulged under new owner Elon Musk provided more proof that social media monopolies are silencing Americans from Tucker Carlson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to millions of non-famous citizens at the behest of government pressure. Here are some key takeaways from Thursday’s oral arguments and earlier revelations from this massive First Amendment case.

1. By the Government’s Own Definition, It’s Censoring

Key to Thursday’s arguments was the question of coercion: Did government demands of internet monopolies equal coercion, or were those merely officials advocating for their views?

“If the government was doing something like that in a coercive manner, then that could be the subject of a proper injunction,” Department of Justice lawyer Daniel Bentele Hahs Tenny told the court in his opening remarks. “The problem is that what you would have to do is say, ‘Here is what the government is doing that’s coercive, and I’m enjoining that.’”

Judge Don Willett responded: “How do you define coercive?”

Tenny: “I don’t think there’s too much disagreement on this point. Coercive is where a reasonable person would construe it to be backed by a threat of government action against a party if it didn’t comply.”

That’s exactly what the government did, the voluminous documents already discovered in this case show. In just one of the examples, Meta executive Nick Clegg, a former high-ranking U.K. official, told his bosses Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg: “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content” (emphasis original).

Clegg also characterized to colleagues an interaction with Andy Slavitt, a White House Covid adviser, this way: “[H]e was outraged – not too strong a word to describe his reaction – that we did not remove this post” of a meme about trial lawyers getting 10 years of vaccine-injured clients from government mandates.

2. Government Officials Treated Internet Monopolies Like Their Subordinates

The Fifth Circuit panel demonstrated familiarity with the numerous examples of this kind of government behavior, such as this email exchange between White House digital director Rob Flaherty and Facebook, in which Flaherty swears at Facebook engineers, “Are you guys f-cking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”

“What appears to be in the record are these irate messages from time to time from high-ranking government officials that say, “You didn’t do this yet,’” Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod told Tenny. “And that’s my toning down the language. … So it’s like, ‘Jump!’ and, ‘How high?’”

The judges also noted the White House publicly threatened the business model of all online communications monopolies through potentially revoking Section 230 and launching antitrust lawsuits. The lawsuit documentation shows leading Democrats making the same public threats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and multiple U.S. senators.

Joe Biden even threatened to hold Zuckerberg criminally liable for not running Facebook the way Biden wanted. In office, Biden also famously accused Facebook of “killing people” by not doing enough to spread the administration’s message and suppress opposing messages. FBI agent Elvis Chan‘s deposition in this case noted federal officials showed adverse legislation to social media monopolies’ leaders as examples of what the government would do to them if they didn’t ban Americans’ speech.

“It’s not like, ‘We think this would be a good public policy and we want to explain to you why that would be a good policy,” Elrod said. “There seems to be some very close relationship that they’re having these — ‘This isn’t being done fast enough’ you know, like it’s a supervisor complaining about a worker.”

3. Judges Likened Government Behavior to Mobsters

Tenny claimed there was no “or else” explaining what the government “would do” if the internet monopolies didn’t obey, so there was no government coercion present.

“This is an analogy, probably an inapt analogy, so if you’ll excuse me — like if somebody is in these movies we see with the mob or something. They don’t spell out things but they have these ongoing relationships and they never actually say, ‘Go do this or else you’re going to have this consequence,’ but everybody just knows,” Elrod replied. “And I’m certainly not equating the federal government with anybody in illegal organized crime, but there are certain relationships that people know things without always saying the ‘Or else.’”

Willett followed that up by commenting the case documentation makes it look like the government is “relying on a fairly unsubtle kind of strong-arming and veiled or not so veiled threats. ‘That’s a really nice social media platform you got there, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

4. Censorship Is Election Interference

The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, John Sauer, initiated this case as Louisiana’s solicitor general. In representing state government interests to the judges, he noted that elected officials have to pay attention to what their constituents are saying online, or they won’t have a good read on what voters what them to do in office.

“We’ve gotta be able to craft messages and know what policies we’re adopting to be responsive to our citizens,” he summarized from statements submitted to the court from multiple state officials. “…Going back to 1863, as everyone knows, going back to the Federalist number 56 where [Bill of Rights author James] Madison said it, everyone knows state legislators have a sovereign interest in knowing what their constituents think and feel, and that’s directly impacted.”

When the federal government silences some Americans’ views online, Sauer said, it makes it harder for elected representatives to actually represent them. Two of the state injuries the plaintiffs assert against the federal government’s censorship are “Interference with our ability to hear our constituents’ voices on social media” and “interference with our ability to have a fair and unbiased process for our people to organize and petition the government for grievances.”

Court documents also revealed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a federal agency, set up a private entity to ban and throttle election-related online speech Democrats dislike. Much of the information choked by this algorithmic censorship operation is true, such as the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s laptop, investigations and members of Congress have noted.

“They invented a whole new word, ‘mal-information,’ to justify going after the censorship of true speech and ideas,” Sauer said last month in a public discussion of the case that YouTube banned.

5. Democrats Want Free Speech for Themselves While Banning It for Their Enemies

The oral arguments also got into the FBI’s 2020 election interference in telling online monopolies that The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was foreign disinformation. Tenny claimed the FBI refused to comment on the laptop because it was a pending investigation.

Yet the FBI and other federal intelligence agencies actually did comment on the laptop by calling it “foreign disinformation,” both privately to the internet monopolies and publicly. This was false, and the FBI knew it. The lower court ruled this deception constituted coercion because it caused people to act on false information.

As Ben Weingarten notes, these lies and FBI-demanded online content bans to protect them benefitted Joe Biden in the 2020 election:

According to Elvis Chan (pdf), an FBI official leading engagement with the social media platforms, while the bureau didn’t explicitly ask the companies to change their hacked material policies, it did frequently follow up to ask whether they had changed said policies, as the FBI wanted to know how they would treat such materials.

The judges almost broached an important question: If the First Amendment protects the FBI’s lies that Hunter Biden’s laptop was disinformation, for which not one federal employee has been disciplined, how can it allow for criminalizing the same behavior by average Americans by labeling their views “disinformation” and “mal-information”?

6. Today’s Internet Is Still Massively Rigged

Taibbi also noted that court documents show the Biden administration got mad enough to fire the F-bomb at social media companies when the algorithmic censorship they demand affected Biden’s Instagram account. Instagram instantly fixed the issue for the White House, but not for non-powerful Americans.

It’s clear from the case documents and other disclosures such as the “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” that the algorithms controlling what Americans see online are now deeply, massively rigged. That rigging is multilayered. It includes all this government coercion of entities including Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Meta, Snapchat, Tiktok, and Twitter going back to at least 2017, as well as pressure operations from corporate media and internal employee groups.

Beyond algorithm changes, social media monopolies have also changed their terms of service in response to government demands, the NCLA attorneys noted last month. So government control of public discourse will continue even if the Fifth Circuit reinstates the injunction.

Tenny told the Fifth Circuit the Covid-era censorship that ignited this case is over because the government currently deems Covid not an emergency. In court, Sauer cited YouTube banning two weeks ago a video of attorneys discussing this case as more proof this massive censorship persists. He also cited court documents showing Americans still can’t post social media messages about censored topics.

“Attorneys present gave estimates ranging from a few weeks to two months for the panel to rule” on whether to reinstate an injunction against more of this government behavior, reported Taibbi, who attended the oral arguments in New Orleans, Louisiana. The previous injunction includes exceptions for crimes such as sex trafficking.

“The government wants to be doing something that it shouldn’t be doing, and they really, really want to be doing it,” said NCLA attorney John Vecchione in the discussion YouTube banned.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her latest ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her several books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

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Senator Rand Paul, M.D., Op-ed: Congress Must Stop The Executive Branch’s Heinous Attempts To Censor Americans

BY: RAND PAUL | JULY 25, 2023

RAND PAUL

The First Amendment’s mandate that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech” is a guarantee that, no matter how inconvenient to those temporarily holding high office, the people have an absolute right to express their thoughts and opinions. Despite this constitutional requirement, over 200 years ago, President John Adams and the Federalists in Congress used the threat of war with France as a pretext to enact into law the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime for Americans to “print, utter, or publish . . . any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government.

The debate surrounding the Sedition Act was about the nature of freedom of speech. One supporter of the law, Alexander Addison, believed that some opinions were so dangerous that it was in the public interest to suppress them, stating, “Truth has but one side: and listening to error and falsehood is indeed a strange way to discover truth.”

An opponent, Thomas Cooper, presciently argued that the purpose of the Sedition Act was to empower one party to “suppress the opinions of those who differ from them.” Unsurprisingly, all the defendants prosecuted under the Sedition Act would be Republicans.

Sound familiar?

On Independence Day this year, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction restricting the Biden Administration from collaborating with social media companies to censor and suppress constitutionally protected speech. In his opinion, Judge Terry Doughty stated that the Biden Administration’s efforts to suppress opinions it opposes “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in the United States’ history.” It is difficult to disagree with Judge Doughty’s description.

For years, the Biden Administration demanded social media suppress and censor conservatives who dared question the origins of Covid, the effectiveness of masks and lockdowns, and election integrity, among other issues. The Biden Administration was so zealous in its enforcement of censorship, even parody content did not escape its anti-free speech campaign.

And the Biden administration didn’t ask nicely. When then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki publicly called on social media companies to censor speech relating to Covid, she mentioned Biden’s support for a “robust anti-trust program,” all but threatening to break up tech giants if they failed to adopt the administration’s censorship policies. Later, the White House announced that it was reviewing policies relating to whether social media should be held legally liable for spreading so-called misinformation. In other words, the Biden administration effectively told social media “Do our bidding, or else.”

The White House was so aggressive that a Twitter representative stated the site was “bombarded” with censorship requests from the executive branch. But that bombardment was not really directed at Twitter — it was a monstrous attack on the free speech rights guaranteed to every American by the First Amendment.

In addition to countless numbers of Americans, I was targeted by the censorship regime. When I posted a video on YouTube to educate the public on the potentially harmful consequences of relying on ineffective cloth masks to prevent transmission of Covid, YouTube took my video down and suspended me for a week.

Americans are a free people and we do not take infringements upon our liberties lightly. The time has come for resistance and to reclaim our God-given right to free expression. Permit me, as a member of the resistance, to present a solution that that restores and protects the First Amendment.

I introduced legislation called the Free Speech Protection Act, which will prohibit federal employees and contractors from using their positions to censor and otherwise attack speech protected by the First Amendment. My legislation will impose penalties for those that violate this rule, as well as empower private citizens to sue the government and executive branch officials for violating their First Amendment rights. Additionally, the bill will mandate frequent publicly accessible reports detailing the communications between an executive branch agency and media organizations, ensure that federal grant money is not used to label media organizations as sources of misinformation or disinformation, and terminates authorities that threaten free speech.

Under my Free Speech Protection Act, the government will no longer be able to cloak itself in secrecy to undermine the First Amendment rights of conservatives, libertarians, liberals, socialists, and all others who wish to exercise their right to free speech and engage in public discourse.

My legislation will make it difficult to hide efforts to censor constitutionally protected speech. Those officials who censor Americans are on notice: if you infringe upon First Amendment rights, under my bill, you will face severe penalties, such as potential debarment from employment by the United States, a civil penalty of no less than $10,000, and revocation of a security clearance. Any administration employee who prizes his livelihood would not dare threaten free speech after my bill becomes law.

Looking back upon his defeat of John Adams for the presidency, Thomas Jefferson wrote, the “revolution of 1800 . . . was a real revolution in the principles of our government as that of [17]76.” Jefferson’s victory was a vindication of the First Amendment as he allowed the Sedition Act to expire and pardoned those convicted for expressing their views.

Once again, the American people are called upon to defend the founding principles over which our forebears fought a revolution. To protect free speech, Congress must prohibit the government’s collusion with Big Tech and other media organizations. Congress must pass the Free Speech Protection Act.

Rand Paul, MD, is a U.S. senator from Kentucky.

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Court Blocks Curbs on Govt. Contact With Social Media for Now

NEWSMAX | Friday, 14 July 2023 03:45 PM EDT

A federal appeals court Friday temporarily paused a lower court’s order limiting executive branch officials’ communications with social media companies about controversial online posts. Biden administration lawyers had asked the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans to stay the preliminary injunction issued on July 4 by U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty. Doughty himself had rejected a request to put his order on hold pending appeal.

Friday’s brief 5th Circuit order put Doughty’s order on hold “until further orders of the court.” It called for arguments in the case to be scheduled on an expedited basis.

Filed last year, the lawsuit claimed the administration, in effect, censored free speech by discussing possible regulatory action the government could take while pressuring companies to remove what it deemed misinformation. COVID-19 vaccines, legal issues involving President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and election fraud allegations were among the topics spotlighted in the lawsuit.

Critics of the administration say the White House specifically sought to silence conservative voices.

Doughty, nominated to the federal bench by former President Donald Trump, issued an Independence Day order and accompanying reasons that covered more than 160 pages. He said the plaintiffs were likely to win their ongoing lawsuit. His injunction blocked the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI and multiple other government agencies and administration officials from “encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”

Administration lawyers said the order was overly broad and vague, raising questions about what officials can say in conversations with social media companies or in public statements. They said Doughty’s order posed a threat of “grave” public harm by chilling executive branch efforts to combat online misinformation.

Doughty rejected the administration’s request for a stay on Monday, writing: “Defendants argue that the injunction should be stayed because it might interfere with the Government’s ability to continue working with social-media companies to censor Americans’ core political speech on the basis of viewpoint. In other words, the Government seeks a stay of the injunction so that it can continue violating the First Amendment.”

In its request that the 5th Circuit issue a stay, administration lawyers said there has been no evidence of threats by the administration. “The district court identified no evidence suggesting that a threat accompanied any request for the removal of content. Indeed, the order denying the stay — presumably highlighting the ostensibly strongest evidence — referred to ‘a series of public media statements,’” the administration said.

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Top 10 Takeaways From FBI Director Christopher Wray’s House Judiciary Testimony

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 13, 2023

MARGOT CLEVELAND

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FBI Director Christopher Wray sat for nearly four hours of questioning on Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee. Here are the top takeaways from the hearing.

1. Wray Indicates Foreign Intel Agencies Worked with Big Tech to Silence Speech

The FBI director faced fierce questioning from Republican committee members on the FBI’s efforts to induce Big Tech to censor American speech. Several representatives specifically challenged Wray to justify the FBI passing along requests from the Ukrainian intelligence agency, SBU, to social media companies. The FBI’s role as a conduit for SBU was just revealed on Monday in a report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

That report revealed that following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the SBU enlisted the FBI to forward to American social media companies lists of accounts that allegedly “spread Russian disinformation.” The FBI obliged, sending a flurry of requests for accounts to be removed, including many American accounts, to multiple social media platforms. In fact, the House report highlighted the inclusion of the official, verified, Russian-language account of the U.S. State Department. The House Judiciary Committee queried Wray on how this could happen, while also inquiring why the FBI would assist the SBU in this endeavor, especially in light of Russia’s known infiltration of SBU.

In explaining the FBI’s involvement, Wray stressed that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 had cut off Ukraine’s communications, causing SBU to ask the FBI to contact U.S. companies on their behalf with the list of accounts supposedly spreading Russian disinformation. But as Republicans on the committee highlighted, the account lists in question included American accounts. Thus, the FBI’s involvement triggered the same First Amendment problems as those litigated in Missouri v. Biden.

This testimony also raised a second area of concern, namely the apparent coordination between U.S. social media companies and foreign governments. Wray said he served as an intermediary because Ukraine’s communications system was down. But in that case, it appears SBU would have contacted the American companies on its own behalf, seeking the silencing of Americans’ speech.

So the question for American social media companies is this: Do they accept requests to remove accounts or posts from foreign countries? And do they censor Americans’ speech based on foreign claims of disinformation?

2. Private Corporations Present a Bigger Concern Than Wray

Social media companies are not the only ones who have some explaining to do following Wray’s testimony. Americans should also demand answers from private businesses with access to consumer information, especially those in the financial sector.

This concern flows from Wray’s response to questioning about Bank of America handing the FBI financial records of customers who had purchased firearms within the six months before the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Wray defended the FBI’s receipt of this information by noting that “a number of business community partners, all the time, including financial institutions, share information with us about possible criminal activity.” Such activity is entirely lawful, the FBI director maintained, although he added that the FBI opted not to use the Bank of America data to avoid concerns over the bureau obtaining that data.

That the FBI decided not to use the data, however, provides no comfort because Bank of America obviously had no qualms about sharing the information. Further, Wray framed Bank of America’s data sharing as consistent with “business partners” who “all the time” share information about possible criminal activity.

But financial data showing a customer had previously purchased a gun does not represent evidence of “possible criminal activity.” Yet that didn’t stop Bank of America from giving the information to the FBI. So what other financial information is Bank of America providing? And what about other “business partners”?

3. Wray Needs to Read the Court’s Opinion in Missouri v. Biden

The partnership that took main billing during Wednesday’s hearing was that forged between the FBI and social media companies, and Republicans drilled Wray on the coordinated efforts to censor American speech. Throughout the entire hearing, though, Wray unwaveringly maintained the bureau was not responsible for the censorship because the FBI was merely making suggestions that posts involving foreign malign influence be removed.

No one who read the district court’s opinion in Missouri v. Biden could reasonably reach that conclusion. And since the FBI played such a heavy role in the censorship enterprise summarized in that case, the FBI director owes it to the public to actually study that opinion.

DOJ lawyers may be telling Wray the FBI is in the clear, but a federal judge disagreed,

and since the court has ordered the FBI to abandon its unconstitutional conduct, Wray needs to understand precisely what that means. Reading the court’s unfiltered opinion is the only way to see the many ways the FBI violated the First Amendment.

4. So Much Ignorance, So Little Time

Wray was not only ignorant of the facts underlying Missouri v. Biden, but he also revealed several other blind spots. For instance, during the hearing, Wray acknowledged he had previously testified that the FBI had not used Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the federal government to collect communications of foreign individuals, in its investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. That ended up not being accurate, however, but Wray was “blissfully ignorant” of that fact when he testified to the contrary to Congress.

Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell also put on a display of ignorance Wednesday, although in his case it was a feigned ignorance, with the California congressman framing the Hunter Biden laptop as concerning the nudes of a private citizen. While Swalwell may still be fixated on the nudes on the laptop, Republicans’ concern has always been of the evidence of a pay-to-play scandal implicating now-President Biden.

Then there’s Rep. Zoe Lofgren who claimed the GOP majority was engaging in “conspiracy theories” to discredit “one of the premier law enforcement agencies in the United States,” and “without any evidence” trying to “make the case that the FBI is somehow opposed to conservative views.” These 20 examples tell a different story.

5. Why Was Auten Anywhere Near Biden Evidence?

Wray and the Democrats weren’t the only ignorant ones, however. Republicans were clueless when it came to understanding why FBI analyst Brian Auten was anywhere near evidence implicating Hunter Biden. After all, Auten had been under internal investigation since 2019 for his role in Crossfire Hurricane. Given the partisan witch hunt that investigation proved to be, why would the bureau allow Auten to play a part in the highly political investigation of Hunter Biden?

Yet it apparently did. A whistleblower has told Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, that Auten opened an assessment in August 2020 and that assessment provided other FBI agents the ability to falsely brand derogatory information about Hunter Biden as disinformation.

Wednesday’s testimony by the FBI director shed no light on the question of Auten’s involvement.

6. AG Garland’s the Real Hack Targeting Parents

While Wray was unable to explain Auten’s involvement in the Hunter Biden investigation, he made clear that when it came to the parents-are-terrorists memorandum, that was all Attorney General Merrick Garland’s doing. That testimony proved enlightening by showing that for all of the FBI’s deficiencies, even its director sees the attorney general as more of a hack for targeting parents at school board meetings.

7. Orange Man Bad, FBI Good

Also enlightening were the Democrats’ main lines of questioning. Here, there were two. The leftist lawmakers spent most of their time rehabilitating the FBI, reciting the many important bureau missions, showcasing hero agents, highlighting horrible attacks on FBI offices, and rejoicing in the FBI’s family days. Then the far-left faction merely attacked Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans.

Together these lines of questioning exposed the Democrats as unconcerned by the many abuses Americans have witnessed over the last half-dozen years. And what was unserious appeared downright absurd when Democrat Pramila Jayapal used her allotted time to challenge the FBI director over the bureau’s purchase of citizens’ data, including location data, from various data brokers. Pre-Trump, every Democrat would have been drilling Wray on such abuses of civil liberties, but this week it was only Jayapal.

8. The Speech or Debate Clause Does Some Heavy Lifting

In addition to the Democrats’ two main lines of questioning, a sub-theme of many of the comments concerned the whistleblowers, with Democrats attempting to discredit their testimony. One way they sought to do that was by presenting the whistleblowers as hired tongues. But beginning with Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and continuing through Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, they made this point by slandering the whistleblowers, falsely stating they had been paid for their testimony.

Of course, the speech or debate clause prevents the whistleblowers from suing the committee members who lied about them, which is precisely why they had no qualms about doing so.

REMEMBER WHAT THE DEMS WERE SAYING ABOUT THE SO-CALLED WHISTLEBLOWER THAT CAME OUT ABOUT PRESIDENT TRUMP? I guess it’s the accused that makes their speech different.

9. Schiff Can’t Stop Lying

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is proof of this point because he can’t stop lying. He lied about the Carter Page FISA warrants. And on Wednesday, he lied again about President Donald Trump’s telephone call with the Georgia secretary of state following the November 2020 election.

Unfortunately, “as I’ve been forced to detail time and again because the corrupt media continue to lie about the conversation, the transcript of the call established that Trump did not request that Raffensperger ‘find 11,780 votes.’” As I wrote in February, “It never happened.” Instead, during that “telephone conversation between Trump’s legal team and the secretary of state’s office, Trump’s lawyer explained to Raffensperger that ‘the court is not acting on our petition. They haven’t even assigned a judge.’” Thus the legal team wanted the secretary of state’s office to investigate the violations of Georgia election law because the court refused to do its duty.

Schiff knows this, but he also knows there are no consequences for lying. On the contrary, he might just convince Californians to send him to the Senate so he can follow in Harry “He Didn’t Win, Did He?” Reid’s footsteps.

10. A Mixed Bag on the Pro-Life Question

The final takeaway topic from Wray’s testimony concerned the pro-life question, and Wray presented a mixed bag. On the one hand, he outrageously refused to condemn the FBI agents who decided to use a SWAT-like display of force to arrest a pro-life sidewalk counselor at his family home when the man’s attorney had agreed to arrange for his client to voluntarily appear to face the charges — of which he was later acquitted.

On the other hand, when Rep. Deborah Ross, D-N.C., attempted to frame abortionists and abortion facilities as being increasingly targeted in the wake of Dobbs, Wray corrected the narrative, noting that the uptick in violence has been to pro-life centers, with 70 percent of the cases involving such organizations.

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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Judge Denies Biden Request to Delay Social Media Order

By Charlie McCarthy | Monday, 10 July 2023 02:20 PM EDT

A federal judge in Louisiana denied a request by the Biden administration to delay an order he imposed last week banning federal officials from communicating with social media companies, Bloomberg reported.

U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty on Monday refused to pause his July 4 nationwide injunction blocking multiple government agencies and administration officials from meeting with or contacting social media companies for the purpose of “encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”

WHY WOULD THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION, AND THEIR PUPPET MASTERS, WANT THE COURT TO STAY THIS ORDER? Only nefarious motivations want a stay. Is it just me, or are they no longer concerned about being blatant with their cheating?

Doughty, nominated to the federal bench by then-President Donald Trump, also denied the government’s alternative request for a seven-day pause while it petitions the appeals court to step in.

The Justice Department is expected to ask the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to intervene, Bloomberg reported. DOJ had insisted that Doughty’s order was broad and unclear in defining what kind of communication with tech companies is no longer allowed.

The judge responded by saying the government isn’t entitled to a delay in enforcing his order since they were likely to lose on the merits of the case, Bloomberg reported. Doughty added that DOJ failed to identify specific examples of government activity that would be hurt in the meantime.

“[The injunction] it is not as broad as it appears,” Doughty wrote in the order. “It only prohibits something the Defendants have no legal right to do — contacting social media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner, the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms. It also contains numerous exceptions.”

Doughty last week ruled the government likely violated the First Amendment in its efforts to persuade tech companies to take steps to limit the spread of misinformation and fake accounts, especially during the pandemic. The Biden administration wants the ban put on hold while it challenges the judge’s 155-page opinion.

