Red-Pilled by The Hologram

Stu Cvrk reporting for RedState

One hundred days into the bait-and-switch presidency, the “America Last” doctrine of The Hologram and his ChiCom-compromised administration is red-pilling Americans with each passing day – at least those who are not themselves compromised and/or Communists like those associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. Here is a short list of the America Last policies implemented to date (not all-inclusive by any means):

• Locking down the Capitol like the average Third World/Communist dictatorship
• Holding 6 January activists in solitary confinement without charges
• Opening the Mexican border to a flood of illegal aliens (and all the drug and human trafficking, spreading of diseases including the ChiCom virus, and surge in criminal activity)
• Pushing continued mask mandates despite CDC guidance and studies showing they’re ineffective
• Busting the budget with a virus relief bill of which only 9% actually goes to people affected, with another $6 trillion (!!) in porkulus promised during his gaffe-filled speech on Wednesday
• Proposed gargantuan tax increases that will destroy economic growth
• Pursuing Green New Deal-related policies via executive orders and the administrative state instead of Congress
• Targeting of Democrat political enemies by DoJ and the FBI
• Pushing a narrative of systemic police violence against black Americans without evidence
• Destroying the military from within through Marxist-inspired Critical Race Theory training,
• Ruling by executive order without the promised bipartisanship,
• Etc.

Gasoline and commodity prices are already rising, and it’s early! Food price inflation is in process, too. And federal taxes will skyrocket if the Biden and the Democrats have their way. How does that benefit the average American? [Where is the Republican pushback, anyway?!?!]

The Democrat modus operandi is being exposed on a daily basis, and their goals are not those that most Americans support. And their tactics are obvious, too. What have we learned in three and a half short months?

1. Everything is political to Democrats; the good of the country is secondary to the good of the Democrat Party and individual Democrats. It is all about authoritarian control, with them calling the shots.
2. Democrats cover for each other at all times. Under virtually every circumstance, they will not throw a fellow Democrat under the bus and will excuse virtually every possible transgression, no matter how egregious. Think about Eric Swalwell (D-CA) consorting with a suspect ChiCom spy, and yet he is still on the House Intelligence Committee
3. Character and ethics are non-existent in the Democrat Party. If they existed, Andrew Cuomo and the rest of the “nursing home Democrat governors” would have been run out of town on a rail (and brought up on charges) long ago.
4. Democrat allies in the media are expected to cover for any gaffes or mistakes, or at least to limit the political damage to the Democrat Party from such errors. The endless excuses for The Hologram’s gaffes and Jenn Psaki’s “circling around” nonsense are cases in point.
5. Two of the Democrats’ favorite political tactics are class envy and bigotry. Class envy is one of the two foundations of the modern Democratic Party’s soul (identity politics being the other) and is purposely very divisive. It is a tool that exploits happy people who were previously neither aware of their forced group membership nor of their antipathy toward other groups. Black Lives Matter capitalizes on class envy and bigotry to advance their anti-American agenda. When was the last time an elected Democrat has condemned BLM objectives and domestic terrorism? BLM – and Antifa – are useful political tools of the Democrats. They are modern-day Brown Shirts – the Sturmabteilung of the Democrat Party.
6. Democrats pervert the language, including inventing new terms and flip-flopping the meanings of others, to suit their political objectives. Examples abound: Nazis are “conservatives,” “gay” instead of “homosexual,” “McCarthyism” used as a pejorative despite his fundamental belief being proven true that there were Commies in the U.S. government, the term “social justice” masking a socialist campaign, etc. And then there are the Orwellian names for their socialist legislation: “Affordable Care Act,” which masked the unaffordable socialist medical nonsense of Obamacare. Or how about The Hologram’s “American Rescue Plan” being sold as a virus relief bill that is anything but, and is instead filled with pork for Democrat constituencies.
7. Democrats are tyrannical—some benign, some purposely trying to change things to the detriment of us all. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are perfect examples; their public pronouncements are classic authoritarianism. They think they know better than the rest of us and by their ostensible intelligence believe that they have every right to call the shots. They make perfect bureaucrats because they just “follow the rules” until the results are indistinguishable from evil.
8. Democrats are legalistic by nature; for them, it is all about process and delay when it suits their political objectives. Democrats have protected the use of lawfare to obstruct the policies of Republican presidents (we saw endless lawsuits by Democrat activists during the Trump administration).
9. Democrat-sponsored reforms aren’t focused on actually improving outcomes. Rather than helping people become productive, self-sufficient, and taxpaying citizens, Democrats shove as many people as possible into dependency on the “government,” which enhances their political power since Democrats are the party of government. That’s what the porkulus spending bills are all about. And that’s exactly what the open borders malarkey is all about: creating a new class of dependent people that Democrats will exploit politically.
10. No political tactic is too vile or unseemly to be used by a Democrat, and no topic is out of bounds if it furthers anything in the Democrats’ agenda. Democrat political rule #1: anything is game in the pursuit of political power. Democrat political rule #2: throw it out there, and if it sticks, keep running with it. Examples abound: the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, Ukraine phone call hoax, the “insurrection,” etc.

The list is virtually endless. One of President Trump’s best political accomplishments was to expose all of the above for regular Americans to see. The contrast of his America First policies with those of the “America Last” garbage of The Hologram could not be starker. Another most valuable service was his exposure of the entire legacy media as nothing more than an agitprop appendage of the Democrat Party. No thinking American will trust the legacy media any time soon.

And the result was a ton of red-pilling during the Trump administration which is accelerating these days as Americans are finding out what the Democrats have in store. Once the truth is known, the world looks different – and that’s a great thing! May the red-pilling continue unabated for the good of the country.

Next Phase of COVID Vaccination is To Create Public Pressure, Guess What You Are...

You Are Selfish and 

Destroying Herd Immunity 

if You Do Not Cooperate

As soon as government started controlling the behavior of people under the justification of COVID fear, there was a natural conclusion evident to the issues. The lady holding up the sign has it exactly correct.  All of the approaches demanded by leftist governmental action framed ‘non-compliance’ with the dictates as the individual being “selfish.”

The leftist pattern of framing your demand for individual freedom and liberty as selfish, has permeated throughout the COVID narrative.  The vaccination demand now carries the exact same compliance narrative as the leftists blend vaccinations with the term “herd immunity.”

The current media talking points say that if you don’t take the non-FDA approved test vaccine, you are selfishly blocking a national effort to attain this “herd immunity.”

The argument is actually quite silly.  If your vaccine protects you from COVID; and if the vaccine actually does do what the government and media tell you it does; then why would you be worried about someone else’s vaccine status?  If the vaccine works, presumably you are protected; my not being vaccinated does not increase your risk or pose a threat.

To give you an idea how the COVID narrative is evolving, CNN ran this segment talking about how non-vaccinated people should be treated:

“To get America to herd immunity, being vaccinated should be incentivized. If that fails, CNN’s Michael Smerconish proposes the government and businesses should consider measures to exclude the unvaccinated from the workplace and events.”

Bill and Melinda Gates announce divorce after 27 years

 

Bill and Melinda Gates announce divorce after 27 years, saying "we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple"

This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest version.

 

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56975466 

 

 

 

Hillary Clinton warns of 'huge consequences' in Afghan US troop withdrawal

 

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has warned of "huge consequences" of President Joe Biden's decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan.

Mrs Clinton told CNN there was a risk the Taliban - the Islamist group ousted in 2001 by the US-led invasion - could retake control.

The US aims to complete the withdrawal by 11 September.

However, the Taliban have been carrying out more attacks.

"This is what we call a wicked problem," Mrs Clinton told CNN. "There are consequences both foreseen and unintended of staying and of leaving," she said.

Mrs Clinton, like Mr Biden a Democrat, was a strong supporter of the US intervention in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. 

 

 

At least 2,500 US troops are currently deployed as part of the 9,600-strong Nato Afghan mission.

The president said the US pull-out was justified as American forces had ensured that the country could no longer be a base for foreign jihadists to plot against the West.

Asked about the president's decision by CNN's Fareed Zakaria on Sunday, Mrs Clinton said, "Our government has to focus on two huge consequences", notably the resumption of activities by extremist groups and a subsequent outpouring of refugees from Afghanistan.

She said the protentional collapse of the Afghan government and a possible takeover by the Taliban could result in a new civil war.

Mrs Clinton said it was also important to protect the "many thousands of Afghans" who had worked with the US and Nato during the conflict, and said a large visa programme should be set up to provide for any refugees.