Doughty’s order bars many agencies and their employees from “urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing” social media companies to remove or restrict content covered by the First Amendment’s free speech protections. The judge included exceptions for communications about criminal activity, national security threats, election integrity issues, and other “permissible public government speech,” Bloomberg reported.

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Dick Morris to Newsmax: Biden Social Media Ruling ‘Most Important’

By Sandy Fitzgerald | Wednesday, 05 July 2023 03:11 PM EDT

A federal judge’s order for an injunction barring President Joe Biden’s administration from contacting social media companies and requesting censorship of some users may be “the most important decision of this year,” political strategist Dick Morris told Newsmax Wednesday.

“Certainly [it is] more important than even affirmative action,” Morris, the host of Newsmax’s “Dick Morris Democracy,” said on “John Bachman Now.”

Morris explained that the administration was using rules under the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which former President Donald Trump set up in 2018 to protect the United States grid against cyber attacks.

“Biden has completely changed it and made it an instrument for domestic surveillance,” said Morris. “CISA monitors all social media posts in the country and the world, and calls social media vendors to account and says on your platform, ‘You’re now running a statement that says that the COVID vaccine doesn’t work,’ or … what they’ll say is ‘You’re running something factually wrong that we want to change, that is not the administration line.'”

As a result, CISA has become a “muscle arm for social media censorship,” as have the CDC, the FBI, and the DOJ, said Morris.

Morris also responded to news that former GOP Rep. Denver Riggleman of Virginia has been working with Hunter Biden’s legal team while helping it with data analysis.

“Obviously he’ll assemble a legal team and obviously he has to say something,” said Morris. “The tax deal that he did was absolutely absurd … it completely misrepresents what Biden did.”

He also raised questions about the income the president and first lady reported in 2017 and 2018, when they reported income of $15 million and another $8 million from the sale of Biden’s book about his son who died.

“To do that, he would have had to sell 15 million books, and they sold 300,000,” said Morris. “Now there’s $10 million of income rattling around Biden’s tax return that nobody knows where it’s from. He claims it’s from the book, but it couldn’t be. And it’s not from his pension. It’s not from his vice presidential salary. It’s from unnamed sources. And that $10 million very possibly was the money that he got from Ukraine and from China that he dressed up as income from his book.”

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How Reddit Radicalizes The Left And Encourages Political Violence

BY: REDDIT LIES | JUNE 19, 2023

REDDIT LIES

Reddit, a link-aggregating website that claims to be the “front page of the internet,” has turned into a hotbed for radicalization. Reddit’s fundamental reliance on upvotes over an algorithm produces an unstable equilibrium in the hands of bad-faith moderators. This creates an incredible echo chamber made up of subreddits, which create groups of individuals who will gladly throw away their empathy as long as they view themselves as a “bastion of good” fighting those who are ontologically evil. In some rare cases, these individuals reach beyond the keyboard and manifest this radicalization into action.

This article is meant to shed some light onto the unseen world of Reddit, where left-wing users are routinely goaded into increasingly concerning rhetoric and, sometimes, even violence.

How Reddit Works

To understand why Reddit is uniquely suited for this type of radicalization, you will need a basic understanding of how Reddit operates. Unlike most social media platforms that utilize complex faceless algorithms to curate content for individuals, Reddit is far simpler. Users are given the ability to “upvote” and “downvote” content, which directly affects what other users see. Theoretically, this system produces a true marketplace of ideas, but there’s a catch.

Reddit relies heavily on more than 40,000 volunteer moderators to act as guide rails for subreddits, allowing good faith and positive discourse to flourish. However, Reddit’s moderators wield remarkable power and go largely unchecked, likely because the value these unpaid moderators bring to the platform makes them indispensable, no matter how Orwellian and drunk on power these moderators become. The free reign that moderators have over the site gives them inordinate power over the system. Often moderators are not selected based on their ability to moderate but rather on their desire to moderate. Since these mods are volunteers, one of the biggest rewards for becoming a Reddit moderator is the power the mods wield.

The problem Reddit faces today is that many Reddit moderators are no longer interested in moderating speech. Instead, these activist moderators use their power to suppress the speech of dissenters, tumbling subreddits into radicalizing echo chambers. They achieve this by censoring and banning anyone who goes against the narrative. Want proof of the assertion Donald Trump hates black people? You’re banned. You refute the claim “genital Surgery is not performed on minors in the states”? You’re banned. Post a link to an Associated Press story about how “South Africa begins seizing white-owned farms“? You’re banned from ever posting in that subreddit again.

Who Uses Reddit?

In terms of user demographics, 74 percent of Redditors are men, and nearly 64 percent are between the ages of 18 and 29. Research has demonstrated that this demographic is uniquely vulnerable to radicalization, and the radicalization of these individuals is becoming increasingly common due, in large part, to the internet and social media. Most headline news stories about the dangers of social media spotlight right-wing radicalization, but this often belies the fact that left-wing radicalization is similarly common on sites like Reddit. Left or right, Reddit is an especially unique social media site that can foster political radicalization among its users.

Discourse on Reddit often quickly devolves into the kind of language that can encourage radicalization. Redditors can often be found using extreme language to attack and belittle their opponents. However, the most vile rhetoric often manifests itself in “safe-space” subreddits where their opponents are either unable or unwilling to retort. The pattern of comments often becomes detrimentally self-reinforcing, where Redditors are praised for doubling down and repeating increasingly radical ideas.

The lack of disagreement radicalized individuals on Reddit encounter means they often come to believe they are a bastion of virtue fighting against the predations of an ontologically evil opponent. This manifests itself in the wholesale hatred of entire groups such as the GOP, where accusations like “All Republicans are Fascists” are repeated dozens if not hundreds of times per day. These baseless accusations often receive hundreds or thousands of approving upvotes, boosting the message to the top of comment threads.

Another common result of residing in radicalizing echo chambers is that Redditors consistently perceive threats that are not actually there. For instance, claims of a “trans genocide” never hold up to academic scrutiny or official definitions of “genocide.” And Redditors are constantly concerned that Republicans, due to their religious nature, are “fundamentally theocratic” or worse, they are “Christofascists.” To say that Redditors frequently demonstrate fundamental misunderstandings of Republicans and conservatives would be a monumental understatement. And in an environment where extremism is unchallenged, misinformation is the bread and butter of the so-called “free-thinking, high IQ” individuals on Reddit. Redditors will frequently misconstrue the truth in order to conflate individuals and ideologies that are not actually linked. It then becomes a game of tenuously tying those two ideologies together via mental gymnastics and repeated lies.

A very common example of this is accusing Republicans of being Nazis, and the idea that “when someone from the left calls someone a fascist, they are more than often not” seems to be one that many at Reddit take seriously. Indeed, in addition to Republicans, here is a list of things Redditors have accused of being fascist: Andrew Yang, Joe Biden, voting, people who don’t like pit bulls, J.R.R. Tolkien, people who don’t like Antifa, anyone who thinks Kyle Rittenhouse is innocent, the Supreme Court, Second Amendment supporters, Christians, Chik-fil-A, the American flag, pro-lifers, neo-liberals, Twitter parody accounts, people born in 1988, and Florida. This could all be written off as absurd if Redditors didn’t frequently advocate violence against and express hatred toward so-called fascists without repercussions.

Along these lines, another common tactic is amplifying the actions of a small portion of a group to demonize the entire group. For example, when one individual does something heinous, such as one lawmaker in Florida making a ridiculous bill “outlawing Democrats” — technically, the bill outlawed any party that had formerly supported slavery — many Redditors condemned Ron DeSantis for it, despite DeSantis publicly disavowing it.

A License to Hate

Redditors are, just like most social media users, highly motivated to oppose things they see as evil. This motivation, coupled with moderators permitting ontological hatred of an entire group of people, is what gives Redditors an excuse to go on the offensive without pesky restrictions such as “empathy” and “respect.” Once this “license to hate” takes hold of a subreddit, it will begin to spiral into ever-increasing hateful discourse.

This process is initiated when moderators, rather than moderating the speech of a subreddit, decide that hateful rhetoric against certain “out groups” is acceptable and even praiseworthy. This suggestion of ontological evil is often the core foundation of radicalization on Reddit. The manifestation of this can be seen in subreddits such as r/WhitePeopleTwitter, r/196, r/MurderedByWords, and many other “non-political” subreddits that have become highly politicized as their moderators have decided that speech against “fascism” (which is merely speech against any conservative) is wholly justified.

Users of these subreddits will often get showered with upvotes for making absurd claims like “The GOP are all fascist traitors” that quickly devolve into people advocating for violence against any and all individuals on the political right. In that situation, moderators are often the only thing capable of preventing a politicized subreddit from spiraling into insanity.

Unfortunately, moderators willing to hold the line on civil discourse are few and far between on Reddit. When moderators release restrictions on speech based on the aforementioned ontological evils projected onto enemies (e.g., “kill all fascists”), the community begins its descent into chaotic vitriol:

This often comes along with crackdowns against dissenting opinions. Often mods will put their foot down and make broad sweeping statements about “not tolerating nazis” and then ban individuals who, for instance, have any activity in r/Conservative because “All Conservatives are Nazis.”

This intolerance of opposing views, driven by the agenda of moderators, is resulting in the death of subreddits and a cooling of speech on the platform. One such example of this is the subreddit r/JusticeServed. Activist mods of the subreddit used an automated tool to systematically ban users who had any participation in subreddits like r/Conservative. The result of these ban waves was the rapid stagnation of a multimillion-subscriber subreddit.

What’s more, the administrators of Reddit apparently support this insane automatic banning process. Recently, when a few confused members of r/Conservative posted the messages they received showing they had been banned from participating in r/JusticeServed, the moderators of r/Conservative got a stern warning from Reddit administrators warning them against “ban showboating.” Needless to say, left-wing subreddits have not been given the same warnings.

Mods that use mass-banning systems are creating giant rifts in user overlap that both hurt communities on Reddit and damage the site’s retention of users and reputation as a whole.

Herman Cain Award

Redditors are champing at the proverbial bit to have a justification to become engulfed in hatred. One of the most prominent examples of how enticing this “license to hate” is for Redditors can most clearly be seen in the meteoric rise of the hate subreddit r/HermanCainAward.

Herman Cain was a 2012 presidential candidate. During the beginning of the pandemic, he publicly denied the severity of Covid-19, which would ultimately take his life in July. In August 2020, a month after his death, his Twitter account posted this: “It looks like the virus is not as deadly as the mainstream media first made it out to be.”

This quickly entrenched Herman Cain as the poster child for individuals who denied the severity of Covid or refused the vaccine and eventually succumbed to the disease.

The subreddit r/HermanCainAward was launched just three weeks later, but it would rise in popularity in the fall and winter of 2021. What resulted was one of the most grotesque displays of widespread hatred for humanity ever orchestrated on Reddit.

The format of the subreddit was simple. Find an individual (usually from Facebook) who had succumbed to the virus and then find posts from that same person downplaying the danger of the pandemic or refusing a vaccine. You then post a timeline of their death to Reddit and, like roaches to a sewer, the worst of Reddit crawled into the comments to jeer and laugh at the demise of these individuals.

r/HermanCainAward is a subreddit dedicated to celebrating the deaths of people who are unvaccinated. Recently, this "reminder" reached the front page in an attempt to justify their behavior.

Comments on various threads show the true meaning of the subreddit: Rejoicing in death. pic.twitter.com/YtKUhr94Kl
— Reddit Lies (@reddit_lies) September 22, 2021

While reveling in the death of people is egregious in itself, some users would regularly take this one step further. In the early days of the subreddit, before it was a requirement to censor names and faces, Redditors would often track down the Facebook account itself and harass the grieving family members.

The #HermanCainAward subreddit is a community dedicated to mocking the dead. Recently they tightened their rules on doxxable content despite many redditors claiming "HCA doesn't #doxx anyone."

30 minutes of going through old posts determined that was a lie. pic.twitter.com/6woQegjLC7
— Reddit Lies (@reddit_lies) September 28, 2021

More than 500,000 Redditors would eventually subscribe to the subreddit that gave them a license to hate. The subreddit was so bad that even liberal corporate media outlets felt they had to condemn it.

Fomenting Violence and Terror Recruitment

When these Reddit echo chambers encourage extremism and allow misinformation to flourish, the threats perceived by the individual members of these Reddit communities are portrayed as imminent and dire. This means these threats demand quick, decisive action. After steeping themselves in rhetoric like this, there is only one conclusion that can logically be drawn by many of the Reddit radicals — violence is justified. Indeed, if you truly believed there was an active genocide going on against trans people perpetrated by “Literal Nazis,” wouldn’t you do anything you could to stop it?

In the spring of 2022, when the draft opinion about Roe v. Wade leaked, r/196 — a left-leaning chaotic meme subreddit — became a hotbed for radicalizing threats, with users posting the addresses and making blatant threats against the Supreme Court on a very regular basis. This included posting the home addresses of justices alongside information on how to make Molotov cocktails, repeatedly issuing bomb threats, and other general terroristic threats. Only in the most egregious cases did the r/196 moderators step in to curtail the unruly crowd.

Nothing special, just a Redditor on r/196 sharing the home addresses of Supreme Court Justices and Molotov Cocktail recipes. pic.twitter.com/ex0CPhF3DB
— Reddit Lies (@reddit_lies) June 30, 2022

In one notable case, a Redditor was contacted by the Department of Homeland Security for threats he or she had made on Reddit toward SCOTUS. And Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s would-be assassin, a man by the name of Nicholas Roske, was actively looking for affirmation as he suggested assassinating the justice on a subreddit known as r/TwoXChromosomes. He laid out his initial intention on Reddit before he was arrested near Kavanaugh’s house with a Glock, zip ties, a tactical knife, pepper spray, a hammer, a screwdriver, a nail punch, a crowbar, and duct tape.

"There is a way he could be removed" -Nicholas Roske's Reddit account before attempting to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh. pic.twitter.com/Gl6LztoS0c
— Reddit Lies (@reddit_lies) July 29, 2022

Naturally, Antifa has found Reddit instrumental in rallying radicalized individuals to its cause. Reddit has thoroughly spread Antifa’s violent ideology, which, again, effectively states that there is no middle ground: Everyone that disagrees with Antifa is a fascist who doesn’t deserve rights or basic protections such as free speech, and any violence committed against these literal Nazis is self-defense, even if you’re the aggressor.

After a user has been successfully steeped in such rhetoric, Reddit provides a gateway for Redditors to turn their anger into violent activism. Subreddits like r/AntifascistsOfReddit give users explicit guides for how users can cover their tracks and hide from scrutiny. (This is often referred to as OPSEC, or “operational security.”)

Antifa’s OPSEC and non-hierarchical organizing structure often make it hard to directly connect violence to the influence of the organization. It should come as no surprise then that Redditors are being arrested for violence connected to Antifa causes. Samuel Fowlkes, one of the Antifa members arrested in April for attacking protesters at a drag show in Texas, had an extensive history on Reddit. His posts and comments demonstrate just how instrumental Reddit was in his radicalization. Kyle Tornow, a man who threatened to blow up a Portland police station during the civil unrest in 2020, also had a history on Reddit.

And while perhaps he wasn’t as far-left as Antifa, it’s worth noting the account of the man behind the recent mass shooting in Louisville, Kentucky, was also found on Reddit. His account regularly espoused left-wing views.

The Louisville Kentucky shooter used the Instagram handle CSturg41.

A Reddit user with the same name (u/csturg41) hated Trump, posted to r/ChapoTrapHouse (a banned far-left subreddit), and was generally a shut-in. pic.twitter.com/gaBBJTwHiC
— Reddit Lies (@reddit_lies) April 10, 2023

Breaking the Cycle

For the most part, Redditors don’t expand their hate beyond the reach of their keyboards. However, it should also come as no surprise that some Redditors decide to take the logical conclusions of the narratives they’re spoon-fed into real life. By now, Reddit has a well-established history of being used by these violent activists to attempt to get advice, suggestions, or praise for carrying out violent acts against other individuals.

That history is as extensive or more extensive than many other social media sites that have been relentlessly called out for violence and disinformation. And yet, the media and the rapidly increasing number of “disinformation” groups have given Reddit radicalization hardly any attention. It appears they only regard violent rhetoric as a problem when it can be connected to right-leaning politics. If concern about violent rhetoric were applied fairly, there would be a deafening chorus from the media and Big Disinformation demanding accountability at Reddit.

Reddit has taken action in the past. Just a few weeks after the Jan. 6 riot, Reddit banned the “The Donald” subreddit for harassment and targeting at the same time it also banned the raucous left-wing “ChapoTrapHouse” subreddit for similar reasons. However, Jan. 6 produced a censorious hysteria among media companies and Big Tech and given the rhetoric and out-of-control subreddits that have flourished on the site since then, there’s little evidence Reddit management still cares about these issues.

Fixing Reddit would mean some pretty fundamental changes to how the site operates, particularly holding moderators accountable. Moderators are the only individuals who really have the power to break this cycle of escalating rhetoric and violence. Redditors as a group have demonstrated they’re incapable of self-moderation. Activist moderators need to be scrutinized and potentially have their privileges revoked. There should be increased moderator transparency.

Moderators, not the site’s owners and administrators, are who ultimately control the platform, and Reddit is going to pay for it dearly. Reddit is subject to the whims of unpaid moderators who have extreme control over the speech on the platform. Until that’s fixed, Reddit will remain a hotbed of radicalization and is likely to be associated with more violence in the future.

The author runs the popular Twitter account @reddit_lies.

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To Address the Loneliness Epidemic, the Feds Want to Control Your Town and Friends

BY: STELLA MORABITO | MAY 30, 2023

STELLA MORABITO

VISIT ON TWITTER@STELLA_MORABITO

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently released an advisory titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” It warns that social isolation is a major public health problem. The 81-page document presents six government-directed “pillars” of action to address the health hazards of social isolation.

On the surface, these six directives may look innocuous, but they present a clear and present danger to the autonomy of our private lives and relationships. The project is potentially so massive in scope that it’s not an overstatement to say it threatens to regulate our freedom of association in ways we never could have imagined.

Let’s look in greater depth at those pillars and the risks they pose.

‘Building a Social Infrastructure’

The first stated goal is to “strengthen social infrastructure in local communities.” It defines “social infrastructure” as the regular events and institutions that make up community life, and says the federal government should both fund local organizations and direct how they’re structured, including their locations. This can only mean that all local communities must answer to the federal bureaucracy in the quest to strengthen social connections among people.

Social infrastructure, the report says, includes physical parts of a community, such as housing, libraries, parks and recreation spaces, transport systems, and so forth. The report expresses concern that some people have better access to such locations than other people, and recommends federal interventions.

Those are likely to be used to promote densified housing along the lines of the “15-minute city” (more accurately termed 15-minute ghettoes), as well as the eventual dismantling of single-family housing. The goal of replacing private vehicles with public transportation fits easily into this scheme too.

I don’t presume that this plan will, by itself, drive wholesale changes in our physical infrastructure. But it would certainly provide authority and justification for changes supported by radical environmentalists, all of which diminish our freedoms.

The advisory warns that participation is mandatory if the plan is to work: “It will take all of us — individuals, families, schools, and workplaces, health care and public health systems, technology companies, governments, faith organizations, and communities — working together…”

The report’s proposed infrastructure to solve the problem of social isolation seems designed to lock everybody into compliance with and dependence upon federal mandates. Local control is then lost.

We end up with a massive federal infrastructure that can monitor the levels of social connection and disconnection in every nook and cranny of society. As described in the report, this would mean every institution, every governmental department, every volunteer association, every locality, every church, every faith community, every organization, every club, every service club, every sports league, and so on, would likely be assessed and “strengthened” to promote social connection.

‘Enact Pro-Connection Public Policies Everywhere’

According to the second pillar, “Government has a responsibility to use its authority to monitor and mitigate the public health harm caused by policies, products, and services that drive social disconnection.” How will these be tracked and mitigated? It “requires establishing cross-departmental leadership to develop and oversee an overarching social connection strategy. Diversity, equity, inclusion, [DEI] and accessibility are critical components of any such strategy.”

In other words, some people are more socially connected than others, and that’s not fair. They enjoy benefits — as in “unearned privileges” — that put others at a disadvantage. So, the government needs to intervene for the sake of equity to “spread the wealth” of social connections.

DEI is a creature of identity politics, which serves to erase human individuality and replace it with demographic identity markers that label people as either oppressors or victims, thus cultivating more resentments and hostilities in society. By injecting the codes of DEI into all social relationships, we’re bound to become even more divided, alienated, and lonely. And the federal government is bound to become even more authoritarian and meddlesome in our personal relationships and social interactions.

‘Mobilize the Health Sector’

Another threat to the private sphere of life comes under the directive to “mobilize the health sector” by expanding “public health surveillance and interventions.” This sounds very much like tracking your social connections and intervening when the bureaucracy deems it necessary. Big Brother sitting in on your doctor visits and therapy sessions?

The report indicates that health care workers will be trained to track cases of what the government views as social connection and disconnection. As they obediently report to the federal bureaucracy, most individual and local control will be lost. Medicine is bound to become more federalized and less private than ever when answering to these mandates.

Consider also that mental health practitioners are already suggesting that signs of racial or cultural bias should be classified as a mental illness.

“Consider also that mental health practitioners are already suggesting that signs of racial or cultural bias should be classified as a mental illness. “

Of course, to the promoters of DEI, all white people are inherently racially biased, simply because of their skin color. This brings to mind the disturbing practice in the Soviet Union of consigning political dissenters to psychiatric treatment. The official line was that you must be mentally ill if you disagree with communism.

‘Reform Digital Environments’

The advisory recognizes that overuse of the internet and social media can drive people deeper into social isolation. But it also promotes centralized government control over technology development, especially in human interactions: “We must learn more by requiring data transparency from technology companies,” it says. So, government would decide how to design and use such technologies. It would very likely compel technology companies to provide data to the government on Americans’ social connections.

The advisory also backs the “development of pro-connection technologies” with the goal of creating “safe” environments and “safeguarding the well-being of users.” Such phrasing has been used in recent years to justify censorship under the guise of protecting certain demographics.

In light of the importance of DEI to the overall strategy, this sounds ominously like a call for further “protection,” i.e., government control of the private sphere. Again, the primary director of all these remedies is the federal bureaucracy, not a trusted family member, friend, pastor, or neighbor.

‘Deepening Our Knowledge’

The fifth pillar of the advisory pushes a “research agenda” that enlists all “stakeholders” — that means every level of government, every organization, every corporation, every school, every family, every individual — to deepen their knowledge about social connection and disconnection. Of course, the advisory has already predetermined the outcome of much of this research, and we can be reasonably confident this research will reflect the outlook offered by the advisory. After all, that’s how researchers get grants and research contracts.

I imagine institutions will publicize their “studies” through a media monopoly that promotes the preferred narrative on what kinds of relationships we should have, what we can and can’t talk about. Essentially, we’ll get a flood of government propaganda about their preferences for human relationships.

In the context of today’s censorship regime, this means promoting a single narrative that will drown any competing views offered by critics and the public with the favored views of government and corporate interests, parroted endlessly by Big Media.

‘Cultivate a Culture of Social Connection’

Finally, the advisory advocates for cultivating “a culture of connection,” one based on “kindness, respect, service, and commitment to one another.” This sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, our government’s relentless push for woke policies tells us that we cannot expect to understand those terms as traditional virtues.

Rather, such terms will likely be used in woke Orwellian fashion, to direct our social interactions and behaviors. For example, not dating a transgender person is now labeled unkind and “transphobic.” “Gender affirming care” — i.e., castration and mutilation of children — is the only “respectful” way of treating gender dysphoria. Your “responsibility” is to comply without question.

The advisory also calls for the media and the arts to promote stories that encourage “connection,” most likely in the Orwellian sense that wokeness demands. Further, the report cautions that certain kinds of social connection are harmful for individuals and society. It warns that too much like-mindedness can lead to extremism and violence.

We should be very skeptical of the federal government’s role in deciding which groups it deems acceptable, given its growing politicization of law enforcement, its attempts to silence concerned parents at school board meetings by labeling them “domestic terrorists,” and its overall undermining of due process and the Bill of Rights.

The Historical Pattern of Big Government Is Atomization, Not Social Connection

Ironies abound in this advisory. The pretext for government injecting itself into our personal lives is to rescue us from the misery of our loneliness epidemic. Never mind that government policies are largely to blame for family breakdown, welfare dependency, urban blight, attacks on free speech, attacks on privacy, and countless other developments that result in an acute sense of isolation and polarization.