The remaining US troops in Afghanistan began formally withdrawing on 1 May, amid escalating violence.

Afghan security forces are on high alert for reprisal attacks.

On Monday, Afghan officials said at least seven soldiers had been killed in a Taliban attack on a military outpost in the south-western Farah province.

They said militants had blown up the post after digging a tunnel for about 400m (1312ft) to access it from a nearby house. One soldier had been captured by the insurgents, they said. Other reports put the Afghan army casualties much higher. 

 

 

As former President Barack Obama's vice-president, Mr Biden frequently opposed a large US presence in Afghanistan.

Mr Biden has said that the US will continue to support Afghan government forces - and encourage peace negotiations with the rebel Taliban leaders. However, correspondents say that may not be enough to ensure stability in the region.

Last year, then-President Donald Trump - who was keen for US troops to return home and criticised US military interventions for being costly and ineffective - set in motion a full US withdrawal from Afghanistan by 1 May this year.

The US then started withdrawing troops after the Taliban promised to stop carrying out attacks on international forces and "soft targets", and said it would not allow al-Qaeda or other militants to operate in areas it controls.

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56966473?xtor=AL-72-%5Bpartner%5D-%5Bbbc.news.twitter%5D-%5Bheadline%5D-%5Bnews%5D-%5Bbizdev%5D-%5Bisapi%5D&at_medium=custom7&at_custom3=%40BBCWorld&at_custom4=19884A34-AC32-11EB-951B-FFBD4744363C&at_campaign=64&at_custom1=%5Bpost+type%5D&at_custom2=twitter 

 

 

 

Calif. opens second emergency child migrant center in L.A. County

 

OAN Newsroom

UPDATED 7:22 AM PT – Monday, May 3, 2021

California has opened another shelter for migrant children. According to reports Sunday. the first group of migrant children started to arrive Saturday evening at the Pomona Fairplex.

Officials said the site can hold up to 2,500 unaccompanied minors and is the second temporary shelter in Los Angeles County.

 

 

Some lawmakers have attributed the surge of migrant children at the U.S. southern border to Joe Biden’s immigration policies, including the halting of border wall construction.

“These circumstances have invited this activity to our border,” asserted Republican Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana.

Officials said the children will stay at the Pomona Fairplex until they are reunited with family or placed with a sponsor. Authorities added, the children will be tested for COVID-19 before being transported to emergency facilities.

 

 

https://www.oann.com/calif-opens-second-emergency-child-migrant-center-in-l-a-county/ 

 

 

The Bleak Biden Way

What is the Biden way? To surveille, monitor, root out, raid, jail, confine, and smear all impediments to fundamental transformation.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

After a hundred days of President Biden, I think most Americans are now on to what will follow in the next few years. 

Joyless Joe

Biden frowns. He grimaces. He occasionally barks and yells as he delivers a gloomy view of America and its people, past and present. 

Admit it: We are all racists, then and now, captives of Jim Crow still. Biden needs as many fabricated enemies as he can find; otherwise, his speeches, his demeanor, his agenda are little more than absurdities. They cannot stand or fall on their own merits because they have none. So grumpy Biden, in his latest and final incarnation, is always anti-something, usually anti-Trump, anti-racism, and anti-everything traditional America is for.

Lots of bad white people still need to be rooted out—outside of the beltway. These are the ones never woken by Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media, academia, the corporate boardroom, professional sports, and the foundations. These retrograde deplorables apparently won’t give up their “privilege” without a fight. 

Bidenism demands these environmental desecrators must stop boiling the planet. We are a xenophobic nation that won’t let pioneering migrants enter the United States. We are a Neanderthal America full of people who won’t wear their masks when vaccinated and outdoors. We are a battered America still reeling from the Trump disasters on the border, the Trump failed coup on January 6, the Trump racism that led to peaceful equity marches all last summer. 

So America needs a booster shot, a new way of electing presidents, a rebooted Supreme Court, new Senate rules, more states, and so much more—with so little time. The downer message makes Jimmy’s Carter’s old cardigan sweater sermons look inspiring, as the grey and sullen Joe himself makes Carter in retrospect seem sunny. 

The emerging Bidenism is what some of us warned we’d see last summer when the deceptive Left and naïve NeverTrump mantra preened that old Joe from Scranton would usher in post-Trump “healing.” His therapeutic candidacy was promised to be a “return to normalcy,” as he was a “moderate” eager to “unify” us.  