Never mind that the proven prescription for loneliness is the opposite: a private sphere of life where intact families raise their children with a sense of virtue; where institutions of faith give people a sense of order and purpose in life; and where friends can confide in one another without meddlers eavesdropping on their conversations. This sphere of life — the private sphere — is the fount of freedom, love, and trust that nurtures social connections. It can only thrive in privacy.

But this private sphere seems to be in the crosshairs of Murthy’s massive government project to “fix” the social connections of all Americans. The government will doubtless enlist a media monopoly and Big Tech for support in monitoring those connections.

Given the current direction of this administration’s policies, it will also deploy heavy-handed political censorship — of which Murthy already proved a huge fan during Covid — to enforce compliance and punish dissent. Such censorship heightens the fear of speaking openly, which only builds more walls between people. Ironically, we would end up more atomized than ever.

The Tentacles of Bureaucracy

This may sound over the top to a general reader who may find the advisory benign and even welcoming, and perhaps just a narrowly focused plan to address a recognized health issue.

I am very skeptical about that for two reasons. The first is the natural inclinations of bureaucracies populated by “experts.” Bureaucracies never shrink. They continuously bloat. That’s the nature of the beast. Their protectors keep pushing their relevance on some issue or problem. Their experts — who will always “know better” than anyone else — will present solutions to be deployed by the bureaucracy. Compliance will then be demanded. And the bureaucracy will continue to bloat until its tentacles strangle every area of life.

The second reason for skepticism is history, which is filled with examples of governments invading the private sphere of life, specifically the institutions of family, faith, and community. That private sphere is still the most decentralized area of life, the one in which individuals are most able to think and speak freely, unless the government invades. Communist China, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany are prime examples in the 20th century of government invading the private sphere.

Eminent sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote about the deep-seated tendency of governments to hijack the functions of the mediating institutions of family, faith, and community. When the government takes over those functions, we lose those institutions as buffer zones between the isolated individual and the all-powerful state. We become powerless in the resulting isolation.

Nisbet posed this rhetorical question: “What remains then, but to rescue the masses from their loneliness, their hopelessness, and despair, by leading them into the promised land of the absolute, redemptive State?”

I believe the surgeon general’s advisory vindicates Nisbet’s point. Indeed, the state creates the malady and then offers its authority as the only cure as it rushes into the vacuum. The strategy for doing so seems evident in the report’s “six pillars.”

Where Does It All End?

No one can say for sure where this “Ministry of Loneliness” proposal will end up. History — particularly recent history — has warned us about such projects. The goals of this advisory may seem unobjectionable, but the concern is about who decides how we connect socially.

When the “who” is the federal government, we should remember that the pattern of the mass state is always to induce loyalty to the mass state. That pattern always comes with a push to surrender our loyalty to one another as individual human beings capable of real kindness and real love. That amounts to something I call the weaponization of loneliness.

We must insist on making our own decisions to live as free individuals. That means pushing back in any way possible against potential intrusions in the private sphere of life. It means rejecting the pseudo-intimacy and pseudo-connection that our federal government seems intent on foisting upon us in exchange for control of our private lives and relationships. Otherwise, we end up in much worse isolation that renders us powerless and unfree.

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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Did FBI’s Censorship Liaison Hide Colleagues’ Connection to the Hunter Biden Scandal?

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 04, 2023

guy in FBI jacket talking on the phone — A close analysis of the *Missouri v. Biden* court filings suggests the FBI is not being forthright in identifying the players involved

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

Evidence is mounting that both the Biden campaign and the federal government interfered in the 2020 election by running an info op to convince voters the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Missouri and Louisiana have unearthed some of the most damning evidence in their First Amendment lawsuit against the Biden administration, but a close analysis of the court filings suggests the FBI is not being forthright in identifying the players involved.

As part of the lawsuit Missouri and Louisiana’s attorneys general initiated, the states obtained limited initial discovery. Among other things, the plaintiffs obtained a list of government officials who communicated with Twitter about so-called content moderation and the deposition testimony of Elvis Chan, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco Cyber Branch.

In his deposition, Chan testified that he is one of the “primary” FBI agents who communicates with social media companies about so-called disinformation. During the 2020 election cycle, Chan coordinated meetings between the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and at least seven of the major tech giants, including Meta/Facebook, Twitter, Google/YouTube, Yahoo!/Verizon Media, and Microsoft/LinkedIn. Those meetings occurred at first quarterly and then monthly and weekly as the election neared.

In questioning Chan, attorneys representing Missouri and Louisiana pushed him on several points related to the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop. The lawyers succeeded in eliciting testimony from Chan that the FBI regularly raised the possibility of “hack and dump” operations with senior officials at the various tech companies. Those discussions included the FBI warning the companies of a potential hack-and-leak occurring shortly before the 2020 election, like the Democratic National Committee hack and WikiLeaks that occurred in 2016.

The plaintiffs also quizzed Chan on the names of any government officials who discussed “hack-and-dump Russian operations” with the tech giants. Chan mentioned Section Chief Laura Dehmlow, “among others.” But Chan then danced around who those others were, saying he couldn’t recollect. Chan eventually identified four FBI officials that attended Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) meetings at which the FBI discussed the risk of hack-and-leak operations. These officials were Brady Olson, William Cone, Judy Chock, and Luke Giannini.

Regarding whether anyone within the FBI suggested Chan should raise the possibility of Russian hack-and-dump operations with the tech giants in 2020, Chan repeatedly said he could “not recall,” but at one point acknowledged, “They may have, but I don’t recollect at this time.”

The plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden claim Chan’s “I do not recall,” is not credible. They say it is “facially implausible that Chan does not recall whether other federal officials discussed warning platforms about ‘hack-and-leak’ operations during 2020, especially after the fiasco of censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story.” Furthermore, the plaintiffs added, “the only aspect of [Chan’s] internal discussions with the FBI about hack-and-leak operations that he does not recall is whether someone from the FBI suggested or directed him to raise the issue with social-media platforms.”

Uncovering whether someone — and if so, who — directed Chan or other FBI agents to warn tech companies about a potential hack-and-leak operation is necessary to unravel the extent of the government’s info ops. Did FBI agents with knowledge of either the Hunter Biden laptop or the existence of damaging communications possessed by other governments, such as Ukraine or China, prompt Chan and others to warn of an impending hack-and-leak to protect the Biden family from any fallout?

Chan also appeared less than forthcoming when questioned about whether he had discussed the 2020 election with any of the people involved in the DNC hack. Here, an unnoticed tidbit from Chan’s deposition proves interesting: Chan testified that he served as the supervisor for the Russian cyber squad that investigated the DNC server before the San Francisco office handed it off to FBI headquarters.

When asked whether “subsequent to the 2016 investigation of the hack of the DNC server,” he had “any communications with anyone involved in that investigation about the possibility that a hack-and-leak operation” could happen prior to the 2020 election, Chan initially provided a misleading response, saying he did “not remember discussing the potential for a 2020 election with any of the FBI personnel because they had moved on to different roles.”

Catching Chan’s narrowing of the question from “anyone” to “FBI personnel,” the plaintiffs’ attorney quickly queried, “and people outside the FBI?” Chan then noted he would have discussed national security cyber investigations involving Russian matters with Sean Newell, a deputy chief at the DOJ National Security Division who also worked on the DNC hack. But Chan refused to say whether Newell or anyone else who worked on the DNC hack had raised the issue of a 2020 hack-and-release repeat.

Chan’s reticence raises red flags. But piecing together two exhibits filed in the Missouri v. Biden case reveals a thread to pull to start getting some answers.

Exhibit 23 used during Chan’s deposition includes a series of emails related to the DNC hack that were filed in the special counsel’s criminal prosecution of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann. In addition to Chan and Newell, the emails include names of about another dozen government agents.

When those names are cross-checked against the names of the federal officials with whom Twitter “had meetings or discussions” about so-called content moderation issues — a list Twitter provided the plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden in response to a third-party subpoena — two names overlap: Chan and Jonathan Sills.

Sills, an attorney with the FBI’s Office of General Counsel, appeared in several emails in which Sussmann and the FBI discussed logistical details for conveying a copy of the DNC server data to the FBI. Given Sills was only added to the email threads when they discussed whether the FBI would pay CrowdStrike to make a copy of the data, it seems unlikely Sills had a broader involvement in the DNC hack-and-release investigation.

But why then was Sills communicating with Twitter about so-called content moderation issues? Was it about payments to Twitter? Or something else?

Recall we still don’t know the identities of the “folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations,” as then-Twitter legal executive Stacia Cardille complained in a Nov. 3, 2020, email to Jim Baker, the then-deputy general counsel for Twitter. “This is probably the 10th request I have dealt with in the last 5 days,” Cardille noted.

Remember also that the FBI’s Baltimore field office provided coverage to the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office out of which the Hunter Biden investigation was being run — to the extent FBI headquarters allowed.

When reached by phone in his D.C. office, Sills told The Federalist he was not authorized to comment on the matter, which is unfortunate because the people who can comment seem not to recollect the most pertinent points. A follow-up email to Sills went unanswered.

Eventually, though, these threads will all be pulled when discovery occurs in Missouri v. Biden. While some will lead nowhere, as the initial discovery proves, there is much to learn about the government’s involvement in the Hunter Biden info ops and its role in censoring speech on social media.

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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Lawsuit Shows Government’s Hands All Over The Election Integrity Partnership’s Censorship Campaign

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 03, 2023

man wearing mask votes in 2020 election — While private platforms did the censoring, the complaint establishes it was the government that initiated and pushed for that censorship.

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

The members of the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project conspired with state, local, and federal government officials to violate the First Amendment rights of social media users, a class-action lawsuit filed on Tuesday in a Louisiana federal court alleged.

Over the course of the 88-page complaint, the named plaintiffs, Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft and Co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana Jill Hines, detailed extensive direct and indirect government involvement with the defendants’ censorship activities, allegedly making the private entities and individuals “state actors” for purposes of the Constitution.

Here are the highlights of the government’s alleged connection to the defendants’ censorship activities.

A Bit About the Defendants

Formed in 2020, the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) describes itself as a partnership “between four of the nation’s leading institutions focused on understanding misinformation and disinformation in the social media landscape: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.” In early 2021, the same four entities expanded their focus to address supposed Covid-19 “misinformation” on social media, calling the effort the “Virality Project.”

In both the run-up to the 2020 election and since then, EIP and the Virality Project pushed Big Tech companies to censor speech. Excepting the University of Washington, which was not named in the class-action lawsuit, the institutions involved in the EIP and Virality Project are private entities, and the individuals running those institutions are non-governmental actors. Thus, without more, the censorship efforts would not implicate the First Amendment.

The Alleged Conspiracy

But there was more — much more — a conspiracy between the defendants, according to the complaint. Those defendants include the Stanford Internet Observatory and the Leland Stanford Junior University and its board of trustees, the latter two of which are allegedly legally responsible for the observatory’s conduct; Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory; Renée DiResta, the Stanford Internet Observatory’s research manager; the Atlantic Council; the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab; and Graham Brookie, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab.

In support of the alleged conspiracy, the plaintiffs quoted at length the defendants’ own words, much of it culled from the EIP’s post-election report, but also pulled from interviews and its webpage. Here we see the EIP boast of its “coalition” that exchanged information with “election officials, government agencies,” and “social media platforms.” “The work carried out by the EIP and its partners during the 2020 U.S. election,” the defendants stressed, “united government, academia, civil society, and industry, analyzing across platforms, to address misinformation in real time.”

The united goal, according to the complaint, was censorship. This is clear from Stamos’ Aug. 26, 2020, comment to The New York Times, when the Stanford Observatory director explained that the EIP sought to collaborate with Big Tech to remove “disinformation.” The EIP further explained that it saw itself filling the “critical gap” of monitoring supposed election “misinformation” inside the United States — a gap the EIP recognized existed because the First Amendment prevents the government from censoring speech.

But the EIP did not act alone. In fact, the EIP was created “in consultation” with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, with the idea for the EIP allegedly originating from CISA interns who were Stanford students. The CISA then assisted Stanford as it sought to “figure out what the gap was” the EIP needed to address. Two weeks before EIP officially launched, Stanford also met “with CISA to present EIP concept.”

Government Collaboration with EIP

The government continued to work with EIP after its formation. Both federal and state-level government officials submitted “tickets” or reports of supposed misinformation to EIP, which would then submit them to the social media companies for censorship. EIP’s post-election report identified government partners who submitted tips of misinformation, including CISA, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), and the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the last of which received reports of disinformation from state and local government officials. EIP would then forward the complaints to the social media companies for censorship.

CISA also helped EIP by connecting it with election-official groups, such as the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors, both of which represent state and local government officials. CISA facilitated meetings between EIP and those groups as well, leading to censorship requests fed to the EIP and then forwarded to social media companies.

The government’s entanglement with the censorship efforts of EIP was more pronounced when it came to the Center for Internet Security because CISA both funded the Center for Internet Security and directed state and local election officials to report supposed misinformation to it. CISA further connected the Center for Internet Security to EIP, resulting in the former feeding the latter a substantial number of misinformation tickets. EIP then pushed those censorship requests to social media companies.

Later, as the 2020 election neared, CISA coordinated with the Center for Internet Security and EIP “to establish a joint reporting process,” with the three organizations agreeing to “let each other know what they were reporting to platforms like Twitter.”

Overlapping Personnel

The individuals responsible for EIP, including Stamos, DiResta, and Kate Starbird, all “have or had formal roles in CISA.” Both Stamos and Starbird are members of CISA’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, while DiResta is a “Subject Matter Expert” for a CISA subcommittee.

Additionally, two of the six CISA members who “took shifts” in reporting supposed misinformation to Big Tech companies apparently worked simultaneously as interns for CISA and at the Stanford Internet Observatory and EIP, reporting “misinformation” to the social media companies on behalf of both CISA and EIP. In fact, the two interns reported “misinformation” to platforms on behalf of CISA by using “EIP ticket numbers.” One of the CISA interns also forwarded a detailed report of supposed “misinformation” from the Election Integrity Partnership to social media companies using CISA’s reporting system.

Coordination with Virality Project

As noted above, after the 2020 election, the Election Integrity Project replicated its censorship efforts to combat so-called Covid “misinformation” through the Virality Project. The Virality Project used the foundations established with the government’s assistance for the EIP and continued to collaborate with government officials and Big Tech.

The Virality Project boasted of its “strong ties with several federal government agencies, most notably the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG) and the CDC.” The Virality Project also identified “federal health agencies” and “state and local public health officials” as “stakeholders” who “provided tips, feedback and requests to assess specific incidents and narratives.” And as was the case with the Election Integrity Project, the Virality Project flagged content for censorship by social media companies, including Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, through a ticket system.

While it was those private platforms that censored Hoft, Hines, and an untold number of other Americans, the class-action complaint establishes it was the government that initiated and pushed for that censorship, while hiding behind EIP and other organizations. And because EIP allegedly conspired with the government to silence the plaintiffs’ speech, the class-action lawsuit seeks to hold it liable too.

The defendants have some time before responding. When they do, they’ll likely seek to have the lawsuit tossed, arguing they aren’t the government and thus could not violate the First Amendment. The detailed allegations of collaboration with the government make it unlikely they will succeed on a motion to dismiss, however, which will mean the plaintiffs will be entitled to discovery — and that’s where we’ll likely see the real evidence of a conspiracy.

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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AUGUSTE MEYRAT Op-ed: Tucker Carlson’s Fox Departure Signals The End For Corporate Media

BY: AUGUSTE MEYRAT | APRIL 28, 2023

Tucker Carlson — When he could have stayed on script and let his popularity carry him along, he instead continued taking ever-larger risks and angering powerful people.

AUGUSTE MEYRAT

VISIT ON TWITTER@MEYRATAUGUSTE

Considering his popularity and relevance, it is still mysterious that Fox News decided to fire Tucker Carlson.

Was it something that emerged in the devastating Dominion lawsuit? Did a coworker file a serious complaint about him? Did the executives at Fox decide the risks he took were more of a liability than an asset? Was it a combination of all these things, or something else altogether?

Whatever the reason, most people agree that Fox lost more than Carlson. While he can take his massive following and start fresh, Fox can hardly avoid looking like a domesticated conservative media company.

For many, Carlson was the only reason to watch cable television, let alone Fox. He was the one authentic person who challenged the Democrat and Republican party lines. As Daily Wire host Matt Walsh recently noted on his show, Carlson’s monologues were news events in themselves because they resonated so well with many Americans. Besides making him popular, Carlson’s authenticity and independence made him unique and likely irreplaceable.

Some people have compared his departure to that of Bill O’Reilly, who also commanded large audiences, but O’Reilly was a pundit for a different time. His brand differed entirely from Carlson’s. He cheered for the right’s old priorities: fighting terrorists, expanding global trade, and lowering the corporate tax rate. By contrast, Carlson voiced populist, anti-establishment, and non-interventionist opinions.

While O’Reilly is a relic of “Conservatism Inc.,” Carlson is emblematic of what conservative media has become: a wide diversity of voices on a variety of platforms that all oppose the leftist narrative propagated by legacy media outlets. By dumping Carlson, Fox’s leaders are deciding to return to the good ol’ days of Conservative Inc. From now on, news and opinion broadcasts will be safe, filtered, and milquetoast.

In the short term, this might protect Fox from more lawsuits and harassment, but in the long term, this assures that Fox will fade into oblivion along with the rest of cable television as alternative online media takes over.

Rather than treating this as a loss, conservatives should welcome the change. This might push more people, especially older generations, to abandon cable news altogether. Conservatives can leave the insipid programming of cable news for the leftist midwits who pride themselves on being (mis)informed.

Frankly, Carlson could not stay at Fox forever. Though he excelled as a cable broadcaster, his commentary, intelligence, and willingness to explore controversies fit new styles of conservative media too. When he could have stayed on script and let his popularity carry him along, he instead continued taking ever-larger risks and angering powerful people. In many ways, he had a stronger counter-cultural and anti-establishment bent than the typical punk rocker, which admittedly is not saying much these days.

As such, it is fitting that he can move into a medium that allows him to work on his own terms. Not only will this allow him more freedom to express himself and to amplify important voices and arguments, but it will also be more profoundly American.

Whereas state-run media controls information and thought in some foreign nations, Americans can listen to different voices all arguing and competing with one another to grow their audiences. Doubtless, American leftists hope to follow suit and destroy all alternative media and abolish free speech. Quite understandably, they see that only gadflies like Carlson, who dissent from their agenda, hold them back from complete cultural, political, and economic supremacy. This is why they devote extensive energy and resources to controlling all social media and cable media platforms. And it looks like they finally succeeded in taking down Fox.

Fortunately, leftist attempts to censor and control online public discourse have mostly played out like a clumsy game of whack-a-mole. They will silence one dissenter only to have 10 more pop up and say something even more “dangerous.”

Moreover, they cannot help but look like fascists and hypocrites every time they play this game, even angering those in the old guard like Bill Maher who at least try to be principled.

That does not mean their failures should make anyone comfortable with the assault on free speech and alternative media in America. People who are committed to the truth and a marketplace of ideas should continue to call out censorship and corporate monopolies.

Even if Carlson rebounds and Fox collapses, it is still outrageous that he was ousted in the first place. To turn this setback into a win, conservatives must see the intentions behind his exit, support alternative media, and (as Tucker Carlson said in a video after his termination) speak out against the falsehoods as confidently and frequently as possible.

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.

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7 Important Social Benefits Kids Develop From Homeschooling

BY: JOY PULLMANN | APRIL 17, 2023

Homeschoolers crouch on the ground — From high interaction with homeschooled families and graduates in multiple environments, professional and personal, I’ve definitely noticed differences.

JOY PULLMANN

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Homeschooling rose to 1 in 10 American kids in 2021 due to lockdowns, and the number has remained high even as lockdowns abated. Most families who began homeschooling due to lockdowns say they don’t plan to go back.

Despite the steady increase in homeschooling since its revival in the 1980s, families who choose this way of raising their children often face fearful responses from family and friends. Chief among the concerns is what people often call “socialization.” Sometimes, they mean, “Will your kids have any friends?” Other times, they mean, “Will your kids understand social cues and how to get along with normies?”

Yes, you can find homeschooling kids who dress oddly and don’t know how to carry on a basic conversation. But you can find people like that anywhere. As anyone who attended a public school can confirm, people who can’t make eye contact and are otherwise antisocial persist in that environment, too.

Homeschooled or public schooled? Impossible to tell. (Charlie Llewellin / Flickr / CC BY SA 2.0)

From high interaction with homeschooled families and graduates in multiple environments, professional and personal, I’ve definitely noticed differences. On balance, these differences tend to favor homeschoolers. Here are just seven I’ve observed that are also often obtainable in small schools.

1. Independent Thinking

It’s common for the “good” kids in public school to work hard to learn what the teacher wants and give it to her. They have a tendency to become compliers. “Just tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.”

Now, homeschooled kids often also want to please Mom and Dad, but the ability to negotiate with a parent in ways one can’t with a teacher often encourages mental independence. They have freedom to read widely and extra free time in which to develop and personalize their sense of self. They also tend to get more long conversations with their parents because of homeschooling’s extremely small class sizes.

All these cultivate independent habits of thought. They teach people to develop their interests and personalities, and to follow arguments all the way to their conclusions. These things also teach students to spend time comparing and contrasting ideas for real, in a way that shapes one’s soul for life, not as a human version of ChatGPT.

Homeschoolers are also used to being unusual. They’re used to being asked questions like, “Do you have any friends?” and given the cold shoulder by public-school kids at events like sports and family gatherings.

Sometimes this turns a homeschooled kid desperate and makes him more peer-dependent, especially if he’s a sociable child and doesn’t spend enough time with friends. So he’s desperate for friends and therefore works overly hard to conform to negative peer pressure. I’ve seen this also with conservative kids. They accept peers’ or culture’s shaming and rejection of their social differences and therefore can more easily turn into antagonists against their own group.

Thus we have entities like Homeschoolers Anonymous, which argues that because some homeschooling families are abusive, homeschooling rather than the family is the problem. (You don’t hear that same argument about public schooling, which has a far higher rate of child abuse than homeschooling does. But I digress.)

If parents observe and address these social dynamics, mostly by helping their children find friends who build them up instead of savage their family’s choices, homeschoolers do tend to emerge into adulthood as independent thinkers. They tend to be quite comfortable with nonconformity, bringing new perspectives into their communities. This strengthens our society, especially now, as political correctness is metastasizing into a totalitarian social credit system.

2. More Practice with Multi-Age Relationships

Since they are so strongly family-oriented, homeschoolers break out of our society’s artificial, factory-school model of corralling people with those who happen to be born in the same calendar year. Homeschooled kids are far more comfortable making friends with anyone, not just those their exact same age.

They drop by for tea at the old lady’s down the block (true story). Bigger kids play comfortably with babies and toddlers. They know how because they have little siblings and cousins they are around more often because they’re not in school all day. This makes many homeschoolers even more socially capable than peers who falsely believe that one can only be friends with a person who looks and acts just like them. It expands their horizons and their relationship skills.

Freedom from same-age exclusivity has academic benefits as well as social benefits. Everyone understands that no person is exactly mentally on track with every other person his age. An 8-year-old may be strong in math but weak in spelling, compared to those of his age. Homeschooling allows the flexibility to meet children academically outside of the “average” peer.

Being too far ahead of one’s class makes bright kids bored, and being too far behind his class makes struggling students despair. Teaching right at a person’s actual level instead of his artificially imposed level is the most effective instruction possible.

3. More Prosocial Habits and Expectations

For decades, parents have moved to the suburbs to raise their kids because they didn’t want their children in environments shaped by poverty. As Thomas Sowell and others have chronicled, America’s urban and rural poor share many antisocial behaviors that keep them down and drag others with them. These include higher rates of violence and nonmarital sex and other coarse and life-damaging behavior such as openly disrespecting authority.

Homeschooling takes the protection of moving to the suburbs a step further. That’s an increasingly prudent step as our entire culture seems hell-bent on downward mobility.

Simply the widespread adoption of smartphones for children immediately degrades entire social ecosystems such as schools, because children are too immature to handle attention-destroying notifications and open internet access. Ten-year-old girls don’t need to see pornographic drawings and get propositioned to join a threesome because their badly parented peers watch YouTube videos of lesbian sex (true stories — from the suburbs).