This illusory reboot from Trump absolutism was to be sort of reminiscent of George H.W. Bush’s “thousand points of light” and “kinder and gentler nation” promises, as the implied corrective to purported heartless eight years of Reaganism.  

Yet all this mush ignores Biden’s innate mean-spiritedness that we’ve witnessed for 50 years dating back to his Robert Bork/Clarence Thomas hearing days, his handsy indifference to the private space of dozens of women, and his more recent “lying dog-faced pony soldier,” “fat” and “you ain’t black” incoherent venom. 

Instead, from time to time, Joe Biden will be wheeled out to give a teleprompted address or a rare scripted press conference. The media will gush: if he loses his way, he is “conflicted” by the sheer weight of the office. If his voice lowers in elderly fashion, he has “mastered” the technique of quiet voice emphases. If he raises it, and almost shouts, Biden is lauded as “animated,” “fired-up,” and “robust.” If his characteristic slurring of words, chopped-up syntax, and repetitions lose the audience, it is only because our modern Longinus is a master of every sort of sublime rhetorical trope.  

In between those infrequent moments, scores of left-wing functionaries in the West Wing will draft and then engage in infighting over the queuing of progressive or socialist executive orders for Biden to issue. The aim for the former understudy is to out-Obama his former progressive godhead and mentor. Biden’s Napoleonic 100 days will be remembered in the left-wing halls of Versailles as a golden moment of defiant activism. More mundanely, it is far easier for Joe to earn the wrath of Republicans than to take on the take-no-prisoners fanatics of his own woke base. 

The Razor’s Edge 

There is a constant frenzy to these near daily fiats and appointments, and for a variety of reasons. Joe is not a robust 78. He is not up to an 18-hour presidential day. His ability to rule by reclining-chair edict is about all that he has in the next 24 months—politically, physically, practically.  

So Biden’s strategy is simple: nominations and executive orders. Republicans in Congress prefer losing nobly to winning ugly and so will never emulate the ‘just say no” nihilism of Democrats. Not long ago Democrats voted nearly unanimously to oppose every Trump appointee. Not now—the Senate will approve almost all of his hard-core leftist nominees, and with lots of Republican votes.  

Similarly, conservative judges do not virtue signal the availability of their courts as go-to-places for conservative activist groups to expect easy court orders to delay, freeze, or overturn presidential directives. So time is of the essence to ram through the hardest left-wing agenda in nearly 90 years, to call it bipartisanship, and to demonize any who object as infrastructure racists, climate racists, immigration racists, voting racists, and stimulus racists. 

Joe does not have a mandate. He suffers from an unsympathetic Supreme Court, a deadlocked and fickle 50/50 Senate, and has only a razor-thin majority in the House. He has not yet managed to junk the filibuster. So he can’t quite yet pack the court, trash the Electoral College, lasso in two states, or ram through an unconstitutional national voter law that overrides all the work of the state legislatures. These structural changes are necessary to ensure his pen-and-phone ephemeral governance is not erased away by a conservative successor.  

Public relations-wise, Joe will continue to talk of unity and “us”—while he calls half the country Jim-Crow racists, insurrectionists, unhinged gun nuts, and all the vocabulary the woke movement mastered over the last four years. Joe will grimace as he lies that he inherited a chaotic border that, in fact, went from quiet to quite crazy under his watch.

He will look pained to confess that Trump was culpable for the entire COVID pandemic that needlessly killed Americans, as if any head of state is solely responsible under his tenure for all those who die from an unpredictable and insidious virus. 

Parasitism

Even in his own convoluted logic of presidential culpability, Biden won’t confess that in the roughly 10 and a half months that the pandemic took off and spread, from mid-March 2020 to January 20, 2021, under Trump, fewer died on average per day (around 392,000 in total, or about 1,200 per day) than during Biden’s first three months (roughly 178,000 in total or about 1,780 a day). In truth, those are probably meaningless data points. But they become meaningful when Biden employs them asymmetrically in order to fault his predecessor.  

Biden never notes that plenty of European nations suffered nearly as many deaths per million of their populations as did the United States—or more: the United Kingdom, and many countries in Western Europe (Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain) and Eastern Europe (Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, etc.). And nations that once were touted as doing “better” than the United States, such as Russia and China, could never be trusted to present accurate data. Those who were said once to have “escaped” the pandemic far more adroitly than the United States are now mired in it, like India and Brazil. 