In an environment like this, sometimes the only possible way to ensure your child actually has a childhood is to homeschool. It would be better if our society decided to protect children from living in social cesspools like this, but most of our parents and institutions have so far refused. That leaves it up to sane parents and churches. Homeschooling is one way to allow children an innocent childhood so they encounter this world’s violence and sex when they are ready.

4. Better Ability to Choose Friends

It’s always been prudent to select one’s companions carefully. Friends strongly affect who you are. Families who pay $50,000 a year for so-called “elite” private schools and then send their children to morally bankrupt Ivies know this. Their values are degraded, but the underlying impetus is correct: One’s companions can determine the course of one’s entire life. This is true for adults and even more so for children.

The thing about public school is that anyone can and does go there. We don’t live in the 1950s, when one could more reliably count on both the average parent and most institutions to be sane and responsible.

Today’s average parent is checked out and lets his kids be mentored by creepy strangers on the internet and other kids who are mentored by creepy strangers on the internet. Today’s average institution is run by apathetic box-checkers whose lack of moral fiber tends to let antisocial people and woke inmates turn everything into an asylum.

This means parents today can’t count on most other people to encourage their families toward the good. Sending children to public school (and allowing them unsupervised internet access) not only prevents parents from carefully selecting their children’s major influences but also ensures their impressionable children will repeatedly encounter sick perversions they are too immature to handle.

Homeschooling (and private schooling) families have far greater control over their companions than do those who allow our degraded public square to mess with their kids’ minds, and therefore can more intentionally manage this key determinant of a family’s character.

5. Better Family Relationships

A complaint I often hear about homeschooling that unintentionally reveals its speaker’s lack of character is: “I just couldn’t be with my kids all day long!” Parents shouldn’t avoid helping their kids mature by farming out their parenting to others. Others don’t do as good a job of it as parents will. It’s also an abdication of their responsibility that has bad consequences for them, their children, their community, and all of society.

Yes, children are annoying. Every person is annoying sometimes. Mature adults realize we’re also annoying sometimes and that a currently annoying person will usually get over it. This isn’t a children problem, it’s a people problem.

Yes, children can be more directly annoying than adults because they are more actively driven by their passions. That’s one top characteristic of immaturity. Yet kids’ natural immaturity isn’t worse because it’s more obvious than most adults’.

When an adult seeks arousal, he might use internet porn, blast loud music in public spaces, or zone out on a video game. A child seeking arousal might wander around whistling or run in circles around the kitchen. He might bang the same song on the piano 20 times a day or tease his sister 30 times just to get a reaction (guess how I came up with these examples).

But Jordan Peterson is right that kids are mostly as annoying as their parents allow them to be. Some parents allow their children to maintain habits of complaining, whining, arguing with parents when they say no, teasing siblings, or fighting. Other parents build and enforce appropriate behavior boundaries in their family life.

By putting family members in more constant direct contact with each other, homeschooling gives parents increased opportunities for character building and habit formation. If parents do this work, it definitely pays off. It also tends to pay off both short- and long-term.

Children who are required by active parents to daily practice self-discipline tend to become better adults — better fellow citizens, better parents, better neighbors, mothers, and fathers. Unlike unparented children, they are also mostly a pleasure to be around — just like adults.

6. More Creative Hobbies and Entrepreneurial Instincts

Because they don’t have to waste so much time being controlled as part of a herd in large classes and schools, homeschoolers tend to have a lot more free time that they don’t spend watching TV. This makes homeschoolers extremely creative and active people, on average, which lends itself to entrepreneurial instincts.

With all the free time they gain from not having to move at a pace constrained by 22 other people, homeschoolers tend to develop strong hobbies and skills. The average homeschooler is involved in more than five community activities such as piano lessons, scouts, and karate, and is more likely to volunteer than public-schooled kids, according to studies.

Cultivating personal interests is not only good in itself, but it also leads to other goods, such as a penchant for social and economic entrepreneurship. Homeschooled students are used to being self-directed and managing their own time and interests. That makes them more likely to develop their own creative pursuits and I think explains why there are so many homeschooling families running high-traffic channels on YouTube.

7. A More Individual Personality

Some combination of the high personalization and high control of one’s time in homeschooling, as well as the lack of personality flattening that comes from harsh peer pressure, seems to make homeschoolers often very much more developed individuals. This reality is a bit ineffable, partly because it’s so varied in its expression.

While most people seem to come out of public schools slotted into some mass marketing consumer profile — punk, valedictorian, LGBT, SJW, jock, geek, nerd, or some other role defined and assigned by corporate conglomerates — homeschoolers tend not to fit into these kinds of boxes very easily.

Partly I think it’s because they have less awareness that these boxes even exist, because of their lower exposure to mass media through both screens and peers. Partly I think it arises out of their years of freedom to deeply explore nooks and crannies of human existence that aren’t part of mass culture, like Victorian clothing, historical re-enactment replicas, or Scottish literature.

Sometimes this reality manifests in slight oddities, like wearing nonstandard clothing, taking longer pauses in a conversation (or being more likely to monologue at people), knowing swing and folk dance steps, and not getting pop culture references. But I prefer these kinds of oddities to encountering a bearded man in a dress or to hearing some crappy song blare out of someone’s speakers that sounds essentially like every other crappy song that has blared out of speakers since the 1960s.

This also makes homeschoolers really interesting people to talk to. They have actual interests in their lives and unusual ways of seeing the world because more of their ideas haven’t come to them via the dreary mass marketing that in our society badly substitutes for legitimate culture. So no, often homeschoolers don’t act like zombies who download their brains from the corporate cloud, but that’s a good thing.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her just-published ebook is “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. Her many books include “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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Education, Family

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Too Dead to Live and Too Alive to Die, Gen Z is Generation Zombie

BY: FORREST ROBINSON | APRIL 13, 2023

zombie crew walking toward the camera — An undead generation has emerged — a horde of Gen Z zombies mindlessly marching, ready to mobilize but not thrive.

FORREST ROBINSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@FOZ89107323

Does Generation Z take anything seriously? Earnestness is “cringe,” being in love makes one a “simp,” and ambition makes one a “try-hard.”

There is a “deeper ideology lurking in the minds of younger millennials & Gen Z,” as Esmé Partridge writes, “the rejection of idealism in all its forms.” Disenchanted with the world, plagued by hopelessness and nihilism, we have become a generation of zombies — a group of youth that is too dead to live and too alive to die.

No Purpose or Place

In the 1920s, famed novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald described his lost generation as one that had “grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, and all faith in man shaken.”

A century later, Gen Z finds itself in a similar position. The past haunts us, and a stormy future looms over the horizon. Even in our happiest moments, we’ve come to expect something bad just around the corner. Anxiousness afflicts many Zoomers — more than half of us already think humanity is doomed.

Though we share similarities with past generations, Gen Z is unique. Some argue Zoomers will eventually outgrow their crazy beliefs in the same way hippies eventually got jobs and created families. Millennials, however, are only getting more liberal as they age, breaking one of the oldest rules in politics. According to a recent Gallup poll, roughly 1 in 5 Gen Z adults says he or she is LGBTQ.

First and foremost, Gen Z craves distinction. They want to differentiate themselves from the masses by changing the world through fighting climate change, institutional racism, capitalism — you name it. This might explain why 1 in 4 people aged 16-25 wants to become an influencer when he or she grows up.

Why the thirst for power and status? Humans need goals that require effort to attain. We are like archers who need a clear and higher target. The popularity of figures such as Jordan Peterson shows that, especially for young men, it is no longer clear what that target is.

A Developmental Crisis

In the book “iGen,” Jean Twenge observes that more than previous generations, Zoomers aren’t growing up. We don’t have a meaningful target anymore. Gen Z is dating less, quitting jobs, not attending church, and spending half its waking time online. If Zoomers need attention, they use Instagram. Bored? Netflix or Youtube. Horny? Pornhub. Hungry? UberEats.

It’s not surprising that pundits like Jesse Singal and Jonathan Haidt blame social media for Gen Z’s stunted growth. Apps such as TikTok and Instagram have no doubt profoundly affected us, but blaming social media for Gen Z’s mental health epidemic is only half-correct.

Before we had Instagram, we had liberalism. As Patrick Deneen once wrote, “It is less a matter of our technology ‘making us’ than of our deeper political commitments shaping our technology.”

Jaded and Conformist

Inauthenticity has reached its peak with Gen Z. To be part of the in-group, a Zoomer must adopt a live-and-let-live attitude and remain blasé at all times, unattached to all people and things. Like Gen X, they avoid sincerity, choosing instead to be ironic, humorous, or just plain passionless.

For Zoomers, being serious is “cringe.” They dislike partisan politics because it’s rooted in taking differences seriously. Gen Z is disproportionately liberal not because they are passionate card-carrying Democrats — although some of them are — but because they are apathetic. They just want to be left alone by what the media portray as Bible thumpers, old white politicians, and conservatives.

It is revealing that the only time Gen Z ever seems mobilized to take things seriously is when a police officer kills a black man or abortion is restricted. Gen Z is so well catechized into its political religion that within minutes, like a flock of sheep, millions of Zoomers suddenly start sharing infographics, donation pages, and memes all over social media. Gen Z only cares about a particular issue when a so-called victim group is allegedly oppressed, or there’s a threat to its autonomy. As soon as the latest political trend goes away, Zoomers stop caring.

A Generation Without Love

The sexual revolution of the ’60s didn’t bring about communism, as Wilhelm Reich hoped, but capitalism in the sexual market. Now driven by a desire for recognition, Zoomers want sexual empowerment above all else.

To that end, Zoomers avoid caring about finding relationships. As one study found, “only one in 10 Gen Z members say they are ‘committed to being committed,’” preferring solitude (or situationships) to real relationships.

Since seeking commitment is now perceived as exerting pressure, young people must put up a facade of unseriousness and just look for green flags so as not to alienate the person they desire.

Even in a relationship, the psychoanalyzing doesn’t cease. Zoomers analyze texts, obsess over appearance, and worry that their romantic interests are dating other people from Tinder. This perpetual state of uncertainty is so exhausting that many are choosing to either throw out sexual rules completely or abstain from relationships altogether.

Repressed and Insecure

With religious values and sexual norms no longer fixed, many Zoomers struggle to nail down a sense of worth and are thus insecure. Not expressing their real personalities or feelings, these Zoomers live in a perpetual state of “LARPing” and suffer from main character syndrome.

Given their repression of “cringe” thoughts and feelings the in-group might not like, Gen Z’s higher likelihood of engaging in self-harm is unsurprising. To escape the torturous emptiness so many Zoomers find themselves in today, many reach for a razor blade or a smartphone. Either Zoomers gobble down drugs for mental illness, harm themselves, or vainly attempt to produce a sense of self with endless selfies and videos for their followers.

The Zoomers’ obsession with “mental health” and “normalizing” certain behaviors is a byproduct of their unstable self-image. Without knowing how to make sense of their emotions, they outsource the task of understanding themselves to therapists.

Godless and Selfish

More than anything, Gen Z wants to feel alive. They turned out in droves to support BLM in 2020 because it enabled them to experience the emotional highs and lows of religion without the responsibilities. As Twitter user Zero HP Lovecraft wrote, “Christians are persecuted by bureaucrats, tamely and passively,” while black people “are persecuted by cops with guns and gas grenades. … Only one of these is exciting.” In other words, one belief system feels boring and uninteresting, the other eventful and real — hence why many gravitate toward the latter.

Even many modern so-called Christians, as Rod Dreher observed, use religion as “a psychological adjunct to life, a buffer to the harshness of the materialistic, individualistic lives they actually want to lead.” In the context of Zoomers, that makes religion — and its secular woke derivatives — a supposed stimulant for attaining health and well-being. Since Gen Z now worships the “God within,” there has been a rise in gnostic beliefs, self-improvement and wellness cults, astrology and tarot, and, of course, LGBT orthodoxy.

In our post-religious society, life has been reduced to a biological process that must be optimized for the sake of social approval. Instead of prayer, we use painkillers. Instead of aspiring toward good works that glorify God, we engage in meaningless activities that glorify ourselves. And out of that reality has emerged the next undead generation. The horde of Gen Z zombies is mindlessly marching, ready to mobilize but not thrive.

Forrest Robinson is a student at Gordon College in Wenham, Ma. He frequently posts threads on his Twitter @Foz89107323.

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Culture

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How Trump Derangement Gave Birth To The Censorship-Industrial Complex

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | FEBRUARY 24, 2023

Trump Derangement fake news protest sign in a crowd of people — **Unlike the military-industrial complex, the Censorship Complex affects all aspects of governance, controlling the information available to you on every topic.**

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

The Biden administration may have abandoned plans to create a “Disinformation Board,” but a more insidious “Censorship Complex” already exists and is growing at an alarming speed.

This Censorship Complex is bigger than banned Twitter accounts or Democrats’ propensity for groupthink. Its funding and collaboration implicate the government, academia, tech giants, nonprofits, politicians, social media, and the legacy press. Under the guise of combatting so-called misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, these groups seek to silence speech that threatens the far-left’s ability to control the conversation — and thus the country and the world.

Americans grasped a thread of this reality with the release of the “Twitter Files” and the Washington Examiner’s reporting on the Global Disinformation Index, which revealed the coordinated censorship of speech by government officials, nonprofits, and the media. Yet Americans have no idea of the breadth and depth of the “Censorship Complex” — and how much it threatens the fabric of this country.

In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned against the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” via the new sweeping military-industrial complex. Its “total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — [was] felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.” Replace “military-industrial” with “censorship,” and you arrive at the reality Americans face today.

Origins of the Censorship Complex

Even with the rise of independent news outlets, until about 2016 the left-leaning corporate media controlled the flow of information. Then Donald Trump entered the political arena and used social media to speak directly to Americans. Despite the Russia hoax and the media’s all-out assault, Trump won, proving the strategic use of social media could prevail against a unified corporate press. The left was terrified.

Of course, Democrats and the media couldn’t admit their previous control over information converted to electoral victories and that for their own self-preservation, they needed to suppress other voices. So instead, the left began pushing the narrative that “disinformation” — including Russian disinformation — from alternative news outlets and social media companies handed Trump the election.

The New York Times first pushed the “disinformation” narrative using the “fake news” moniker after the 2016 election. “The proliferation of fake and hyperpartisan news that has flooded into Americans’ laptops and living rooms has prompted a national soul-searching, with liberals across the country asking how a nation of millions could be marching to such a suspect drumbeat. Fake news, and the proliferation of raw opinion that passes for news, is creating confusion,” the Times wrote, bemoaning the public’s reliance on Facebook.

“Narrowly defined, ‘fake news’ means a made-up story with an intention to deceive, often geared toward getting clicks. But the issue has become a political battering ram, with the left accusing the right of trafficking in disinformation, and the right accusing the left of tarring conservatives as a way to try to censor websites,” the Times wrote, feigning objectivity. But its conclusion? “Fake and hyperpartisan news from the right has been more conspicuous than from the left.”

Two days later, Hillary Clinton repeated the narrative-building phrase, condemning what she called “the epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year.” But then, as if to remind Democrats and the legacy press that he had wrestled control of the narrative from them, Trump branded left-wing outlets “fake news” — and just like that, the catchphrase belonged to him.

Disinformation Is Scarier if It’s Russian

That didn’t deter the left in its mission to destroy alternative channels of communication, however. The media abandoned its “fake news” framing for the “disinformation” buzzword. “Misinformation” and “mal-information” were soon added to the vernacular, with the Department of Homeland Security even defining the terms.

But silencing conservatives would require more than merely labeling their speech as disinformation, so the various elements of the Censorship Complex deployed what they called “the added element of Russian meddling” in the 2016 election, with Clinton amplifying this message and blaming the spread of social media misinformation for her loss.

Priming the public to connect “disinformation” with Russia’s supposed interference in the 2016 election allowed the Censorship Complex to frame demands for censorship as patriotic: a fight against foreign influence to save democracy!

The Censorship Complex Expands

The Censorship Complex’s push to silence speech under the guise of preventing disinformation and election interference hit its stride in 2017, when FBI Director Christopher Wray launched the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) purportedly “to identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States.”

The “most widely reported” foreign influence operations these days, Wray said, “are attempts by adversaries — hoping to reach a wide swath of Americans covertly from outside the United States — to use false personas and fabricated stories on social media platforms to discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.” Wray’s statement perfectly echoed the claims Clinton and Democrats had peddled ad nauseam in the press, and it foreshadowed how the Censorship Complex would soon mature.

The launch of the FITF in 2017 brought together numerous representatives from the deep state. The FBI’s Counterintelligence, Cyber, Criminal, and Counterterrorism Divisions worked closely with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, and other intelligence agencies, as well as “state and local enforcement partners and election officials.”

Significantly, the FITF viewed “strategic engagement with U.S. technology companies, including threat indicator sharing,” as crucial to combatting foreign disinformation. That perspective led to the FBI’s hand-in-glove relationship with Twitter, which included monthly and then weekly meetings with the tech giant, some of which CIA representatives attended. This symbiotic relationship also led to the censorship of important — and true — political speech, such as the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop, which exposed the Biden family’s pay-to-play scandal right before a critical presidential election.

State Department Renovates Its Wing

In 2011, by executive order, the Department of State established the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications to support government agencies’ communications “targeted against violent extremism and terrorist organizations.” While renamed the Global Engagement Center in 2016, the center’s counterterrorism mission remained largely unchanged. But then at the end of that year, Congress expanded the Global Engagement Center’s authority, directing it “to address other foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation activities.” And with language straight out of the Russia hoax playbook, the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 further refined the Global Engagement Center’s mission:

The purpose of the Center shall be to direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and foreign non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States and United States allies and partner nations.

Together, the State Department and the many intelligence agencies behind the FITF worked not just with Twitter but with the array of tech giants, such as Google and Facebook, pushing for censorship of supposed mis-, dis-, and mal-information. But the deep state was not alone. The “disinformation” contagion also reached the Hill, nonprofits, think tanks, and academic institutions with both politics and a desire to suckle at the federal teat driving a frenzied expansion of the project. Together these groups pushed for even more silencing of their opponents, and the Censorship Complex boomed.

The danger Eisenhower warned the country of in 1961 is mild in comparison to the threat of the Censorship Complex. Unlike the military-industrial complex that reached only one function of the federal government, the Censorship Complex affects all aspects of governance, controlling the information available to you and your fellow Americans on every topic.

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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Are FBI And CIA Agents ‘Sheep Dipped’ At Twitter and Other Tech Companies?

BY: MARK HEMINGWAY | DECEMBER 20, 2022

surveillance screen — **That so few people are curious about the nexus between intel agencies and Big Tech should be a national scandal.**

MARK HEMINGWAY

VISIT ON TWITTER@HEMINATOR

According to the latest drop of “Twitter Files” from Michael Shellenberger, “As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — ‘Bu alumni’ — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.” It appears that Twitter still has 14 employees on the payroll who worked at the FBI and CIA.

The problem isn’t just confined to Twitter. My colleague and Federalist contributor Ben Weingarten recently wrote an article for the New York Post, “Inside revolving door between Democrat Deep State and Big Tech.”

In addition to covering what was happening at Twitter, Weingarten details a broader number of suspicious links between Silicon Valley and U.S. intelligence agencies. Given the near-constant string of deep-state scandals and social media censorship we’ve endured in recent years, a big question we should all be trying to answer right now is, “What exactly are all these spooks doing at tech companies?”

So far, the answer appears to be: “They’re almost certainly up to no good.” After the first batch of “Twitter Files” dropped, it was revealed that Elon Musk fired Twitter Deputy General Counsel James Baker. Prior to going to work at Twitter, Baker was a top lawyer at the FBI from 2014 to 2017. In that capacity, he played a significant role in shepherding FBI’s baseless and illegal Russiagate investigation.

In fact, it’s probably safe to assume one of the reasons Baker exited the FBI was to dodge any accountability for the FBI’s reckless and politically motivated attempt to investigate the president of the United States. Twitter was a pretty soft landing.

Or at least it was, until it was revealed that Baker, who was still employed at Twitter as of a few weeks ago, got fired after he intercepted the internal company communications Musk was giving to journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss to expose the censorship and misdeeds of the company’s previous management. Nobody has quite figured out what he was doing, but there’s widespread speculation Baker may have removed Twitter communications with the FBI or other damning info before it could become public.

Yes, large global corporations need high-level, discreet corporate security, and potentially for benign purposes the particular skillsets that former law enforcement and intelligence personnel provide. However, the situation with Baker makes the problem plenty obvious. If you’re inclined to automatically trust the professionalism and integrity of the FBI and CIA, please have your head examined.

I want to know how many of these FBI and CIA agents are “sheep dipped.” In the intelligence world, “sheep dipping” is a term of art. It describes a tactic whereby a member of the military is “officially discharged from service” to do covert work. In secret, they are still eligible for rank promotions and military benefits.

I first learned the term from my father, because he was “sheep dipped.” He worked for the CIA in Laos in the early 1960s lead-up to the Vietnam War. He was a young Marine officer. During his year in Laos, his normal service records were replaced with records saying he was separated from the Marine Corps, to allow the government to deny any responsibility if anything happened to him. When he returned from Laos, they swapped out the files saying he’d left the Marine Corps with his regular service record, all as if nothing unusual had happened.

Suffice it to say, during this episode, dad witnessed the CIA’s involvement in drug smuggling and other unsavory behavior. The whole episode left a very bad taste in his mouth.

Fun fact I learned earlier this year: The man in charge of CIA operations in Laos when my father was there was the legendary spymaster Ray Cline. One Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory relates that Lee Harvey Oswald, who was still serving in the Marines when he briefly defected to the Soviet Union, didn’t really defect. He was sheep dipped and working for the CIA on an intelligence-gathering mission inside the Soviet Union.

The whole crazy escapade, according to the tale, was possibly organized by Cline, the local CIA station chief at the same time and place as one of Oswald’s previous overseas deployments. For what it’s worth, Cline also happens to be the former father-in-law of Stefan Halper, the dubious paid informant who was the FBI’s source for much of their bogus Trump-Russia investigation.

In case, you’re keeping track, why yes, I did just draw a line, albeit not a particularly straight one, that connects the Kennedy assassination and the Russiagate scandal. (It would have been too digressive to mention Cline and Halper’s connections to Watergate and Iran Contra, but I think you get the drift.)

Now, as clarification, I should say that “sheep dipping” seems to apply mostly to the intel community’s use of military personnel and isn’t necessarily an all-purpose phrase for CIA or FBI undercover work. One of the most annoying things about being subjected to years of completely credulous Russiagate and Steele dossier coverage was every pundit suddenly becoming an armchair expert on espionage and throwing around phrases such as “SIGINT” when we all know they just learned what signals intelligence was 15 minutes ago.

But the point here isn’t to offer up conspiracies about the Kennedy assassination. It’s to make the point that one reason conspiracy theories are so easy to believe is that it’s well-known the Deep-State Industrial Complex employs a lot of tactics such as sheep dipping that are expressly about manipulation and deception.

Combined with so many official denials over the years that turned out to be lies, this makes it impossible to believe intel agencies when they say they aren’t doing something. It was very much denied that American soldiers were in Southeast Asia when my dad was in the jungle learning how to eat soup with chopsticks. More recently, we have very dishonest denials about domestic spying by Obama intelligence officials John Brennan and James Clapper that in a just society should have led to criminal charges.

The FBI response to “Twitter Files” revelations that they were working behind the scenes with the social media network and encouraging censorship is about the furthest thing from reassuring. “The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities,” an FBI spokesman told journalist Jon Nicosia. “Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.”

Based on what we know, there’s absolutely no reason not to assume that, of the numerous former FBI and CIA employees at Twitter, some weren’t either informally or directly working for intel agencies. Further, it is incredibly alarming that the watchdogs that are supposed to protect us from rogue government agencies eroding our rights can’t be bothered to investigate this.

For most of my life, the corporate media, and the activist left in particular, treated these agencies with extreme skepticism. Revelations such as these would formerly have set off klaxons in newsrooms. But now? “People’s brains are so drowning in partisan muck that the Bernie/AOC left — which still pretends to find the CIA and FBI nefarious if you force them to take a stance — refuses to care about the grave dangers in what [Matt Taibbi] reported about FBI’s role [at Twitter],” says Glenn Greenwald. Worse, Greenwald observes that their shared partisan obsessions mean that the left has completely surrendered to the corporatist imperatives of liberal institutions such as the media. “The only real enemies they see are the Trump movement and GOP. That’s why I use ‘left-liberal’: their core worldviews have merged,” he further observes.