There is no need to mention that the states with some of the highest COVID-19 fatalities per million in their populations, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, were near religious in their adherence to shutdowns and mask wearing. Indeed they followed almost every CDC and later Biden gyration—and freelanced too by sending active COVID-19 patients into pristine long-term care facilities. Their executives like Andrew Cuomo were deified by the press, the more so as the fatalities mounted. 

Joe Biden will go into agonizing contortions as he is forced to remind us of the “vaccination mess” he also inherited. Indeed, he has claimed (“inadvertently” or “in jest”?) there were no vaccinations at all being given when he entered office (despite doing his own photo-op vaccination a full month before he was inaugurated).  

What Biden will not or apparently cannot say is that he inherited from Operation Warp Speed a vaccination rate of about a million Americans per day when he was sworn in. Indeed, when we compare the unimpressive protection and potential dangers of the Chinese, Russian, and European AstraZeneca vaccinations to their three U.S.-sponsored counterparts, it explains why the United States, after only tiny Israel, has the best record in obtaining effective, plentiful and safe vaccinations and protecting millions of its population as quickly as possible.  

The effort to leverage the free market, to pay early on top dollar for vaccinations, to spread risks among three and more companies, to over-order supplies, and to offer logistic help and liability exemptions reified Trump’s earlier vow, widely ridiculed by “experts,” to start to deliver to Americans some initial vaccination relief from COVID-19 within 10 months of the outbreak.  

Indeed, it is lamentable how an ungracious Biden—so reminiscent of both his earlier denunciation of the travel ban and then revisionist praise of it—appropriates or ignores Trump’s achievement, one that saved thousands of American lives.  

Divide et Impera 

Biden told the nation that the January 6 Capitol riot was the greatest attack on American democracy since the Civil War. He knows that is untrue and an egregious insult to the more than 5,000 Americans who perished on December 7, 1941 and on September 11, 2001.  

Biden knows also that the mob of frenzies who entered the Capitol was mostly leaderless, since his own Justice Department has not found any insurrectionary or conspiratorial leaders. There were no rioters armed with guns, much less any using them. And no one other than those in the mob suffered fatalities, of which only one death was attributed to the deliberate use of violence: Ashli Babbitt, the unarmed 14-year decorated Air Force veteran, who was fatally shot entering a window in the capital, by an officer, whose name, age, race, and sex were mysteriously never disclosed—as is the now American norm in such lethal police shootings of the unarmed. For such a supposedly riotous group, there were no riots over the police shooting of an unarmed suspect. 

The Biden vaccination then follows from the Biden travel ban that allowed the Biden reopening of the Trump lockdown, thus ending the Trump pandemic and Trump recession, which in turn ensured the Biden recovery and indeed Biden boom.  

In truth, a year of pent-up demand, of $6 trillion in promiscuously spread funny-money, of the public exuberance of a vaccination-fueled waning of the epidemic and of not yet tampering with the Trump pre-virus tax cuts, deregulation, and energy expansion, are all creating a boom.  

But what will Biden say in a year when his tax hikes, new regulations, and hard-core leftist bureaucratic appointees, stifle supply as demand soars, inflation roars, and the economy slows? The ghost of Trump did it? Russian collusion? Racism?  

Abroad, would that Biden follow his 100 days of characteristic plagiarism by claiming the achievement of others as his own, while fobbing his own failures onto others. That way, had he just left the Middle East be, or Trump China’s containment policy alone, then perhaps there would be a peaceful continuance. 

But the “Biden plan” of resurrecting the Iran deal, of pumping up the deflated theocracy in Iran, of restoring to the Palestinians veto power over the wishes of 600 million Arabs in the Middle East, of alienating our allies in Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf, and gratuitously ostracizing the Israelis will not end well. But then again, when it does not end well, Biden will call for ecumenicalism abroad and to reverse the “Trump Middle East” disaster that he inherited. 

So Biden will grimace and contort, as he calls for unity, to rally the virtuous against the legions of Russian colluders, racists, insurrectionists, and Jim Crow revivalists under every American bed. All these impediments to fundamental transformation, Joe Biden must unfortunately, reluctantly, and with real remorse surveille, monitor, root out, raid, jail, confine, and smear. 