With the exception of an under-resourced conservative media and a few independent lefty journalists such as Taibbi and Greenwald — who have dared to stay true to ideals that most of the journalists now trying to discredit them claimed to hold six years ago — no one is interested in solid evidence suggesting intel agencies have been secretly curbing Americans’ First Amendment rights, and possibly doing so to explicitly influence elections.

The fact that so few people are curious about the nexus between intel agencies and Big Tech, even when the evidence is staring them in the face, should be a national scandal. Americans deserve to know the truth about whether our intel agencies are being used against citizens. We should be concerned that the full extent of what they’ve done — and what they likely continue to do — to us will never be known.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator

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6 Huge Takeaways from the Sixth Dump Of ‘Twitter Files’

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | DECEMBER 19, 2022

hand holding smartphone with social media icons — **While the ‘Twitter Files’ confirm many previously known facts and reveal some new details, they also raise more questions.**

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

Part 6 of the “Twitter Files” broke late Friday when independent journalist Matt Taibbi published a 40-something-tweet thread titled: “TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY.” Here are six highlights from the latest drop of internal communications bandied back and forth between Twitter executives and government officials.

1. The FBI Was the Hand in Twitter’s Glove

“Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary of the FBI,” Taibbi opened his “Twitter Files” thread from Friday. Then over the course of some 45 tweets, Taibbi provided proof from internal communications of the tech giant to support his claim and what Taibbi dubbed both the “master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter” and a “unique one-big-happy-family vibe” between Twitter and the FBI.

For instance, the “Twitter Files” revealed that from “January 2020 to November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety Chief Yoel Roth.” And the emails and other communications showed “agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.” “What stands out,” Taibbi stressed, “is the sheer quantity of reports from the government.”

Twitter’s relationship was not limited to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, nor were communications limited to emails, Friday’s installment of the “Twitter Files” revealed. A Sept. 15, 2020 email from a then-legal executive at Twitter, Stacia Cardille, to Jim Baker, who served at the time as deputy general counsel, confirmed these points. The email, titled “Elections Work,” summarized Cardille’s elections-related work and opened by discussing “Government-Industry Sync.”

“I participated in our monthly (soon to be weekly) 90-minute meeting with FBI, DOJ, DHS, ODNI, and industry peers on election threats.” Cardille then noted several items of import — more on those later. Key here, however, is the revelation that Twitter and “industry peers” had monthly and “soon to be weekly” meetings with the “FBI, DOJ, DHS, and ODNI,” or Office of the Director of National Intelligence, showing Twitter was not the only tech company groomed by the feds to spy on and censor Americans, and that it wasn’t merely the FBI involved.

So maybe “hands-in-gloves” is a more apt descriptor.

2. Bloated FBI Task Force Pushed for Silly Censorship

While Cardille’s email to Baker cast Twitter’s relationship with the FBI and other federal organizations as related to “election threats,” the emails exchanged between the feds and Twitter reveal the government regularly pushed Twitter to target select accounts for posts far removed from any semblance of an election threat. Or, as Taibbi reported, “a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.”

For instance, in one Nov. 10, 2022 email, “Fred” wrote, “Hello Twitter contacts,” “FBI San Francisco is notifying you of the below accounts which may potentially constitute violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service for any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy.” Four Twitter account names followed, which were all suspended, including “one account whose tweets are almost all jokes,” but the latest of which Twitter considered “civic misinformation.”

Taibbi provided several more examples of the FBI alerting Twitter to accounts that the FBI believed were violating Twitter’s terms of service. Taibbi then provided screen grabs of the offensive accounts while stating that “many of the above accounts were satirical in nature,” and nearly all were “relatively low engagement.”

The FBI’s targeting of such “low engagement” accounts seems strange until you realized the FBI greatly expanded the number of agents assigned to its “social media-focused task force, known as FTIF,” created following the 2016 election. The task force “swelled to 80 agents,” Taibbi noted, before making a profound point: “The ubiquity of the 2016 Russian interference story as stated pretext for building out the censorship machine can’t be overstated. It’s analogous to how 9/11 inspired the expansion of the security state.”

3. Feds Thread the Constitutional Needle — or Try To

While Friday’s drop of the “Twitter Files” revealed the FBI and other federal agencies pushing Twitter to censor users, and Twitter acted as if the “ask” was a “tell,” the communications also show that the agents carefully crafted their requests to avoid triggering the Constitution.

Here it is necessary to understand the current state of First Amendment jurisprudence, which holds that when the government seeks the private censorship of speech, “what matters is the distinction between attempts to convince and attempts to coerce,” and “a public-official defendant who threatens to employ coercive state power to stifle protected speech violates a plaintiff’s First Amendment rights.” Conversely, a mere request does not trigger the Constitution.

Notice, then, the care the FBI used in its communications with Twitter: The FBI focused not on the government’s interest in censoring the speech, but on the Twitter accounts the FBI said it believed were “violating your terms of service.” The agents used the same or similar boilerplate language in the emails Taibbi published on Friday. Those same emails also ended with the caveat that the information provided by the FBI is “for any action or inaction deem[ed] appropriate within Twitter policy.”

An email from the FBI’s National Election Command Post to the San Francisco field office also parrots the key language necessary to avoid triggering the Constitution. Specifically, the FBI’s national election group asked the San Francisco field office to assist in coordinating efforts with Twitter to obtain “any location information associated with the accounts that Twitter will voluntarily provide to aid the FBI in assigning any follow-up deemed necessary to the appropriate FBI field office.” The same email makes clear the FBI would use the necessary “legal process” to obtain access to account-holders’ information.

For all the screaming about the First Amendment, then, and the declaration by many that the “Twitter Files” prove the FBI violated Americans’ constitutional rights by seeking the censorship of speech, these exchanges show the FBI attempting to thread the needle to avoid making Twitter a state actor.

Whether the FBI and Twitter succeeded in these efforts, however, remains to be seen because, as one of the country’s most preeminent First Amendment scholars Eugene Volokh explained in his essay “When Government Urges Private Entities to Restrict Others’ Speech,” there may be “room for courts to shift to a model where the government’s mere encouragement of private speech restrictions is enough to constitute a First Amendment violation on the government’s part.”

4. Are Feds Playing Fast and Loose with Classified Info?

The FBI’s efforts to maintain separation between itself and Twitter to avoid triggering the Constitution apparently didn’t prevent the federal government from sharing classified information. The Sept. 15, 2020 email from Cardille to Baker revealed this concerning detail.

“I explicitly asked if there were any impediments with the ability of the government to share classified information or other relevant information with industry,” Cardille wrote about her most recent “monthly (soon to be weekly) 90-minute meeting with FBI, DOJ, DHS, ODNI, and industry peers on election threads.” The “FBI was adamant that no impediments to information sharing exist,” Cardille told Twitter’s then-deputy general counsel.

How could that be? Do the FBI and other intelligence agencies ignore classification designations when working with the tech industry? Or is the supposed intel the FBI is feeding to the social media giants with the goal of censoring private speech so mundane it isn’t classified? Both scenarios are troubling, just for different reasons.

5. The FBI Outsources Its ‘Misinformation’ Flagging

Another important revelation from part six of the “Twitter Files,” Taibbi concisely punctuated thusly: “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.”

This conclusion followed from Taibbi’s review of communications received by Twitter via its “Partner Support Portal,” which the Center for Internet Security created. The Center for Internet Security, according to Taibbi’s reporting, is a non-governmental organization that serves as a DHS contractor. The Center for Internet Security “describes itself as ‘partners’ with the Cyber and Internet Security Agency (CISA) at the DHS.”

When the Center for Internet Security receives complaints related to supposed election “misinformation,” it says it will “forward it to our partners,” which in addition to the DHS’s Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency, includes the “Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University.” In turn, according to the “Twitter Files,” the Stanford University project will report “misinformation” to Twitter.

Taibbi provided an example in which Stanford flagged as misinformation a video it called “legal-heavy.” Then to support the idea that the video represented misinformation, the Center for Internet Security’s analysis of the legal issues was quoted at length. What was unclear from the exchange, however, was whether the Center for Internet Security accurately represented the content of the video or properly analyzed the law, as well as whether the video included other accurate points.

That Twitter would be willing to censor someone’s “legally heavy speech,” based on the say-so of various private third parties, may not implicate the First Amendment, but it is a dangerous squelching of free speech that prevents the public from learning and assessing conflicting viewpoints.

6. Some Very Suspicious Timing

A final and more isolated point from Friday’s Twitter dump concerns an email Taibbi highlighted because it showed the multiple channels Twitter and the FBI used to communicate. In the email Taibbi highlighted, San Francisco Special Agent Elvis Chan wrote to Roth and Cardille to “be on the lookout for a Teleporter message from me with two documents to download.” But that email is suggestive beyond the relevance noted because of the date and the suggestion that the message is significant.

Chan’s email to the high-level Twitter executives was dated Oct. 16, 2020, and began, “Twitter folks, I just got something hot off the presses today” — something apparently so important that Chan directed Roth and Cardille to monitor their Teleporter messages.

Now what could those two documents “hot off the presses” concern? Well, the FBI agent’s email to the Twitter executives came a mere two days after the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story on Oct. 14, 2020, raising real suspicions that the two documents related to that scandal.

And so, while the “Twitter Files” confirm many previously known facts and reveal some new details, they also raise more questions.

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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Corporate Media Can Stomp and Cry All It Wants, Its Special Twitter Privileges Are Ending

BY: EVITA DUFFY-ALFONSO | DECEMBER 16, 2022

**Corporate media ‘journalists’ are crying like children because they no longer get special permission to dox their political enemies.**

EVITA DUFFY-ALFONSO

VISIT ON TWITTER@EVITADUFFY_1

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, corporate journalists freely persecuted their political enemies by posting their identities and locations to enable in-person harassment, but not anymore. This week, Musk decided he’s no longer allowing anyone, including journalists, to jeopardize people’s safety via Twitter, and he began temporarily suspending the accounts of offending members of the press.

“Everyone’s going to be treated the same. You’re not special because you’re a journalist,” Musk wrote in a Twitter post.

The crackdown on doxxing is personal for Twitter’s CEO. On Wednesday, Musk reported that his 2-year-old son named “X” was followed by a “crazy stalker” who had mistaken X for Musk. According to Musk, the stalker blocked the car driving his son and “climbed onto the hood.” The incident motivated Musk to suspend several high-profile journalists guilty of doxxing. This caused the corporate media to fly into hysterics. “Elon Musk censors the press,” said one CNN headline.” “[U]nprecedented,” stated the flabbergasted Axios. “Twitter suspends journalists who wrote about owner Elon Musk,” alleged The Associated Press. “Musk has begun banning journalists who have criticized him on Twitter,” whined Washington Post TikTok reporter Taylor Lorenz.

All this outrage is performative. Firstly, Musk made it clear why the journalists are suspended, and it’s not because they “criticized” him, as Lorenz said. “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” wrote Musk.

Secondly, the propaganda press doesn’t care about freedom of the press or free speech. They cheer on and instigate the de-platforming of competing journalists and news organizations. The only thing the media cares about is losing its monopoly on digital discourse and the special treatment it received from pre-Musk Twitter staff.

Before Musk, the corporate media enjoyed gross privileges awarded to them by their ideological allies at Twitter. When Lorenz outed the identity of the formerly anonymous woman who runs the “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account, Lorenz was never disciplined. As the “The Twitter Files” reveal, if Twitter staff did try to sanction left-wing users for violating Twitter rules, senior executives at the company would swoop in behind the scenes and protect them.

Meanwhile, countless conservative journalists were subject to random suspensions, locked accounts, and bans for harassment-free thought crimes. The Federalist’s Senior Editor John Davidson continues to be locked out of his Twitter account because in March he tweeted the truth: Rachel Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, is a man. Levine, a transgender male, is indeed a man and no amount of makeup or surgery will change that, yet Twitter penalized Davidson for promoting “hate speech.” It still is penalizing him.

The Federalist’s CEO and co-founder Sean Davis was also targeted by pre-Musk Twitter and his account is still subject to a shadowban today. That means Davis’s posts are reduced in their ability to reach people. The reason for the shadowban remains unclear, but it’s fair to assume the censorship was politically motivated. The “Twitter Files” revealed how pre-Musk Twitter used shadowbanning to punish ideological dissenters against Twitter’s own terms of use.

Former President Donald Trump was perhaps Twitter’s most high-profile ban. While he was still in office, Twitter nuked Trump’s account. The “Twitter Files” show Twitter moderators admitted at the time of his banning that Trump had not violated any terms of service. The “Twitter Files” also revealed that the very real Hunter Biden laptop story was banished from the app even though it didn’t violate any of Twitter’s stated rules, either.

Unlike conservatives who were political targets of Twitter’s pre-Musk censorship regime, journalists suspended for doxxing are instigating real, physical harm. People outed and targeted by corporate media for expressing conservative views have been fired, had their businesses harassed and ruined, and been targeted for violence. Unlike the shadowbanning of Davis, the banishment of Trump, and the nuking of the Hunter Biden laptop story, doxxing journalists know exactly what Twitter rule they violated. Musk told them in plain words.

The leftist media complex is in a frenzy because it lost some privileges after Elon took over. “Handled,” one Twitter employee wrote to a “connected actor” who requested the deletion of disliked tweets, according to the “Twitter Files.”

That kind of special treatment is over. Twitter’s “rules for thee, but not for me” policy is gone, and the propaganda press is going to have to get used to it.

Evita Duffy is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.

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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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COMMENTARY: How I Lovingly Guided My Child Away from Transgenderism — And How You Can Too

BY: ANONYMOUS | DECEMBER 02, 2022

transgenderism flag written with sidewalk chalk — **I had to accept my limits, but that didn’t mean I was helpless. Parents are still the most important influence on their kids.**

ANONYMOUS

About a year and a half ago, I noticed that my son — let’s call him Andy — was putting rainbow stickers on his phone. And a friend alerted me that Andy rebuked her daughter in a group chat for being “so cisgender.” I did some delicate digging, and it became clear: My child, then 13, was flirting with going “trans.”

He’s not alone. The number of transgender-identifying kids is up 20 to 40 times since a decade ago, to 1.5 percent of all teens. And the gender facilities that say they are the experts have been unmasked. Videos and statements have revealed that doctors in these so-called clinics are willing to give 15-year-old girls double mastectomies and call it treatment.

I wasn’t about to send my son off for experimental medical interventions that didn’t treat any underlying psychological issues. In this, I think I’m representative of the silent (and bullied) majority. Still, what could I do?

The first thing I had to do was to realize that the gender cult is powerful, and I can’t control the choices and feelings of my kid. I had to accept my limits, but that didn’t mean I was helpless. Parents are still the most important influence on their kids.

Finding a New School

I was lucky: My son was at a private school that did not push kids, behind their parents’ backs, into exploring alternate sexualities and getting “treated” by lifetime medicalization. If my son had been at a trans-affirming school — which means just about any public school — I would have been undermined at every turn.

At this school, however, he did have a cohort of “rebel” friends who all seemed to identify themselves as gender-questioning. And the school itself was not academically challenging enough for Andy. So I focused on academics, and we looked for a new school that would be a better fit on that score — and still supportive of my values. Finding one gave him a fresh start and a new peer group.

Building Real Identity

Next, I decided I would not provoke Andy by debating gender and trans issues. Maria Keffler in her book “Desist, Detrans, and Detox” reminds parents that transgenderism in adolescents is less about sex and more about identity, identity, and identity. A few decades ago, Andy probably would have worked through his teenage crises by going goth or arguing with me about religion. These days, becoming one of the letters in LGTB is the shortcut to being interesting, not “basic.”

Well, I didn’t want to make gender-bending the way he was going to differentiate himself from his parents. If he had been openly claiming a different so-called gender identity, maybe I would have been more confrontational about it. But since he was just flirting with being trans, not yet eloping, I decided not to make the topic of the sexes even more important than it already was. Instead, I focused on helping him build an identity in a healthy way.

I made it a priority to compliment him, every day, praising him for all the good things he is. Every time I “caught him” being funny, smart, helpful, generous, thoughtful, or kind, I noted it out loud. Every day, multiple times a day. I tried to help him see that these things are more important to his identity than some exotic “gender.” I also tried to help him feel more at home in his skin. He was given lessons in a sport he enjoys, so he could experience his body being strong and agile. Whatever reduced his alienation from his body, I encouraged.

Open-Ended Questioning

Next, I focused on building our relationship. I asked a lot of open-ended questions, and I made goofy jokes. We laughed a lot. I learned about him and signaled that I was interested in learning more. De-escalating tension and increasing the joy between us was key.

If Andy wanted to wear a vintage shirt that looked like it belonged on a French aristocrat from a few centuries ago, I just shrugged and let it pass. As long as what he chose was somewhere within the boundaries of socially acceptable male clothing, I didn’t make a fuss. After all, being a man (or a woman) is large enough to encompass differences in style, personality, and interest. It’s the trans movement that stereotypes the sexes, telling us that a sensitive, artistic boy must actually be a girl. Nonsense! My son could be a man and wear pastels.

When opportunities arose in everyday life, I pointed out the differences between men and women. In talking about school athletics, I would casually observe, “Oh, in high school, the athletic teams are divided by sex, because by puberty, boys develop more muscles and have more lung capacity than girls.” I never made these into arguments, just objective remarks.

In fact, we didn’t talk about so-called gender much, although I was prepared to. I coached myself on how to respond with neutrality and interest. I was determined only to ask questions. “I’m not clear how, if gender is socially constructed, that it is also an infallible identity deep inside the person?” “Help me understand. If gender is fluid and changeable, why should people get surgeries to alter their bodies permanently?” Books and essays pointing out transgenderism’s inconsistencies helped me clarify my thoughts. Still, I vowed I would only provide my own answers when Andy asked me a question — only, that is, when he was truly curious about my thinking.

I did take Andy to one talk on gender by a speaker who was calm and sympathetic but still supportive of my values. When he asked why he had to go, I simply said, “It’s an important topic, and this point of view is not well-represented in the culture.” Afterward, when I asked him what he thought, he said, “It was fine,” in a tone of voice that indicated the opposite. I dropped it; the talk still gave him a lot to chew on, even if he didn’t want to admit it.

Limiting Technology

One other piece was key: technology. Much trans proselytizing happens online, with anonymous adults love-bombing vulnerable kids. These adults sell the idea that acceptance can be found only in their new trans family and not in their real home. Some parents need to take drastic steps regarding their kids’ online presence. Fortunately, the screen problem was one I had been addressing for a long time, so I could be more moderate.

Andy did not have a smartphone, although even flip phones these days have internet browsers. I gave him a new phone designed for kids, one that had some carefully curated apps but no internet browser. For computer time, he was limited to an hour a day, and I trusted the internet filters I managed on his computer to keep him off the porn sites and the sexually explicit forums that cater to trans-questioning kids. All that limited (but didn’t eliminate) his exposure to pro-trans pressure. As a bonus, I got a much more cheerful kid at home who wasn’t always in front of a screen.

The point of all of this was threefold: to be the good guy, to distract him from all gender talk all the time, and to provide other identity options than the trans one.

Upping My Parenting

Lastly, I played the long game. Even when I didn’t believe it, I kept repeating to myself that the universe wouldn’t give me a kid that I couldn’t care for. That I had his best interests at heart — and online trans gurus didn’t — and I could wait this out with patience. I prioritized him when we had downtime in the evenings, not my phone. And I did the things I needed to, like sleeping enough and getting my own support system, so I could be available to him. Should I have been doing all of this all along as a parent? Well, of course, and in fact, it’s not like I had to do a total 180 when this emergency happened. Some of these things I was already doing, sort of. But I still needed to level up my parenting.

This summer, when he decorated a new phone, there were no rainbow stickers on it.

I wouldn’t say we are out of the woods, but he seems uninterested in the whole gender question. His wardrobe choices are less outrageous, and he’s not anxious, angry, and approval-seeking. Instead, he’s engaged and happy at school and at home, and he doesn’t need to be “different” according to the trans script. He’s happier being different just as himself. That makes me one happy parent.

This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.

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Watchdog Group Sues Biden’s DHS For Records on Alleged Coordination to Censor Americans

By: ALEXA SCHWERHA, CONTRIBUTOR | November 30, 2022

President Biden Meets With Business And Labor Leaders At The White House — **(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)**

Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Nov. 22 after it failed to complete a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request into communication records regarding alleged online censorship during the 2020 presidential election.

The watchdog group was seeking communications between the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA), a DHS subdivision, and the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), an “information exchange” between researchers, election officials and government agencies established in 2020 to identify and research online misinformation leading up to elections that flagged social media posts for platforms to address. Judicial Watch demanded that the Washington D.C. District Court order the DHS to acknowledge the Oct. 5 FOIA request and “produce… non-exempt records responsive to the requests,” according to the lawsuit.

“We’ve had these disclosures essentially over the last year that federal agencies, especially DHS, hav been working to censor Americans… either directly or indirectly,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Through the EIP, multiple groups, including CISA and liberal groups such as the Democratic National Committee and the NAACP, could file “tickets” reporting potential election misinformation, which EIP would then forward on to social media platforms after an investigation into the claims. The EIP released a 2021 report detailing its efforts to address misinformation in the 2020 election in which it acknowledged it had shared hundreds of posts with online platforms, with “35% of the URLs we shared with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube […] either labeled, removed, or soft blocked.”

“This lawsuit’s designed to get into that. There’s these federal frauds that colluded to come up with a system of censorship for social media, and it looks like this [Department of Homeland Security] agency participated in it and we want to figure out what was going on,” Fitton said.

BREAKING: Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against the DHS for all records of comms between the CISA, a division of DHS, and the EIP, which was created to flag online election content for censorship and suppression (1/3). https://t.co/xlJLtr8llL
— Judicial Watch ⚖️ (@JudicialWatch) November 30, 2022

Judicial Watch also requested records between CISA and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and the Stanford Internet Observatory, both of which were part of the EIP. The request specifically asked for communication about the 2020 election and “online misinformation and disinformation.” However, DHS allegedly failed to adhere to the Nov. 3 FOIA deadline, according to the lawsuit.

“When an agency unlawfully refuses to comply with FOIA, we have the option of suing the federal court, which is what we did,” Fitton told the DCNF.

House Republicans also launched an investigation into Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook about their role in online censorship. Amazon, Apple, TikTok and Microsoft are also under investigation by the House Judiciary Committee, The Washington Times reported.

Republican Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina reportedly made a request for all communication between the Biden administration and social media corporations pertaining to “digital censorship.”

“This is a threat to the first Amendment like we’ve never seen in modern history,” Fitton said.

The White House, DHS, CISA, the EIP, University of Washington Center for an Informed Public and the Stanford Internet Observatory did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

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Why Did Gen Z Turn Out to Vote for Democrats and Against Their Own Interests?

BY: AUGUSTE MEYRAT | NOVEMBER 16, 2022

girl in red sweater holding her phone sitting next to a girl friend — **No one challenges the kids, so they grow up soft and slow, making them the perfect sheep to be manipulated en masse.**

AUGUSTE MEYRAT

VISIT ON TWITTER@MEYRATAUGUSTE

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the disappointing results of the last week’s election: the current post-Covid rules (or lack thereof) for voting, mismanaged ballot collection and counting, Republican leadership, and American voters. Naturally, all of these factors played a role in helping a party that has failed on multiple fronts to stay securely in power.

However, one major reason for Democrats winning was Gen Z voters coming out in large numbers to vote for them — though this was not quite as big a reason as Democrats believe. This cohort was responsible for electing cognitively impaired man-child John Fetterman and incompetent shrew Kathy Hochul as well as reelecting Covid tyrant Gretchen Whitmer. Less unsurprisingly, they’re also responsible for supporting the legalization of marijuana and expanding abortion.

Why did these young people feel motivated enough to go and vote against their interests and keep the country on a downward trajectory? Do they like rising crime, high inflation, mass illegal immigration, homeless encampments, high gas prices, and a shrinking economy? Did they really think Biden would pay off their student loans? Are they just brainwashed zombies who comply with the narratives of TikTok?

Based on my extensive experience as an English teacher, I would say that yes, the average Gen Z American is largely indifferent to important issues that affect the country, even ones that affect their general quality of life. Every day, I witness their lack of reasoning skills and personal drive. This in turn causes them to be disturbingly introverted and handle most of their interactions with people through social media. Many have no real community or deep-seated beliefs and act more on feelings than principle.

Instead, they spend most of their waking life on the internet, consuming mindless content and dreaming up fake personas for themselves. And as a result, they are largely immature, lonely, and neurotic.