All that is the Biden Way.

International child abuse site with 400,000 users busted by German authorities

 

One of the world's biggest international darknet platforms for child sexual abuse images has been busted with more than 400,000 users, German prosecutors have said.

Four suspects from Germany were arrested in connection with the "Boystown" darknet site, which paedophiles used to exchange and watch indecent images of children and toddlers from all over the world, according to authorities.

 

 

Frankfurt prosecutors said they found images of the "most severe sexual abuse of toddlers" among photos and video material on the platform, which has been active since at least 2019.

Three suspects, who were said to be the administrators of the online platform, were arrested in mid-April in along with an alleged prolific user of the site.

One of the suspects was arrested in Paraguay.

Authorities said their investigation involved "one of the world's biggest child pornography darknet platforms".

A German police task force investigated the platform, its administrators and users for months in co-operation with Europol and law enforcement authorities from the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, the United States and Canada.

 

 

The suspects included a 40-year-old man from Paderborn, a 49-year-old man from Munich and a 58-year-old man from northern Germany who had been living in Paraguay for many years, the prosecutors' statement added.

They allegedly worked as administrators of the site and gave advice to members on how to evade law enforcement when using the platform.

A fourth suspect, a 64-year-old man from Hamburg, is accused of being one of the most active users, having allegedly uploaded more than 3,500 posts.

Germany has requested the extradition of the suspect who was arrested in Paraguay.

No names were given in line with Germany privacy regulations.

After raids of several buildings in German in mid-April, the online platform was shut down.

 

 

https://news.sky.com/story/international-child-abuse-site-with-400-000-users-busted-by-german-authorities-12293938 

 

 

 

How China is stoking America’s racial tensions

A government that would never dream of allowing free elections

 in its own country mocks America’s democratic process

written by Ian Williams for Spectator.US

Footage of a brutal late March attack on a 65-year-old Asian American woman in Manhattan drew widespread outrage on social media. It also made for a productive afternoon for Zhao Lijian. From his Beijing office, the Chinese government spokesman retweeted 20 posts and shared the video 12 times on his official Twitter account. ‘We can’t help but wonder, who will be the next victim? When will it all end?’ he asked his almost 900,000 followers.

Zhao isn’t the only one who’s been busy. In the wake of the Atlanta spa shootings on March 16, Chinese state media used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to stoke a narrative of American racism and hatred. One Twitter post from Global Times, a Communist party tabloid, shows the Statue of Liberty, gun in hand, towering over a tiny cardboard cutout figure marked ‘Asian’, with a target on its chest. Another cartoon, shared by CGTN, the international arm of China’s state broadcaster, shows an American COVID-19 vaccination center, and a young Asian asking the doctor, ‘By the way, is there also a vaccine for racism?’

Two years ago, China had almost no diplomatic presence on western social media. Now around 200 diplomats growl and troll their way around these platforms — the vanguard of a concerted push by party-controlled organizations, working in concert with a vast and shifting array of bogus accounts, to sow disinformation and discord.

They cut their teeth early in the COVID-19 pandemic, promoting conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus. Beijing pumped out propaganda and disinformation internationally through thousands of fake and hijacked Twitter accounts. It sought to portray itself as a leader and benefactor in public health, at the same time trashing the faltering efforts of Western democracies.

The EU accused China of running ‘a global disinformation campaign to deflect blame for the outbreak of the pandemic’. In June last year, Twitter shut down 170,000 accounts linked to the Chinese government, citing ‘a range of manipulative and coordinated activities’. YouTube banned almost 2,600 Chinese channels in the second quarter of 2020 alone, as part of what YouTube calls ‘our ongoing investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China’.

CGTN was accused of spreading disinformation and propaganda on Twitter about the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. State media manipulated images and videos, and depicted protesters as violent tools of the West, practicing ‘terrorism’. In response, Twitter removed nearly 1,000 accounts and suspended thousands of others, which were part of what it described as a ‘significant state-backed information operation’. Facebook and YouTube also removed accounts.

Last summer, Chinese diplomats reveled in American protests over policing and race, embracing the Black Lives Matter movement with relish and accusing the US government of hypocrisy and double standards on human rights. When it came to the presidential election campaign and its messy aftermath, Beijing largely avoided showing a preference for either Trump or Biden. Instead, a government that would never dream of allowing free elections in its own country mocked America’s democratic process. Party-controlled media stoked a narrative of US national decline, highlighting chaos, dysfunction and the threat of violence — all amplified by social media.

China has pursued this theme in its coverage of the recent anti-Asian violence, using it to deflect attention from the persecution of the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the coordinated response, sanctions against Chinese officials by the US, UK, Canada and the EU. With western companies under pressure over the use of forced labor in Xinjiang, spokesman Zhao Lijian tweeted, ‘It is a historical fact that the #UnitedStates forced black slaves to collect cotton. Who on earth engaged in forced labor?’ Later he tweeted: ‘Shocking conspiracy of the US & West: destabilize #Xinjiang & contain China’s development. The cotton smears are just part of the bigger plot.’

China’s state-controlled news outlets appear to be among the highest ranked accounts on Twitter and Facebook. CGTN has 13.6 million Twitter followers and 116 million on Facebook. Global Times has 1.8 million on Twitter and 62 million on Facebook. Xinhua, a state news agency, has 12.4 million on Twitter and 89 million on Facebook. Obscure diplomats have quickly built followings to rival Hollywood celebrities.

Can there really be such an audience for stultifying propaganda? Perhaps, but there are many dark social media arts, which China has quickly learned. The figures are almost certainly false, inflated by automated programs (bots) that generate fake followers and fake likes. The idea is to give the pages more credibility and reach, and thereby pull in legitimate users. Bogus or hijacked accounts are used as ‘amplifiers’ to push posts and tweets and get them trending.

There used to be a distinction between Russian and Chinese activities in cyberspace. While China concentrated on cyber-espionage, plundering secrets from Western corporate and government systems, the Russians were the vandals. They launched destructive cyberattacks while engaging in disinformation and hack-and-leak operations, tactics with their roots in the Cold War heyday of ‘active measures’. Their aim was to sow division, doubt and distrust, spotting and exploiting cracks to weaken the target. Those aims have not changed.

Now Russian and Chinese tactics are converging. Both use social media to peddle disinformation and toxic content, amplifying fringe media, obscure ‘experts’ and conspiracy theorists.

The aim of both is not only to obscure facts but to disorient and depress: when Zhao Lijian pumped out tweets after the Manhattan attack, the content was carefully chosen. The posts he shared were not the angriest, but they were full of despair: ‘What the hell is wrong with people?’, ‘This is incredibly difficult to watch’, ‘Oh my God, what is happening to this country?’ ‘This is a state of emergency.’

And China has a wider policy goal — framing hate crime as a consequence of the US government’s more assertive recent stance against Beijing. ‘Experts say [hate crime] results from US politicians’ smearing of China as culprit of COVID-19. Worsening bilateral ties play part in discrimination surge,’ Global Times said in a recent tweet, without naming the ‘experts’.

The Communist party also has formidable weapons in the form of TikTok and WeChat.

The TikTok app, popular among 16- to 24-year-olds, is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. TikTok is a platform for catchy short videos, with an estimated 100 million users in the US. It has been criticized for its zealous collection of personal data and intrusions on the data security of users, and recently agreed to pay $92 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging it illegally tracked users and shared biometric data from photos and videos. The data, which included face scans, was allegedly shared with third parties, some in China. The company denies any wrongdoing.

More invidious is TikTok’s opaque algorithm that determines what a user sees. On Twitter and Facebook, users are mostly served content from accounts they subscribe to. On TikTok the videos can come from anywhere, and the app takes account of a range of information. This includes the type of videos you look at, the duration, your likes, comments and sharing, as well as user data such as age, gender and location. The precise recipe is unknown, since it has been designated a state secret. Last year, when it looked like ByteDance might be forced to sell its US operations, the Chinese government imposed export controls on the algorithm. While the company does employ engineers in the US, control is firmly in the hands of secretive China-based teams, which have been experimenting with advanced inputs including facial and voice recognition and sentiment analysis. In China the com- pany deploys this tech to censor content and promote CCP propaganda. It claims it does not censor in the US, but all Chinese companies must by law cooperate with the Communist party on ‘national security’, a very elastic concept. While the US algorithm might not be massaged as blatantly as in China, there is ample room for subtle manipulation.