This much is argued by writer and former English professor Mark Bauerlein, who writes that Gen Z, “will be the most conformist cohort in American history, already favoring cancellation more than any other age group, and politics will be a primary mode of grouping.” This generation is told what to think by various online influencers, and they passively comply. Because of screen addiction, they will never learn to think or act for themselves, nor will they ever really want to.

The propagandizing effect of heavy social media usage cannot be overstated. For young people, nearly every narrative and social phenomenon now originate from the internet. This means that it’s the dumb and disturbed “influencers” online, not parents or teachers, informing this next generation about politics, economics, and culture. And the algorithms of popular social media sites are designed to curate and amplify this same defective messaging a million times over. The subversive effect on people with still-developing frontal cortexes is not all that different from the “Ludivico technique” in “A Clockwork Orange” in which criminals are forcibly bombarded with images and music in order to condition them against misconduct.

Why is Gen Z so glued to their screens? Two friends and fellow teacher-writers Jeremy Adams and Shane Trotter have examined this question in depth. In his book “Hollowed Out,” Adams argues how the breakdown of family, schools, and the culture at large has left today’s young people morally and intellectually adrift: Not working? Not supporting oneself? Playing video games all day on somebody else’s dime? Not feeling a crumb of shame about it — even describing such a state as happy? That is hollowness.

The many norms and standards (these things that would “fill in” a person) that used to be reinforced by their parents, pastors, teachers, politicians, entertainers, and artists simply aren’t anymore. Should it surprise people that the kids carelessly withdraw from the world and play on their phones?

In Trotter’s book “Setting the Bar,” he attributes the failures of Gen Z to low standards and a permissive parenting culture that coddles kids:

The typical modern youth experience — from the school environment, to the parenting norms, to the broader cultural value structure — is ingraining limiting beliefs and destructive habits that leave our kids ill-equipped for the challenges that lie ahead of them.

No one challenges the kids, so they grow up soft and slow, making them the perfect sheep to be manipulated en masse.

Adams and Trotter demonstrate how circumstances have turned many Zoomers into sad, confused individuals doomed to have an impoverished adulthood. Instead of receiving lessons on independence, critical thinking, and disciplined living, too many of them are protected from all forms of adversity and given an iPad to keep them pacified. This treatment insulates them so much from reality that they never come to know themselves and are bored to the point of despair.

Ironically, understanding this dark reality may be the key to generational reform. True, it might be easy to agree with Bauerlein that Gen Z is hopeless and will probably bring the rest of the nation down with them, but this theory assumes that the Gen Z lifestyle is actually sustainable. The students in my classes all share a natural desire to be better people. I do what I can to offer them a way out; that is, I talk to them and push them to do more. At first, they resist and resort to their phone for comfort but this attitude changes when they feel the profound joy of actually learning and accomplishing something.

Conservatives can shake their heads at today’s young adults refusing to grow up, or they can actually try to reach these kids. It’s not like they want to be lonely, ignorant, or “neurodivergent.” And most, if they’re being honest, don’t want to be slaves to their smartphones. Rather, like everyone else, they want goodness, beauty, and truth. They want loving relationships, authentic experiences, and some degree of mastery over their emotions and impulses. Above all, they want meaning.

If they have those things, then they will stop voting for corrupt mediocrities and suicidal social policies. More importantly, they will stop wasting away their lives on frivolity and enjoy a fruitful and fulfilling adulthood. Although election results are technically a political matter, what they reveal about voters is a cultural and moral one. We should treat this midterm as the Gen Z cry for help. It’s time for us to go out and save them.

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.

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Study: Outside of School, America’s Teens Average 70 Hours Per Week Glued to Screens

BY: JOY PULLMANN | OCTOBER 31, 2022

little girl on smartphone — **America’s young people are wasting almost all of their waking free time on entertainment instead of personal development or service to others.**

JOY PULLMANN

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOYPULLMANN

Americans ages 11 to 18 play online for an average of 10 hours per day, according to a study out today by a research team that includes psychologist Jean Twenge, author of “iGen” and “Generation Me.”

The researchers surveyed 1,600 Americans ages 11 to 18 in May 2022. On average, the study participants reported using digital media an average of 10 hours and four minutes per day, on such entertainment activities as social media, video chat, texting, shopping, and gaming.

That’s a total of 70 hours per week spent online, approximately double the average time spent in school. If teens were suddenly banned from screen time, they could use the time freed from solely that to instead hold down both a full-time and a part-time job. Some of this average may include multitasking, such as texting while scrolling Instagram, the study said, but this total of 70 hours per week spent on screens also did not include time spent watching TV.

Low-Class Behavior Rampant in Middle Class

The researchers say their Institute for Family Studies and Wheatley Institute study is the first to examine the effects of family structure on young people’s screen time. They found that teens living with their own biological and married parents still spent an astonishing amount of time on screens, at an average of nine hours per day. Still, that was nearly two hours fewer per day, on average, than children living without a biological parent, who spent an average of 11 hours per day online.

“The adolescents most likely to be depressed, lonely, and dissatisfied with life are heavy digital media users in stepparent, single-parent, or other non-intact families,” write study authors Twenge, Wendy Wang, Jenet Erickson, and Brad Wilcox. “The link between excessive technology use and poor mental health is larger for youth in non-intact families compared to those in intact families.”

So, according to this study’s findings, children in intact families spend an average of 63 hours per week amusing themselves online, while children in broken families spend an average of 77 hours per week amusing themselves online. The study discovered “especially large differences by family structure in youth time spent on gaming and texting. For example, youth in stepfamilies report spending about 50 minutes a day more texting than youth in intact families.”

Other studies on children’s screen use reinforce this finding — that America’s young people are wasting almost all of their waking free time on entertainment instead of personal growth or service to others. As this IFS/Wheatley study points out, this shift has happened extremely quickly, and it’s not all because of the 2020-2022 Covid lockdowns that also arrested American children’s development. Between 2009 and 2017, “the time high school students spent online doubled.”

The study points out that high screen time for adolescents is correlated with depression, loneliness, lack of sleep, and negative body image. It does not mention the opportunity cost of diverting young people’s free time to entertainment consumption instead of personal development that benefits others, such as learning to repair bicycles, playing outside, testing out jobs through work and internships, or working to save for college or marriage.

The study recommends that parents keep electronic devices out of kids’ bedrooms at night, limit screen time to a few hours per day, delay smartphone access to age 16 or 18, keep kids off social media as long as possible, and arrange for their kids to make friends with kids in families with similar boundaries about tech use to help their children socialize with people instead of robots.

Unchallenged mass tech addiction is one more way our morally bankrupt ruling class incentivizes destructive lower-class behaviors instead of encouraging lower classes to raise their standards. This works to erase the middle class by indulging laziness, like the shameful “quiet quitting” PR campaign. This is another form of societal suicide. Laziness cannot maintain, let alone keep advancing, the United States’ world-class level of scientific and cultural advancement.

Nothing worth having comes without strenuous and sustained effort. Internet addictions erase not only willpower but also self-discipline, excellence, and the communication skills needed to work with others and sustain key relationships such as marriages, as Twenge and others’ academic work shows.

This Is a National Crisis

If a child played with Legos for 10 hours a day, every day, his parents or teacher would have him screened for autism and developmental delays. If a child played pretend for 10 hours a day, at any age, he’d be sent to the school psychologist.

If your child did anything for 10 hours a day, you’d be worried about him and work strenuously to bring some balance to his life, for his own good. Parents need to man up and do the hard work of tightly restricting the addictive side of the internet from their kids, for not only their own good but for the sake of our country. Even 30 hours of screen time a week is obviously excessive for kids. Seventy hours of screen time a week is completely out of control, the willful destruction of our future.

“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war,” wrote the National Commission on Excellence in Education in the famous 1983 report, “A Nation At Risk.” “As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”

The same sentiment applies to today’s American youth, but in a far more advanced condition. If a foreign nation had imposed on Americans the destruction of our mental and moral capacity that results from such rampant internet addiction as this study explores, we’d consider it an act of war. In fact, it’s pretty clear that our top foreign adversary created an addictive social media app for the same reason it helps Mexican drug cartels ship fentanyl across our border: because China knows that if they destroy America’s future, they rule the world.

The only thing standing between them and your kids is you, parents. Maybe a few elected officials could stand with us and take down these internet monopolies that make bank strip-mining our future, or at least require real proof of parental consent for children to use addictive tech products, such as a tiny credit card payment. But don’t wait for others to do your job for you. Put down your phone, grab your kids, and make your family motto the title of one of my childhood books: “Do Something Besides Watching TV.”

If your children enter adulthood having done nothing with 25,000 hours of their lives they can never get back, and with their brains destroyed by internet slot machines, that’s on you. You’re the one paying for their phone and letting them self-destruct. Tell them to get a job or read some books or do anything but sabotage themselves and our society. If you don’t, you deserve to be judged the same way as moms who put Mountain Dew in their babies’ bottles.

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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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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If Big Tech Isn’t Regulated Before 2024, The Election Will Be Rigged Again

BY: SAMUEL MANGOLD-LENETT | AUGUST 17, 2022

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testifying before Congress

SAMUEL MANGOLD-LENETT

VISIT ON TWITTER@MANGOLD_LENETT

In a recently published blog post, Twitter announced its plans to “protect” political discourse ahead of the upcoming U.S. midterm elections by reaffirming its commitment to its “Civic Integrity Policy.” Given Silicon Valley’s tendency to suppress conservative speech while emboldening leftist causes, it is all but certain this policy will be used exclusively for right-wing censorship. And considering the impracticality of introducing regulations prior to the 2022 midterms, the Republican Party must make regulating Big Tech a top priority in order to ensure the integrity of the 2024 presidential election.

According to Twitter, its Civic Integrity Policy “covers the most common types of harmful misleading information about elections and civic events” by flagging “misleading content” and, in some cases, outright suppressing content that contains “false or misleading claim[s].” But, with recent history as a guide, we can see that Twitter does not enforce this policy honestly.

In 2020, just weeks before the presidential election, Twitter suppressed discussion of Hunter Biden’s laptop. The company went so far as to prevent users from sharing the New York Post story exposing the sca ndal with one another, claiming that its circulation violated the company’s policy on spreading information obtained via hacking. Coincidentally, Twitter did nothing to stop the circulation of leaked copies of Donald Trump’s tax filings.

Why does this matter?

Twitter justified its suppression of speech that favored a Republican incumbent by falsely designating it as ill-begotten misinformation while simultaneously doing nothing to crack down on the likely illegally obtained information that damaged the same incumbent’s reputation among the electorate.

It just so happens that by suppressing negative stories about Joe Biden, Big Tech may have handed him the election as 82 percent of Biden voters in seven swing states were unaware of all of the scandals attached to him. Seventeen percent of these voters said that knowledge of these scandals before voting would have caused them to change their vote.

The company’s integrity policy was applied in ways that specifically targeted speech favorable to the Republican Party. By censoring this speech, Twitter played a direct role in Joe Biden’s ascension to the presidency.

Social media’s utility is largely the provision of a digital town square where people can share information with other people. So, ethically, ought companies that monetize user data obtained from speech-centric platforms not protect speech?

But more importantly, considering how often Big Tech platforms such as Twitter act on behalf of the federal government, they must be held accountable for violating the First Amendment rights of American users. Corporations that function as extensions of the government must be compelled to uphold the constitutional protections of American citizens.

In a July 2021 briefing, former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki explicitly stated that the Biden administration intended to collaborate with Big Tech to “monitor misinformation more closely” and “proactively address the public’s questions without inadvertently giving a platform to health misinformation that can harm their audiences.” She also acknowledged that the White House intended to reign in counter-regime narratives by “bringing individuals and organizations together to address misinformation.” The White House was so effective at persuading Big Tech to crack down on narratives in opposition to its own that social media companies deplatformed journalists who were too effective at asking questions about Biden’s Covid strategy and Covid vaccine efficacy.

Agents of the government must be subject to the U.S. Constitution and prevented from infringing on the rights of American citizens. And despite what tech executives will say when testifying before Congress, these companies are politically motivated and serve the interests of the political left. Is there any question as to whether Big Tech plans to mobilize in favor of Democrats again in 2024?

It is far too late — and politically impossible — for congressional Republicans to introduce regulatory legislation that would reign in social media platforms like Twitter before the 2022 midterm elections. So, upon reclaiming control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the GOP must act to secure digital free speech ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @Mangold_Lenett.

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This Insane 2020 Time Magazine Article Explains Exactly Why the Left Fears Losing Twitter

REPORTED BY: DAN O’DONNELL | APRIL 28, 2022

An astonishing but largely forgotten story in Time Magazine explains why there is so much leftist concern today about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter.

DAN O’DONNELL

Of all the hysterical leftist reactions to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter on Monday, MSNBC host Ari Melber’s was easily the most revealing.

“If you own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don’t have to explain yourself,” he gravely intoned during his show Monday evening. “You don’t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party’s candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it ‘til after the election.”

You don’t say. This was in fact the way the left used social media to win the 2020 presidential election. They even admitted it openly in a stunning yet largely forgotten February 2021 article in Time magazine entitled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.”

“For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President,” wrote reporter Molly Ball. “Their work touched every aspect of the election.”
And they wanted credit for it, Ball continued, “even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream — a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
Their aim, they insisted, wasn’t to rig the election but to “fortify” it against then-President Donald Trump and his allies, whom they believed to be a threat to democracy itself.
“Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”

The final piece was critical, especially in the waning days of the campaign, when an October surprise in the form of Hunter Biden’s laptop threatened to derail his father’s candidacy and undo the organized left’s hard work.

The New York Post’s exclusive story dropped like a grenade less than a month before Election Day, providing “smoking-gun emails” showing that the younger Biden introduced his father “to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”

The emails, the Post explained, were obtained from a computer dropped off and apparently forgotten at a repair shop in Delaware. Under the terms of the repair agreement, the store’s owner took possession of the laptop when it was deemed to be abandoned. Twitter and Facebook, though, determined without any evidence that the emails were actually “hacked materials” and thus distributed in violation of their terms of use agreements.

Facebook quickly acted to limit the reach of the story, while Twitter took the extraordinary step of locking the Post’s account and preventing other users from sharing its story or even pictures from it. Neither Hunter Biden nor the Joe Biden presidential campaign denied that the laptop was Hunter’s, and the younger Biden’s business partner, Tony Bobulinski, went on the record a few days later with documents that confirmed the Post’s reporting, which seemed to uncover an international bribery scheme.

It didn’t matter. Once 50 obviously partisan intelligence officials issued an evidence-free statement calling the laptop materials “Russian disinformation,” it was determined that they would be censored in both legacy and social media.

Of course, more than a year after Biden was safely elected, both The New York Times and Washington Post confirmed that the laptop was genuine, but the censorship did its job: A Media Research Center poll of swing state voters confirmed that 16 percent of Biden supporters would have changed their votes had they heard of the laptop story, including 4 percent who would have switched their vote to Trump. This obviously would have swung the entire election to Trump, but that would have been an unacceptable result for the leftist cabal intent on “fortifying” democracy by stacking the deck against him. In light of the Media Research Center’s findings, social media censorship was very possibly the most effective way they did it. And naturally they had to brag about it in Time.

“Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories, the viral force of social media and the involvement of foreign meddlers made disinformation a broader, deeper threat to the 2020 vote,” Ball reported. “Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago. She piloted a nameless, secret project, which she has never before publicly discussed, that tracked disinformation online and tried to figure out how to combat it.”
She ultimately concluded that engaging with this supposedly “toxic content” or trying to debunk it was ineffective, so “the solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place.”

This research armed liberal activists to pressure social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to far more aggressively and creatively enforce their rules, prompting a crackdown on “disinformation” that was in fact completely accurate. Because it was harmful to the effort to “save democracy” and defeat the “autocratic” Trump, it was censored.

“Democracy won in the end,” Ball concluded. “The will of the people prevailed. But it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.”

This reveals the real threat of Musk’s Twitter takeover: If it is no longer possible to suppress factual information in the name of rescuing democracy from its alleged enemies, then those enemies (read: Republicans) might start winning more elections. And that is simply unacceptable.

Dan O’Donnell is a talk show host with News/Talk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee, Wis. and 1310 WIBA in Madison, Wis., and a columnist for the John K. MacIver Institute.

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Did The New York Times Admit Joe Biden Is Corrupt So Democrats Can Get Rid of Him?

REPORTED BY: JOY PULLMANN | MARCH 23, 2022

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris wearing facemasks

It is painfully obvious, as was predictable, that Joe Biden’s presidency is a dumpster fire. As demonstrated by the party’s destructive callousness towards children, the elderly, and the poor during their Covid lockdown frenzy, Democrats care about none of these real-world results of their policies. But they do care about polling, and Joe Biden’s is abysmal.

According to even heavily politicized polls, Biden is at least performing as badly as Donald Trump. Biden is between the third- and fifth-most ratings-underwater president ever in American history at this point in his first term.

Biden of course also has the advantage of a wildly favorable press and social media monopoly while Trump had the strong headwind of a wildly negative one. That factor obscured for a great many of American voters actions that easily demonstrated long before his election that Biden was unfit for the presidency.

Now that he’s president, however, and very publicly bungling essentially every major issue all the way up to U.S. national security, Biden’s weakness and incompetence have been impossible for the corrupt media to entirely cover up. Biden’s appalling withdrawal from Afghanistan may have been the first major blow to public confidence in his governing ability, and it’s been followed by blow after blow: the repercussions of ending U.S. energy independence, historic inflation caused by massive government spending, aggression by America’s foreign foes, a tacitly open border with human trafficking of historic proportions, not to mention fueling America’s legalized mass killings of unborn infants and forcing schools to inflict gender dysphoria on the children in their care.

So yes, the polls look bad. That’s why Democrat officials suddenly switched away from their Covid mania, lifting mask mandates in blue states, ending the daily falsified “body counts” on TVs and newspapers, and jumping immediately into European war hysteria. But that’s not been enough to turn those polls around. Historic indicators presently suggest a “red wave” in the upcoming midterms.

That brings us to The New York Times’s recent “limited hangout“: its highly suspicious, very late acknowledgment that, hey, that laptop containing evidence that Joe Biden is just as corrupt as his son Hunter Biden told Russian prostitutes — that laptop is real, and so is its data. Yes, the United States’s top foreign adversaries likely have blackmail material on the U.S. president, and likely paid him some very big bribes.

Oh, and yes Twitter and Facebook did use their global communications monopolies to rig the election for Joe Biden by hiding this information (and who knows what else).

Why would The New York Times do this — and Facebook and Twitter not ban this information release just like they did before? Well, one explanation is hierarchy reinforcement. As I wrote Monday, like forcing their “minions” to wear face masks, the ridiculously belated laptop confirmation also equals the ruling class “flexing their power to say things they won’t allow their political opponents to say.”

There’s another explanation, though. It’s that Joe Biden is no longer useful to the ruling class. After being used to win an election, he’s now making it impossible for them to credibly foist on Americans the idea that his party could win another one with him on their masthead. The donkey is showing through the lion skin, and so they need a new donkey.

So while it seems utterly legitimate to insist on accountability such as appointing a special counsel to investigate the Biden family’s apparent corruption, that also could relieve the Democrat Party of their greatest liability. They’d probably deeply appreciate that, in fact. Biden got the ruling class what they wanted, and they don’t need him any more. Getting rid of him now would in fact be highly convenient for maintaining their power.

There’s only one problem with that. Kamala isn’t at all going well for them either.

In which it dawns on the Biden White House that Vice President Harris is not up to the job. From @playbookdc on new @jmartNYT and @alexburnsNYT book: https://t.co/86qnWPGA8l pic.twitter.com/P31Byp72Cw
— Byron York (@ByronYork) March 22, 2022

Enjoy that bed you made for yourselves, Democrats. I hope it’s at least as uncomfortable as that bed you’ve made for all the Americans whose long-term outlook is more suffering, thanks to Democrats’ criminal prioritization of power for themselves above all else.

The chairman of the Fed is talking about our formerly 'transitory' inflation lasting *three more years.* From @djheakin https://t.co/8Z0UwItrss pic.twitter.com/4Qszu2qLgJ
— Byron York (@ByronYork) March 22, 2022

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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Christians, Let’s Spend More Time in Prayer Than on Twitter

REPORTED BY: ELLE REYNOLDS | MARCH 02, 2022

There’s a lot of panicked chatter about World War III lately. Twitter is awash in propaganda from both sides of the Russia-Ukraine border. Instagram is flooded with pro-Ukraine posts and profiles are painted with the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. NPR wants to make sure you know, amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict, how to self-care. Not to be outdone, Fox also has a primer on how to cope with the stress of news of war.

Many of those reactions aren’t bad. It’s good to celebrate stories of courage and to vocally support peace. It’s also good at times to walk away from the news cycle and be present in your own daily responsibilities.

But there is a real danger to thinking that you, as an American Christian who is not on the ground in Ukraine, can do the most good by getting sucked into the online informational meatgrinder. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with using a post or a hashtag to show support for suffering people, it would be a mistake to use such a contribution to pat ourselves on the back for “helping” — as many well-meaning Christians posted black squares on Instagram in 2020 that did little but alleviate their own sense of wanting to be able to say they did something. We all have a human desire to be in the know, and to an extent, involved, when crisis strikes. It’s why “if it bleeds, it leads” became a news industry saying and why people gossip. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve seen it in myself this week and felt convicted for it.

We are called, as the Apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 6:18, to be “praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints.” In Romans, he entreats us to “Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.” Specifically, we are commanded to pray for those in positions of worldly power.

That isn’t to say that, when presented with opportunities to tangibly serve, we should sit on our hands atop our prayer mats. The Bible has plenty to say about faith without works, or being hearers of the word and not doers. The clear-eyed actions of the church in Ukraine should remind us all to reach for our Bibles before our Twitter feeds. Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the head of Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church, announced his plans to bring Mass to citizens huddled in bomb shelters. He was reportedly scheduled to attend a meeting of bishops in Florence but scrapped the trip to stay behind in Kyiv.

“The church will come to the people,” he said. “Our priests will descend to the underground, they will descend to the bomb shelters, and there they will celebrate the Divine Liturgy.”

Other Ukrainian Christians are asking for, along with prayer, more Bibles.

A defining truth of our faith is our security in salvation that does not come from this world, and our peace that is not attainable through geopolitics. We should seek to steward this earthly life in peace, but its lack should not cause our faith to founder. If Ukrainian Christians can stalwartly bear witness of their heavenly hope from bomb shelters, surely American Christians can do our shared faith the credit of not participating in panic.

May our unchanging concentration on our Savior at a time that makes many anxious even be a testimony pointing to his sovereign grace. He has used times of crisis to His glory before.

The second book of Kings recounts the siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib, king of Assyria. In response to his taunts and saber-rattling, we’re told, the people of Jerusalem, under the leadership of Hezekiah, “were silent and answered him not a word, for the king’s command was, ‘Do not answer him.’” Instead, Hezekiah went to the house of the Lord. The humble prayer he prayed before the Lord’s deliverance remains a worthy template for our own prayers for the protection of the church, in Ukraine and elsewhere.

O Lord, the God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim, you are the God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; you have made heaven and earth. Incline your ear, O Lord, and hear; open your eyes, O Lord, and see; and hear the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to mock the living God. Truly, O Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste the nations and their lands and have cast their gods into the fire, for they were not gods, but the work of men’s hands, wood and stone. Therefore they were destroyed. So now, O Lord our God, save us, please, from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you, O Lord, are God alone.

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

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Senator Mike Lee Op-ed: Big Tech Insists They’re Protecting Americans From China While Importing Chinese-Style Social Controls

Commentary By Mike Lee | OCTOBER 22, 2021

If you need evidence that Big Tech firms are starting to worry about the growing movement to diffuse their immense market power, look no further than their newest scare tactic: using China as an excuse to avoid antitrust scrutiny.

Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and the nonprofit proxies they pay to defend them have put a lot of effort into trying to convince America that subjecting Big Tech to more stringent antitrust enforcement or regulation would have dire consequences. They’ve warned that innovation would suffer, but that rings hollow when so many of the new innovative companies are already being bought up (and then often shut down) by Big Tech.

They’ve suggested that antitrust action might result in the loss of the free services we’ve come to depend upon. But how do they call their services “free” when we pay for them by giving them all of our personal data, which they store and monetize, and when they rely on our content to make their platforms valuable in the first place?

Big Tech firms have told us we should be grateful for the superior quality of their services, which could suffer if they were broken up. But then again, one could argue that Google Search was better before it was filled with ads.

YouTube was better before its algorithms tried to corrupt our children and amplify the reach of terrorists. Facebook was better before it censored people of faith and conservatives, while protecting those who post revenge porn. Instagram was better before it drove our teenagers to anxiety and depression. Amazon was better before it silenced conservative authors and raised questions about its influence on a multibillion-dollar defense contract.

Having failed with each of those claims, Big Tech has turned to a new bogeyman: China. Antitrust enforcement actions against Big Tech—or legislation aimed at restoring and protecting competition in Big Tech markets—would risk crippling America’s ability to combat the growing threat from Communist China, or so the line goes. The cynicism would be offensive if the argument weren’t so laughable.

It’s not just lobbyists bringing these arguments to my office and others on Capitol Hill. Earlier this summer, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in an interview, “These gross proposals like breaking them up and so forth, it’s not going to be helpful because it’s going to set us back against China.”

Last month, the National Security Institute began a series “examining the national security implications of antitrust challenges at home and abroad.” The first panel featured Big Tech defenders suggesting the antitrust laws were written for late-19th-century monopolists and are too outdated to deal with Big Tech, and that Big Tech is a driver for research that is essential to national security. Antitrust scrutiny, they implied, might hinder the companies’ ability to compete with China, who won’t be imposing the same restraints on their own companies.

Like every other excuse Big Tech has made, this too rings hollow and we should flatly reject it. That doesn’t mean the antitrust laws should be enforced in the absence of actual anticompetitive harm. Nor does it mean that we should radically alter our antitrust laws to embrace a “big is bad” philosophy. But the idea that Big Tech should be treated with kid gloves makes no sense. The fact is, American ingenuity is strong enough to compete and win on the merits without coddling or amnesty from our antitrust laws.

Competition, and the innovation and disruption that facilitate it, are what made these companies American success stories. That same competition, innovation, and disruption are what will keep them at their best or make way for the next great American success story. You see, competition in Big Tech doesn’t threaten American, it threatens the monopolists—and that makes America stronger.

Insulating American companies from competition out of a fear of foreign competitors will do the opposite of what Big Tech claims to want: we will be stuck with stagnant monopolists too complacent either to benefit American consumers or to protect us from foreign threats.

In fact, it is Big Tech companies themselves that pose the greatest threat when it comes to China. They not only can’t protect us from foreign threats, but in some cases actively cooperate with them.

Google has been accused of working with the Chinese military, and has acknowledged developing a filtered version of its search engine to satisfy Chinese censors. Amazon has been working with a Chinese partner to expand its web-hosting services in the highly censored country.

The New York Times revealed earlier this year that Apple—which assembles nearly all of its products in China— has stored data on Chinese government servers, shared customer data with the Chinese government, removed apps from its App Store to appease the Chinese government, and banned apps from a critic of the Chinese Communist Party. The Times also alleged that Facebook was courting the Chinese government in 2016 by developing a censorship tool. Facebook has admitted to sharing data with Chinese state-owned companies, and last year it undertook to expand its Chinese ad business.

These are the benevolent corporate heroes who are going to save us from the Chinese threat? Give me a break.

Far from saving us, it seems like the habits of their new Chinese friends are rubbing off on our Big Tech big brothers. In a way, Silicon Valley is helping America keep up with China: now we too have censored speech on the internet, constant surveillance, and tightly controlled marketplaces.

Instead of embracing the very crony capitalism that has been so destructive to American prosperity in the past, American firms should spend more energy competing on the merits for Americans’ business, and less time cozying up to Chinese bureaucrats. The free market should pick winners and losers, not Communist apparatchiks.

This whole episode leads me to only one conclusion: insisting that antitrust enforcers pull their punches or risk impairing our ability to face the threats from China is nothing short of corporate extortion, a protection racket at a global scale. What we need is more competition, and less protectionism. The only way we will defeat the economic threat of communist China is by empowering American businesses to challenge and disrupt the would-be Chinese collaborators that make up Big Tech.

The hypocrisy is glaring: Big Tech wants to assist Communist China in exchange for access to its economy, while pointing to the Chinese threat as an excuse for anticompetitive and monopolistic conduct in the United States. Americans deserve better, and we should refuse to entertain this disingenuous and insulting excuse.

Mike Lee is a U.S. Senator from Utah and author of “Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America’s Founding Document.”

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Google and YouTube will remove monetization and prohibit ads from content that questions global warming

Reported by CARLOS GARCIA | October 07, 2021

Google and YouTube announced that they will take measures to strip online content of revenue producing opportunities if they express skepticism about global warming. In a statement from Google’s ad team on Thursday, the massive online company said they would deny ad revenue from content that contradicts “well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” Google says the new policy is in response to advertisers expressing frustration that their ads are appearing on content they disagree with.

“Advertisers simply don’t want their ads to appear next to this content,” the company said. “And publishers and creators don’t want ads promoting these claims to appear on their pages or videos.”

The new policy will be implemented through a mix of human review and automated tools. The company appeared to claim that not all skeptical content will be demonetized, but that they will carefully distinguish “between content that states a false claim as fact, versus content that reports on or discusses that claim.”

Big tech companies have come under fire for what some say is selective enforcement of their censorship policies to police those on the right while allowing left-leaning speech free rein.

“There is a huge risk, I mean, for one they’re not particularly accountable except through your ability to sign off of the platform or sign on,” said Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John’s University, to CNBC.
“There’s no kind of vote, there’s no type of representative, there’s no way to weigh in on what the rules should be or shouldn’t be. There are not even a lot even a transparency around the rules or how they’re enforced, this is something that has just started developing in the last five years at all these companies,” she continued.

“And so it’s really dangerous when you think about the control that private companies have,” Klonick concluded, “but at the same time it’s really dangerous to think about what would happen if private companies weren’t doing this type of work, and everything that would be going on in these platforms without them.”

Axios called the new policy “one of the most aggressive measures any major tech platform has taken to combat climate change misinformation.”

Here’s more about censorship by big tech companies:

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Facebook Loses Teen Sex Trafficking Case, Legal Defeat Puts Social Media Platforms in Crosshairs

Reported by Jack Davis | June 26, 2021

The Texas Supreme Court has ruled against Facebook as the social media giant tries to use a controversial federal law to dodge liability for its platform being used by human traffickers to recruit victims. The ruling allows three survivors of human trafficking who want to sue Facebook to move forward with their cases, according to Forbes. Facebook had argued it was not responsible for what its users say under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act.

Section 230 has become a controversial piece of law, with critics saying it gives social media companies too much power. Forbes reported that in 2018, Congress carved out exceptions to Section 230 so that lawsuits could be brought against companies that violate human trafficking laws. In his opinion, Justice Jimmy Blacklock noted those limits.

“We do not understand section 230 to ‘create a lawless no-man’s-land on the Internet’ in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking,” he wrote.
“Holding internet platforms accountable for the words or actions of their users is one thing. … Holding internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing. This is particularly the case for human trafficking.”
“Section 230, as amended, does not withdraw from the states the authority to protect their citizens from internet companies whose own actions — as opposed to those of their users — amount to knowing or intentional participation in human trafficking,” the ruling said.

The case involved three women who, according to the ruling, “allege they were victims of sex trafficking who became entangled with their abusers through Facebook.” One was 15 years old when she was befriended by a Facebook user who told her he would help her pursue a modeling career.

“Shortly after meeting him, Plaintiff was photographed and her pictures posted to the website Backpage (which has since been shut down due to its role in human trafficking), advertising her for prostitution. As a result, Plaintiff was ‘raped, beaten, and forced into further sex trafficking,’” the ruling said.

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THIS REPORT AT https://www.westernjournal.com/facebook-loses-teen-sex-trafficking-case-legal-defeat-puts-social-media-platforms-crosshairs/

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Jason Whitlock Op-ed: Faith conquers fear, powers the American dream, and fuels my Blaze Media project

Commentary by JASON WHITLOCK | June 08, 2021

In the absence of religious faith, fear reigns and freedom recedes.

Discerning the origin of the current, fear-based American social climate is not difficult. Don’t blame scientists in China for releasing the angst virus assaulting traditional American liberties. Blame the tech engineers operating in Silicon Valley laboratories. They invented the social media apps that amplify fear and empower “cancel culture,” the nuclear weapons dislodging America from its Judeo-Christian values.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey are Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Douglas S. MacArthur ending America’s 60-year culture war with an unparalleled bombing campaign. What started with President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiative is closing with repression of speech, corporate media propaganda, and an evisceration of America’s Judeo-Christian ethos.

Facebook and Twitter finished the mission of turning America secular, godless, and shamelessly immoral. The apps allegedly intended to bring us together have torn us apart. We should not be surprised. The apps urge self-worship, celebrity worship, and consumerism, which lead to hedonism, idolatry, and materialism. A secular society always produces chaos and division.

Photo courtesy Jason Whitlock

Branded as racists, Uncle Toms, coons, homophobes, transphobes, hypocrites, and misogynists, American Christians fear publicly identifying themselves by their faith. They’ve placed their political identity and racial identity above their religious identity. They’re conservatives. Or Republicans. Or nationalists, both white and black. Or libertarians. Or liberals. Or social justice activists. Or, worse, Trump supporters and Trump resisters.

They avoid saying the name that made John Brown and Frederick Douglass abolitionists, compelled Thomas Jefferson to write that “all men are created equal,” comforted Union soldiers during the Civil War, and inspired Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream. They avoid directly referring to the name that made America great in the first place, the name that forced us to overcome our superficial differences and transform those differences into our greatest strength.

Jesus.

He’s been canceled, crucified by a toxic secular culture that bullies His believers with threats to expose their sins on the Satan-con Valley social media platforms and/or the Satan-con Valley-catering corporate media outlets.

Photo courtesy Jason Whitlock. Jason Whitlock (left) and his brother James (right) sit together on Easter Sunday in 1974.

Fear is the enemy of truth, freedom, and the American dream.

I signed a contract to partner with Blaze Media on a digital media project dedicated to pushing back against the corporate-supported, systematic effort to undermine America through racial division and fear. I joined Blaze Media because I wanted to partner with people who wouldn’t look at me funny when I referred to Jesus as part of my journalistic worldview and platform. I joined Blaze Media because Glenn Beck smiled when I said Jesus is the only solution for what ails America, because Steve Deace wears his faith publicly, and so do Phil Robertson, Allie Beth Stuckey, and others.

I am not a sports journalist-turned-preacher. I’m not a finger-wagging hypocrite looking down on the people who don’t share my beliefs. I’m a sinner. I’m the same guy who wrote hilarious Pussy Galore columns for Fox Sports, the same guy who used to waste his time and money drinking and carousing inside the Spearmint Rhino in Las Vegas, Tootsie’s in Miami, Diamond Joe’s in Kansas City, and Magic City in Atlanta.

I’m someone who knows that in order for me to make better decisions — in all aspects of my life — I need Jesus. I’m someone who recognizes that any success I’ve achieved in a 30-year career is a byproduct of the values my grandmother, a tiny church in Indianapolis, my parents, and my siblings instilled in me as a young boy. My testimony is amazing. It’s further evidence of the power of faith and the availability of the American dream.

My brand and approach to journalism and broadcasting are fearless. My courage is rooted in faith.

Photo courtesy Jason Whitlock

Fear is destroying America. It locked us in our homes, forced us to cover our faces, and forbade us to worship together for more than a year. It stole freedoms we took for granted. It allowed Colin Kaepernick to polarize our national anthem. It turned rare incidents of deadly police misconduct into a fictional genocidal pandemic. It spawned race hoaxes and a generation of race-baiting grifters. It diminished sports’ ability to unify.

That’s why we are launching the Fearless platform, which will start with my show, “Fearless with Jason Whitlock,” and a second podcast showcasing my friendship with my right-hand man, “Uncle Jimmy” (Dodds), and will eventually include a Fearless writing vertical.

We’re going to fight back. We’re going to be the abolitionists of fear. From my new hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, we’re joining hands with Beck, Deace, Robertson, Mark Levin, Steven Crowder, Dave Rubin, Allie Beth Stuckey, and the rest of Blaze Media to stand as an example of what Americans can accomplish when we put our differences aside and work together.

On the surface, Fearless will look a little different from the rest of the Blaze Media family. But our love of country will be just as strong, our appreciation for this nation’s founding documents just as sincere, and our search for liberating truths just as intense.

The 400-year African American journey is this nation’s most compelling and powerful narrative. It’s proof the American dream is real and attainable. That’s why our adversaries abroad and within are perverting, manipulating, and weaponizing the African American narrative. Black Americans’ fight for freedom made the United States live up to the ideals espoused in the Declaration of Independence — the equality of man and unalienable rights bestowed by our Creator.

Our relentless pursuit of freedom was the iron that sharpened American iron.

The Chinese Communist Party knows this. The revolutionaries in Satan-con Valley know this. The editors at the New York Times know this. The trained, self-described Marxists who founded Black Lives Matter know this.

In order to destroy America, you must cripple belief in the rags-to-riches American dream and the conviction that America is a force for good. Reshaping the African American narrative into a journey that damns this nation — rather than one that illuminates our unprecedented resolve to do better — hastens our decline.

The black journey fueled American exceptionalism. The elite architects of chaos cleverly and covertly attack this obvious truth.

“Black Twitter” is not an organic construct. It’s a social media algorithm designed to paint any truth-speaking public figure as a racist or a race traitor. The New York Times’ 1619 Project isn’t journalism. It’s the companion of academia’s virus, critical race theory, propaganda designed to foster racial animus and erode black patriotism. Black Lives Matter isn’t concerned with the welfare of black men. It’s a fundraising arm of the Democratic Party and a lobbyist for the LGBTQ agenda.

The racial conflict BLM, Antifa, and social media influencers promote smokescreens a far more insidious plot — the plot to cancel Jesus and impose a cultural Marxism on the United States. Global elites prefer China’s system of authoritarian governance and worker exploitation. Backers of the Great Reset and Build Back Better prefer that America function the way China does. Jesus and communism cannot coexist. Karl Marx, the father of Marxism and the proponent of communism, explained that in his political theory.

The racial smokescreen is working. We’re losing the faux race war and surrendering the freedoms that made America the envy of the world.

We’re losing because we’ve sidelined our best soldier — Jesus. The original combatants of the Civil War drew on Jesus as their primary power source. Have you ever studied the lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic?

Here’s my favorite passage:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was borne across the sea
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me
As he died to make men holy let us die to make men free
His truth is marching on
Glory, glory hallelujah

Julia Ward Howe, a white abolitionist, wrote those words in 1861. The words spurred men to sacrifice their lives for the freedom of others. Mine eyes have seen the glory of what Americans can accomplish when we come together as one nation under God, when we conquer our fears.

Your sin does not nullify your Christianity. It justifies it. Let go of that fear. Your sins, no matter what they are, do not prohibit you from speaking truth, standing on biblical principles, and being heard.

The enemies of truth, the elites rewriting history and redefining American freedom, are not silent or scared. Their immorality (sin) emboldens them. Our sin silences us. Not any more. Not if I can help it.

The mission statement of the Fearless Project is simple: We’re a digital media platform dedicated to promoting a culture of fearlessness, free speech, truth-seeking, and American patriotism. We will accomplish our mission by critiquing, lampooning, and probing the events shaping conversations around sports, race, and popular culture.

You will not have to believe what I believe to enjoy and benefit from “Fearless.” That’s the gift of a Judeo-Christian culture. It works to ensure that non-believers receive the same opportunity to pursue their dreams as everyone else.

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The Trump Purge Makes Living In America More Like Living In China

After the terrifying ransack of the U.S. capitol Wednesday during a Donald Trump “stop the steal” rally, big tech companies are joining leftist elites in the media and government in their effort to squash the Trump movement once and for all. Seizing on the backlash from the riot, they have seamlessly banned President Trump from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.

What happened at the capitol was an embarrassment for our country. Now, the hypocritical outcries from Democrats, who proudly condoned left-wing Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters as they terrorized American cities all summer, are ushering in a great reckoning.

The Jan. 6 demonstrators, the vast majority of whom were peaceful, were there to protest legitimate claims of election irregularities and voter fraud. But Google-owned YouTube doesn’t want you to know that. They announced Thursday that they will ban all videos about voter fraud in the 2020 election.

The one free speech haven, Parler, Apple is keying up to ban from its app store and bar from iOS devices, claiming content on the website contributed to the capitol unrest. Google has already jumped the gun, banning Parler yesterday.

Every corner of the Trump movement is being publicly purged from the internet. Thursday, Shopify stripped all online stores for President Trump, including the Trump Organization and Trump’s affiliated campaign account.

Anyone who has supported the president is in for it, as well. Rick Klein, the political director at ABC News, in a now-deleted tweet said that getting rid of Trump is “the easy part.” The more difficult task will be “cleansing the movement he commands.” Democrats have already created a “Trump Accountability Project,” an enemies list to ban, cancel, or fire anyone who staffed, donated to, endorsed, or supported President Trump and his administration.

Trump subverted the elites who run our country. He took on big pharma and China. He negotiated, renegotiated, and destroyed trade deals in his mission to put America and American workers first. He went to war with critical race theory institutionalized in our schools and in government.

He stood for things that those who run our biggest corporations and hold our highest government positions detest. For virtually his entire presidency, they tried everything to delegitimize his administration, beginning with the now-debunked Russiagate. Trump showed their corruption, and now he will pay.

The man, the administration, and his supporters will likely go down in history books as delusional and dangerous. Why? Because the left has a monopoly on power, so they can control what people see and therefore think.

As the left’s arbiters of “truth,” big tech has been banning users they don’t agree with and suppressing stories like The New York Post’s blockbuster investigation into Hunter Biden‘s laptop and sketchy deals with foreign governments and companies with ties to the Communist Chinese government. With the help of their partisan “independent fact checkers,” big tech and the media made sure average Americans never knew about this before they went to the polls.

Following the riot among Trump supporters in the capitol, Facebook removed President Trump’s video calling for peace and rule of law, claiming it instigated violence. Then Facebook de-platformed him. Trump’s speech didn’t fit the narrative that he was a pro-violence, lawlessness insurrectionist.

This disturbing reality we live in, where one political party now has the power to control the narrative in all aspects of our lives — school, work, social media, and government — might make us feel eerie echoes of living under Chinese Communist Party influence instead of in the United States of America.

Perhaps what’s most troubling, and something that we might not have even considered in the chaos of the last few days, is the long-term impact this will have on American children. Generation Z or Zoomers, aged 13 to 21, may be one of the first generations that is more influenced by what they see and read on social media and the internet than what they hear at the dinner table from mom and dad.

A Business Insider’s poll found that 59 percent of Zoomers listed social media as their top news source. While technology used to serve as a way to make information accessible, a way to have the world at your fingertips with just a quick search, it has become something much different. It is teaching the youngest and most impressionable among us that suppression is normal and personal censorship is an important survival mechanism.

Children are being taught to watch what they say and think, lest they be labeled a racist, white supremacist, homophobe, or xenophobe. Indeed, making a pro-Trump TikTok video can get your college admission rescinded and subject you to intense personal harassment. A three-second insensitive or politically incorrect Snapchat video from 2016 can get you featured in a New York Times article and your college admission rescinded, and subject you to bitter bullying.

For young people today, it’s becoming normal to see political leaders in our country deemed “dangerous” to be ousted from public platforms and ostracized from society. They watch their parents self-censor at work, fearful of backlash from employees or coworkers that could get them fired.

Americans used to support the right of people to hold and express opinions others disagree with. Yet the newest generation believes feelings are more valuable than freedom. Study after study finds that younger people are more supportive of limiting speech than are older generations.

A recent survey found that an overwhelming majority of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison think the government should be able to punish “hate speech.” Of course, “hate speech” is simply the left’s ambiguous term for anything veering from the leftist orthodoxy on issues such as abortion, sex, race, and immigration.

Silicon Valley oligarchs have an agenda. They aren’t platforms, they are publishers, which should nullify the privileges they enjoy under Section 230. Will the Democrats who are now running our government do anything to stop big tech tyranny? Of course not.

This problem is not going away. America’s ethos of free speech and expression is going extinct at the hands of big tech and the leftists controlling media and government.

The U.S. Capitol riots are over, thanks to law enforcement. However, the censorship that followed has created a dangerous precedent.

For young people, their “normal” is beginning to feel increasingly like it’s heading towards life in China. It’s less free and tolerant than the America their parents grew up in. Imagine how much worse things will be when today’s youths are running the country.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Evita Duffy is an intern at The Federalist and a junior at the University of Chicago, where she studies American History. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, & her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1

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Twitter Is The Enemy Of The American People

JANUARY 9, 2021 By David Marcus

On Oct. 18, 2020, Twitter banned the account of Dr. Scott Atlas for defending President Donald Trump’s position on mask mandates. In his tweet, he cited scientific studies, and the tweet contained absolutely no false information.

Also in October, Twitter banned the account of The New York Post for accurately reporting on a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Today we know these were just the first salvos in this evil company’s assault on American liberty.

For all its talk about safety, community, and the health of discourse, we see today that Twitter acts in favor of one interest and one interest alone: its own, even when it means destabilizing the American people. On Friday, the company permanently banned Trump from its platform and began a purge of conservative voices. They claim this is needed to protect America from a coup. That is a farcical lie. They did it because their political enemies such as Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley are now out of power, and they mean to keep it way.

As a private company, Twitter is free to do as it pleases. And I am free to call them what they are: a shill for communist China that seeks the destruction of America. Do you doubt that? Then explain why Iran can call for Jews to be killed on Twitter’s platform and China can spread propaganda about how rounding up Uyghur men and forced sterilization of Uyghur women is actually good, but Donald Trump can’t tweet. It is evil. And anyone defending Jack Dorsey’s death machine is complicit.

We live in two Americas right now. In Republican-led Florida and Texas, economies are open, people go to restaurants and movies, small businesses can prosper. In Democrat-led New York and California, lockdowns are crushing the people. They are not allowed to gather in person, only on big tech platforms. Guess which outcome Twitter prefers?

Now compare the effects of COVID on these two Americas. There is no rational way to argue that the lockdowns led to better results.

I want to put this as clearly as possible. Twitter attempted and largely succeeded in silencing dissent to policies that were against its own interests. They don’t care about the suicides, overdoses, missed cancer screenings, or poverty caused by these actions, they only care about money and power. Blood is dripping from Jack Dorsey’s hands across the globe and here at home as he counts his billions.

Feckless Democrats and faux conservatives applaud or look the other way at Twitter’s actions because it serves their purposes; the poor, blind fools have no idea that they will be next. This has nothing to do with the Constitution, or laws, this has to do with Dorsey being a liar who orchestrates mass disinformation campaigns on the American people. Twitter’s safety guidelines have nothing to do with safety, they have to do with profit.

I am not writing here about Section 230, or legislative approaches to rein in Big Tech. That can come later. I am writing to make it clear that Twitter has played a central role in destroying Americans’ lives through lockdowns, lying to them about Hunter Biden to win an election, and enabling the world’s most brutal regime to practice genocide in peace.

Twitter doesn’t want to serve you; it wants to rule you. And it is well on its way.

Now Big Tech is seeking to deplatform Twitter’s competitor, Parler. Politicians and journalists are cheering for censorship and suggesting that cable operators should ban conservative news outlets. You see, these people know what is good for you and what isn’t. They just want to protect you from dangerous information. To them, you are a child and they are your parents, the only difference being that you pay them an allowance.

Now we Americans have no choice. Now we must convene our secret meetings in person, far from the peering eyes of Big Tech and its Chinese overlords, for whom it will do anything. Consider the fact that in many places in America meetings are literally illegal right now. Everything changed on Friday. The cards all stare up at us from the table now. Twitter’s goal is to create for our children an America our parents would not recognize.

Twitter is the enemy of freedom, the enemy of liberty, and the enemy of the American people. It must be treated as such.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

David Marcus is the Federalist’s New York Correspondent. Follow him on Twitter, @BlueBoxDave.

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Joshua Lawson of the Federalist Op-ed: Giving 2021 A Fighting Chance Requires We All Choose To Do What Is Hard

Even before the horrible year that was 2020, New Year’s Eve celebrations have long been filled with the near-certain expectation that things will definitely get better. Generally speaking, it’s a fine sentiment. Optimism is good; hope is good; and striving to improve the future from where we are today led us from the cave to the fields, across vast oceans, and into the limitless of outer space.

But nothing magical happens when the calendar year flips over. There’s no unexplained scientific phenomenon that shifts the incalculable number of atoms in our known universe into undaunted forces for good simply because we’ve reached the conclusion of this year’s cycle through the Gregorian calendar. Instead, history tells us things can always get worse.

After the stock market crashed in 1929, the Great Depression didn’t reach its darkest days until 1933. The 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria was followed by the invasion of Poland in 1939, then the steamrolling of France and near-defeat of Britain in 1940.

Yet while there’s no iron-clad guarantee that 2021 will be great, every one of us can contribute to the effort to make a redemptive year a reality.

No government action will make 2021 better than what we just went through in 2020. As with most positive change, any meaningful, lasting shifts in the trajectory of our towns and our nation will stem from individuals choosing to do good.

World events of a grand nature will remain outside our ability to master. Pandemics, wildfires, and — unless you live in one of a handful of swing states — presidential elections involving more than 158 million votes are things almost entirely beyond our control. Yet, even in the worst of times, we can control how we interact with our fellow Americans, and a shift in the right direction in this regard is one of the simplest — albeit difficult — steps we can take.

It’s within the grasp of each of us, as individuals, to decide if what we both consume and contribute is life-affirming or malevolent, restorative or toxic. In our workplaces, online using social media, with our families, and interacting with total strangers, we are responsible for how we live amongst one another.

In our current rancorous political environment, we’ll have a chance at a better year if we realize most genuine conversations or debates aren’t best served in a tit-for-tat on Facebook or Twitter but in person over coffee, lunch, or a drink after work. This doesn’t mean surrendering our principles or allowing ourselves to be walked over. It does, however, require we prudently recognize whose minds are open to change, and those who refuse to be unconvinced of what they believe; which arguments may bear fruitful discussion, and those that will only lead to more frustration and anger this country can do without.

Regardless of one’s faith, there is wisdom in the instructions given in the Bible’s 2 Timothy:

Again I say, don’t get involved in foolish, ignorant arguments that only start fights. A servant of the Lord must not quarrel but must be kind to everyone, be able to teach, and be patient with difficult people. (2 Timothy 2:23)

As the author of the epistle to Timothy later notes, being honest doesn’t mean being needlessly hurtful or tactless, and he reminds us to “Gently instruct those who oppose the truth.” There’s an Aristotelian golden mean between failing to state a necessary truth and being an overly blunt jerk about it.

Similar valuable cautions are given in Titus 3:2 not to slander, to “avoid quarreling,” and to “show true humility to everyone.” Later in the chapter, we’re also reminded it may be best to walk away from those who continue to engage in foolish controversies:

If people are causing divisions among you, give a first and second warning. After that, have nothing more to do with them. (Titus 3:10)

Admittedly, it’s hard to do, especially in a climate that often mistakenly views the last person who responded in a Facebook fight as “the winner” or politeness as a sign of “weakness.” Even so, it’s one of the few ways to lower the temperature to the point where authentic, amiable exchanges and healthy debates are possible. We’ll be a better nation in 2021 if Americans take time to ask and reflect, “Will this truly make things better?” before acting.

Furthermore, giving 2021 a fighting chance will involve constantly “checking one’s priors” at the door. Or, as Jordan Peterson has phrased it, we’d do well to “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something that you don’t.”

As more Americans limit their media consumption to voices and opinions they already agree with, ideological and philosophical blind spots pose an increasingly higher risk. Yet rarely are things as simple as either the “left” or “right” (antiquated terms to begin with) being absolutely correct or absolutely wrong.

Taking in the views of only a small territory of the political spectrum is one of the contributing factors that led us to a place, never more evident than in 2020, where one half of the country can’t even stand being in line next to the other half — six feet apart, no less. We don’t have to agree, but we have to be able to at least relate to where those we disagree with are coming from. This begins with the humility to acknowledge we may be wrong about something, or, at least, not as correct as we think we are.

“Genuine conversation is exploration, articulation, and strategizing,” Peterson writes, “When you’re involved in a genuine conversation, you’re listening.” This may also require mingling outside a safe, “bubbled,” friend group, especially if that group is comprised of similarly like-minded folks.

It means not assuming to know the totality of someone’s beliefs and values based on their stance on a single issue. It means being OK with someone thinking, even acting, in a way we personally disagree with (as long as it doesn’t directly infringe on anyone’s rights to life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness). A tolerance of true intellectual diversity will be a key factor in helping 2021 rebound after the past year.

In what could be the most important New Year’s resolution we make, by exercising humility, patience, and grace, we can each take responsibility in helping make 2021 the year we all need it to be, one individual choice at a time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Joshua Lawson is managing editor of The Federalist. He is a graduate of Queen’s University as well as Hillsdale College where he received a master’s degree in American politics and political philosophy. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaMLawson.

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What Big Tech Didn’t Want You To See On The Federalist In 2020

Reported by Joy Pullmann | DECEMBER 29, 2020

Leftist media has skewed U.S. politics for decades, but Big Tech’s amplified influence over global discourse and governments is new. While Congress passed no legislation related to this political and national security emergency, we the people were held captive in lockdowns during a major election while crucial public information was filtered, hidden, and surveilled by unaccountable companies with no allegiance to the United States and obvious disdain for hundreds of millions of its inhabitants.

This is a huge social problem. Regaining our freedom to speak and to share and compare information may be the first task towards redressing our grievances against those who claim to govern us. For how can consent of the governed be truly granted when the people’s ability to inform their consent is manipulated? It cannot.

To regain our self-governance, then, we all need to develop new habits of information-gathering and -sharing. As a tiny part of and precursor to more of that effort, here is an accounting of Federalist work that Google, Facebook, and Twitter tried to keep people from seeing in 2020.

You will notice it fits the pattern of big tech censorship that big tech claims isn’t censorship: it all goes one way politically. All of it also comprises election-meddling by effectively promoting misinformation and disinformation on key voting issues.

Just Plain Hiding the News They Can’t Use

In June, a foreign think tank, NBC, and Google colluded in an attempt to demonetize The Federalist in retaliation for our coverage of Black Lives Matter rioting. The tech giant demanded we end our commenting section, and continues to refuse to allow it back. Google-owned YouTube also continues to shadowban Federalist content and choke our engagement.

In July, Google claimed it had “mistakenly” made it impossible for people to find a slew of conservative news sites, including CNSNews.com, The Washington Free Beacon, Breitbart, Twitchy, RedState, PJ Media, The Blaze, Townhall, LifeNews, PragerU, and The Daily Wire.

After the election, Instagram slapped a warning label on a post in which President Trump honored Pearl Harbor Day. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, put an automatic “fact check” on Trump’s post that claimed Joe Biden won the election, although Trump’s post included nothing about the election results. Instagram later removed the “warning.”

In October, “Twitter suspended U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Mark Morgan for a post celebrating the success of the U.S. southern border wall keeping violent criminals from reaching American communities,” reported The Federalist’s Tristan Justice.

The online publisher banned Morgan, a public official, from communicating the elected president’s publicly stated priorities, telling him in an automated message the post violated the publisher’s “hateful conduct” policies. Morgan had written: “@CBP & @USACEHQ continue to build new wall every day. Every mile helps us stop gang members, murderers, sexual predators, and drugs from entering our country. It’s a fact, walls work.” If this is hate speech, all conservatives are criminals.

Evidence of Biden Family Corruption

Infamously, Twitter and Facebook tampered with the 2020 election in October by immediately and actively suppressing public knowledge of a federal corruption investigation into Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, related to information found on a Delaware laptop.

Yesterday, the computer store owner who turned the laptop over to federal investigators sued Twitter for defamation. Twitter’s ban was predicated on alleging the laptop containing “hacked” material, even though, as The Federalist documented, Twitter regularly allows the circulation of hacked and hoax information. The laptop owner says he did not hack it, he owns it, and that Twitter claiming otherwise has significantly damaged his reputation and employment.

In October, Twitter openly admitted it was pre-emptively choking the story on their platform even before deploying their Chinese- and Democrat-funded “fact-checking” organizations to explain away what are obviously politically motivated, selectively enforced, anti-truth information operations designed to help Democrats control the United States.

Twitter also pre-emptively blocked The New York Post’s subsequent reporting on its Hunter Biden laptop scoop, despite those containing additional corroborating details, and although witnesses and additional evidence also surfaced to independently corroborate the story. Twitter banned members of Congress and the president’s campaign from posting information about the story. It kept the Post locked out of its Twitter account for weeks following the breaking story in the run-up to the election.

Lest we all become too dulled to this successful attempt to control the nation without the people’s consent because we’re all used to leftists refusing fair play and equal treatment, we all need to remember that enough Biden voters to swing the election decisively to Trump said they would have changed their votes if they knew about this corruption story. Big tech bias is not a trivial issue. It is the difference between a fair election and a corrupted one, between self-rule and a corrupted oligarchy.

Evidence of Election Tampering and Errors

From May 2018 to October 2020, Twitter and Facebook restricted posts from President Trump at least 65 times, according to a media study. They did this precisely zero times to Joe Biden (or Hillary Clinton), and it’s not because he’s the most accurate politician alive.

In June, the anti-Trump bias ridiculously caused Twitter to put a warning label on an obvious parody video about a “racist baby.” More seriously, at the same time Twitter repeatedly throttled as “false” President Trump’s claims that mail-in ballots are an insecure voting method. That is absolutely true and it made the 2020 election ripe for fraud, abuse, and contested results.

On election night, Twitter flagged a post from President Trump that said: “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” Twitter claimed this was “disputed and might be misleading” and banned users from sharing the tweet. Later it was shown that Pennsylvania indeed counted post-election ballots against its own law forbidding that.

On Nov. 4, Twitter slapped a “warning label” about “disputed information” in a tweet from Federalist Cofounder Sean Davis, whose “offending” tweet accurately summarized the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ruling that ballots brought in after election day would be counted.

On Nov. 9, Twitter put a warning label on a quote from and link to an affidavit of sworn testimony alleging election fraud tweeted by Federalist Senior Contributor Ben Weingarten. “This claim about election fraud is disputed,” Twitter claimed, preventing people from retweeting it without adding their own comments. It later removed the choke without explanation.

In December, Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway explored the disqualifying errors in a “fact-check” done by one of Facebook’s partners of allegations of election fraud in Georgia. Facebook used the same fact-check she fisked to pre-emptively ban her article from its platform.

COVID-19

Big communications companies rabidly policed discussions about COVID-19 in 2020. Big tech seemed especially pouncy about information related to face masks. This included Amazon’s Nov. 24 ban of a book by former New York Times reporter Alex Berenstein’s book discussing the scientific evidence that mask mandates are ineffective.

It extended to repeated bans and chokes on Federalist content about masks, many by a supposed Facebook “fact check” that didn’t fact check any Federalist articles. It was just a generic fact check applied against anyone questioning the efficacy of cloth masks and generic mask mandates, even when such individuals cited scientific evidence from reputable sources.

Former White House Coronavirus Task Force advisor Dr. Scott Atlas was banned from publishing references to scientific studies on masks. CNN anchor Jake Tapper and CNN commentator Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a professor of neurosurgery, cheered Twitter on. Google-owned YouTube infamously pulled down a June interview of Atlas.

Weirdly, in April Facebook had blocked DIY cloth mask-making sites while banning the sale of medical-grade masks and sanitizer. Yet just a few months later Facebook’s blocking activities supported the use of makeshift masks made out of any material and blocked information, including from The Federalist, pointing out that all masks are not equally effective at virus and other particle filtering. Perhaps pointing out that research has found that gaiter-style or scarf masks actually may increase virus transmission may get this article banned too.

Social media bans on mask information from The Federalist included the well-read Oct. 29 article that quoted and linked to high-quality studies from reputable sources, “These 12 Graphs Show Mask Mandates Do Nothing To Stop COVID,” which was also throttled on LinkedIn.

YOU ALL MIGHT WANT TO TRY TWO NEWER SOCIAL MEDIA SITES. https://mewe.com/ and https://parler.com/

Spygate

In October, Twitter began publicly testing stronger information controls, which resulted in it warning users who tried to tweet a Federalist article breaking new information about the Spygate scandal. Spygate, of course, is the Obama administration’s documented and so far unpunished use of federal surveillance and policing powers to baselessly persecute, prosecute, and hamstring their political opponents.

The article Twitter impeded reported handwritten notes from Obama CIA Director John Brennan that showed President Obama was made aware months before the 2016 election that the Russian government may have been influencing Hillary Clinton’s false collusion smear against Donald Trump. Sean Davis reported more in that piece for The Federalist:

There is no evidence the FBI ever took any action to ensure that Russian knowledge of Clinton’s plans did not lead to infiltration of that campaign’s operation by Russian intelligence agents. The CIA referral, specifically its reference to a ‘CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell,’ suggests that the Obama administration’s anti-Trump investigation may not have been limited to the FBI, but may have included the use of CIA assets and surveillance capabilities, raising troubling questions about whether the nation’s top spy service was weaponized against a U.S. political campaign.

Seemingly Random Acts of Censorship

In September, Facebook employed abortionists to “fact-check” two videos from Live Action explaining why abortion is never medically necessary. Numerous obstetrics professionals and a national OB-GYN organization supported Live Action’s statement as accurate, but that didn’t matter to Facebook, which choked Live Action’s page.

In November, Instagram and Facebook’s sweeps caught up an innocent and completely apolitical local charity that used Facebook to coordinate donors and volunteers. Oathkeepers Causeplay may sound like it’s a conservative group, but it’s not (and even if it were, there’s nothing wrong with being conservative). It’s a group of people who dress up like TV and movie superheroes and other characters to cheer up disabled and sick children.

The act of random censorship hurt sick kids by depriving the charity of funds and volunteers. It also scared people away from associating with the charity — which, again, not only did nothing “wrong” but actively does good — out of fears they’d also lose their Facebook-mediated access to friendships and social activity. Good job, Facebook.

Also in October — see a pattern here? — Facebook users who searched for the Christian group Let Us Worship were given a warning message falsely claiming the group was affiliated with QAnon. “This is a peaceful movement from across the political spectrum and they are suppressing it by linking us to Q,” the group’s founder, Sean Feucht, told The Federalist. Facebook claimed the mislabeling was a glitch. Yet nobody shut down their traffic over their inaccurate statements despite the harm they caused others.

Again in October, Facebook demonetized the satire website Babylon Bee for making a Monty Python joke in a headline. Facebook claimed the Bee’s silly headline “Senator Hirono Demands ACB Be Weighed Against A Duck To See If She Is A Witch” “incited violence,” and refused to alter its decision after a review. In a self-parody that is impossible to top, Snopes and Twitter also frequently “fact-check” and throttle the clean satire site. I guess humor is now too conservative to allow.

It wasn’t just 2020, either. This has been going on for years. In fact, you might say Twitter, Google, Facebook, and others have been perfecting their ability to shut down non-leftist discourse and project public opinion cascades. In retrospect, earlier tech bans on speech look like dress rehearsals for the 2020 election bleep show.

In 2018, for example, The Federalist published a theologian’s story about how Facebook banned him from expressing Christian views about teaching young children about LGBT sex and gender identities. Earlier that year, Project Veritas released undercover video of a former Twitter employee verifying the company’s practice of “shadowbanning,” called that at the time because the practice was covert. In 2019, Google banned a conservative think tank from buying online advertising because a scholar affiliated with the think tank had critiqued multiculturalism.

Punishing the Conservative Base While Monetizing Them

Once a website’s content has begun to be flagged as “false” even if it is not, search engines and social media increasingly throttle traffic to the entire site, not just the flagged content. This further serves leftist information control by making publications reluctant to challenge what the unelected tech arbiters of reality have decided we must see and say. This means Google, Facebook, and Twitter ultimately don’t want you to see anything from The Federalist. They also hope you don’t notice.

“[S]tories from right-wing media outlets with false and misleading claims about discarded ballots, miscounted votes and skewed tallies were among the most popular news stories on” Facebook directly after the election, reported The New York Times. Facebook responded with deeper cuts into the reach of information from right-leaning outlets and greater amplification for articles from leftist media:

employees proposed an emergency change to the site’s news feed algorithm, which helps determine what more than two billion people see every day. It involved emphasizing the importance of what Facebook calls ‘news ecosystem quality’ scores, or N.E.Q., a secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism.

…The change was part of the ‘break glass’ plans Facebook had spent months developing for the aftermath of a contested election.

Unnamed sources told the New York Times Facebook is working on ways to control information while still keeping users, and that the tools it has developed for this mostly affect right-leaning content. The company may also make permanent some information control mechanisms developed specifically for the 2020 election. But they have to be careful about this, the NYT reported, because when people notice the information control they stop using Facebook so much.

Right-leaning information is consistently among the most popular content on Facebook and YouTube. This means people who consume right-leaning information provide Facebook and Twitter millions of dollars because their time spent on site lures advertising. This allows Facebook to put competing information outlets out of business by siphoning away all advertising revenue while not paying for the content creation that draws the eyeballs, reinforcing their information monopolies.

Nice little racket. Tailor-made for people who don’t believe Americans ought to be allowed to make their own decisions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her newest ebook is “The Family Read-Aloud Advent Calendar,” and her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” A Hillsdale College honors graduate, @JoyPullmann is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

Photo Timothy Krause / Flickr

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Current Congress Least Productive Since 1970s, Mired In Social Media Fights And Pointless Bills

Reported by VARUN HUKERI, REPORTER | December 14, 20201:39 PM ET

Donald Trump Delivers Address To Joint Session Of Congress / (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The current 116th Congress will be the least productive with fewer enacted bills than any legislative session since the 1970s, while social media activity among members of Congress and the introduction of legislation skyrocketed in 2020.

A recent report published by the public affairs research group Quorum found that only 28 of the 5,117 bills introduced in the House and Senate this year were enacted. Congress by comparison introduced 8,364 bills in 2019 and 169 of those were eventually signed into law.

The number of bills enacted by the 116th Congress is notably smaller than that of its predecessor. While the 115th Congress introduced nearly 3,000 fewer bills during its session in 2017 and 2018, President Donald Trump signed 417 bills into law according to the Congressional record.

The primary reason for this could be attributed to Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress at that time. Democrats gained a majority of House seats following the 2018 midterm elections and current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replaced former Speaker Paul Ryan.

It is expected that periods of divided government can lead to less enacted legislation, according to Axios, but productivity in Congress is still the lowest it has been in decades.

Social media activity among members of Congress increased dramatically in 2020 as the number of bills passed declined, according to the Quorum report. Lawmakers posted on social media 784,614 times this year across platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

Researchers found that for every bill introduced in Congress, lawmakers posted 98 times on Twitter, 60 times on Facebook, 5 times on Instagram and 4 times on YouTube. Lawmakers also collectively released 13 press releases for every bill introduced.

For every bill signed into law and enacted, lawmakers posted 17,912 times on Twitter, 11,016 times on Facebook, 874 times on Instagram and 669 times on YouTube. Lawmakers also collectively released 2,312 press releases for every bill signed into law and enacted.

Members of Congress frequently posted about the coronavirus on social media as hashtags and key words related to the pandemic dominated user feeds among both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, according to the Quorum report. Other prominent events lawmakers posted about this year included the 2020 Census and civil unrest related to police violence.

“Congress did a lot more posting on social media and a lot less legislating,” researchers wrote. “Twitter replaced floor debates in 2020. Memes and designed graphics replaced the classic floor posters you spot on CSPAN.” (RELATED: ‘I Never Met Her’: Joe Manchin Slams Ocasio-Cortez After She Took A Jab At Him On Twitter)

Congressional job approval among voters remains low amid criticisms of gridlock and an ineffective legislative agenda, according to Gallup polling data. A Gallup poll released in November found that only 23% of voters approved of the way Congress is handling its job while 73% disapproved.

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Loving Your Neighbor Is More Important Than Winning An Election

In the aftermath of a tight election outcome, it seems that while many matters are important to consider, one is more pressing: We are struggling to love our neighbors.

We are not any more or less fallible than human beings in past generations. Humans are humans, capable of profound works of love, compassion, and ingenuity as well as malice, destruction, and banality. Yet in our current milieu, it appears our political divisions are as rancorous as they have ever been.

The problem could be the particular messages themselves — Lower marginal tax rates! Higher marginal tax rates! The Iran deal was bad! The Iran deal was good! Build the wall! Don’t build the wall! — and sometimes it is. More often, though, the issue is that the medium has become the message.

Interacting digitally is as consequential as the messages we are sharing. Our social media and meme-based interactions generally do not promote understanding. Rather, they facilitate misunderstanding and division because they are disembodied.

We all know the poison of online comments sections and the Twitter trolls and random Facebookers who say outrageous things. I am not the first and will not be the last to lament our digital connectedness ripping the national fabric.

Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

What can repair this breach? The answer is simple: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” As recorded in the gospels, Jesus gave this commandment to love others second only to the greatest commandment: to love God.

You might ask, what does it mean to love my neighbor? Are my neighbors only the people who live geographically proximate to me? Certainly not. A lawyer in the first-century world asked the itinerant teacher Jesus of Nazareth, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied with a story many of us know as the Good Samaritan.

In the story, robbers severely beat and rob a Jewish man and leave him half dead on the side of the road. Two different members of the clergy walk by, indifferent to the man’s suffering. They choose not to see him. Eventually, a Samaritan, a rival ethnic group from the Israelites, stops to help the man. The Samaritan goes above and beyond to alleviate the man’s suffering by nursing his wounds and paying for his stay at a local inn.

People often understand the Good Samaritan story as a one-off “help a stranger in need” parable, but this view completely misses the point. If we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, we must be able to see them. Usually, our neighbors won’t be literally beaten, lying by the roadside, and they usually will not be complete strangers. They will instead be all around us, daily intruding into our lives with their needs. They also will often be quite different from us, perhaps even offensively different, as the Israelite man was to the Samaritan and vice versa.

The two men who passed by the beaten man chose willful blindness, pretending to be oblivious to his needs. The Samaritan saw the beaten man as an embodied, physical presence whom he had means and opportunity to help. He chose to see the victim’s need and have compassion on him, someone toward whom the Samaritan was supposed to be indifferent.

Get Offline

In doing so, we choose to look away from the people around us: the obnoxious co-worker who is desperately lonely, the single mom who could use a night off, or the materially wealthy person who, although he “has it all,” is starved for real human connection. Human beings already have a prodigious capacity for self-deceit. The added layers of self-righteousness that arise from spending countless hours in the self-referential algorithmic vortex of social media positively blind us.

If we were to focus on the needs of those around us and eschew our devices and the news cycle more and more, the world would shift under our feet in the best way. At the risk of sounding like a facile high school graduation speech, we could “change the world.”

Part of the problem in news and media consumption is that we have, to borrow a phrase from Minneapolis-based writer James Lileks, “non-contiguous information streams.” We are essentially able to consume the news that fits our worldview to such a degree that, after a while, the broad political camps in the United States only talk past one another and not to each other.

To combat this, we should spend less time on our devices because we are so focused on those around us and their needs that the emotional and psychic vacuum of the news cycle simply cannot get traction in our lives. This will do two things. First, it will make us more pleasant and happy.

Second, it will have the salutary market effect of winnowing the least skilled and worst motivated actors in news and media, forcing them out. As a result, we will be pushed toward increased consolidation in media, making it more difficult to retain an audience when alarmism or salacious pandering to partisans is the modus operandi. It is hardly a perfect solution, but is it worse than our current setup? I think not.

Be a Friend

Elections have consequences, to be sure. The result of a Biden administration or a parallel universe where Donald Trump won a second term, however, pales in comparison with the would-be effect of tens of millions of Americans choosing to reduce substantially their engagement with their mobile devices, social media, and the news cycle more generally.

Tens of millions of Americans choosing instead to focus their attention on the needs of those around them, even those we find distasteful? That is a country of which I want to be a part.

If you feel the particular burden of public engagement, start first and foremost with your local municipality or town, your local councilman or alderwoman, or your local school board. The needs of so many people are all around us if we choose to open our eyes and embrace the discomfort of engaging real people with real problems, a discomfort that can lead to deep contentment as we see and love our neighbors. Let us choose this discomfort over the dopamine hit of social media, and over the false god of memes, the news cycle, and an outrage machine that exists to stoke our fears.

When my children get on the school bus every day, my wife says to them, “Find a friend who needs a friend.” Absolutely no election result, from now until forever, changes the fact that people around you need a friend. Find a friend who needs a friend, and choose to love that neighbor.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

John lives in St. Louis, writes in his free time, and has almost four children.

Category:

Society, Spiritual

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Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘Social Media’

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BY: JOY PULLMANN | SEPTEMBER 06, 2023

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