WeChat presents a different sort of challenge. It is aimed at Chinese speakers, with an estimated 19 million regular users in the US. For immigrants it has become a vital way of keeping in touch with friends, family and developments in China, where it is known as the ‘app for everything’, such is the range of its services. This has made it an important component of the surveillance state, a weapon of social control, censorship and disinformation. Overseas, it has been used to intimidate Uighurs, Tibetans and other dissidents, often with threats relayed via relatives at home. But the broader danger is that by pumping nationalist propaganda into Chinese-speaking communities, shaping what they read and see, it is creating bubbles and magnifying divisions within America.

The Trump administration sought to ban both TikTok and WeChat on national security grounds. Both have fought back in the courts, and President Biden has paused the action against them while his staff becomes ‘familiar with the issues in this case’.

China has been quick to take advantage of this opening, presenting itself as the champion of Asian American communities in the wake of the recent anti-Asian violence. Older established migrants and political exiles have little time for Communist propaganda, but newer communities, particularly those drawn to the US by economic and educational opportunities, may be more receptive to WeChat-enabled propaganda and nationalist blandishments.

China’s use of social media can at times be clunky and crude. The irony is that the reach of its increasingly toxic and combative message, its ability to reach a Western audience, is being enabled by American social media platforms — platforms that are blocked in China, where trying to access them can lead to interrogation and jail.

Twitter, Facebook and YouTube do crack down on Chinese disinformation when it becomes impossible to ignore, as with COVID and Hong Kong, but their actions are inconsistent and patchy. Twitter and Facebook have now started labeling Chinese accounts as ‘state-affiliated’ but that has not dampened unease, even among Facebook’s own employees. Staff there are reportedly concerned the company is being used as a conduit for state propaganda, with a wave of sponsored posts of happy Uighurs, dancing, singing and generally thriving under Chinese rule.

Still, the Chinese embassy in Washington is having to do without its Twitter account, which was suspended in January after diplomats responded to evidence of forced sterilizations with a tweet claiming Uighur women had been ‘emancipated’ from extremism and were no longer ‘baby-making machines’. It was typical of China’s approach to try to whitewash an atrocity by appealing to feminism. In this case they misjudged their audience and overstepped the mark.

In targeting identity politics, China is stoking the most difficult and divisive issues in America. The absurd part is that Xi Jinping’s rule is built on an increasingly virulent ethnic nationalism. This fuels the CCP’s combative stances internationally — see, for instance, China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi unashamedly berating secretary of state Antony Blinken for America’s record on human rights.

At home, meanwhile, the Communist party crushes human rights and regards any cultural and religious difference as a threat. This is what drives the appalling repression in Xinjiang, where the party is seeking to neuter Uighur culture and subjugate it to the Han Chinese. China’s Communist leadership is no position to lecture anybody about racism. Yet they do.

Article by Peter Van Buren in The American Conservative

 

This Has Just Been the Beginning

The extreme rhetoric of the moment promises to summon a strongman.

Rod Dreher asks “What are they preparing us for by teaching non-white people to fear and loathe whites?” It’s a good question, and the answer is something to fear.

Once only on social media, now commonplace on the legacy outlets, we encounter near-constant pleas to kill white people, or cancel them, or push them aside. A white friend married to the same Asian woman for decades was cursed at in front of his grandchildren as a fetishist. Late night “comedy” shows openly enjoy speculating what violence Derek Chauvin will suffer in prison. A Barnard College instructor discussed gassing whites in a coming race war. It is completely acceptable in our public discourse to say such things, almost fashionable under grievance theology.

Coupled with the sentiments toward white people is a similar theme against men in general. Twitter from time to time will burp up hashtags like #WorldWithoutMen, with tweets that range between funny-not funny jokes about how women can get by with “more batteries” to outright calls for violence. We can’t help it, having been assured “all men are part of a patriarchal system that stamps all over women,” one big Handmaid’s Tale of woe. Not really much room for practical improvement like when we were just asked to help with the dishes.

Of course, the rules of media, social and anti-social, say this is okay even as they punish those who say exactly the same things but change white to black (racists) or men to women (misogynists). As each outlet cuts out more and more dissenting voices, the anti-white, anti-male pieces expand into more of the bandwidth. Stymied in their attempts to create a legal version, “hate speech,” progressives use economic power to create a de facto one outside the law, Pee Wee giggling how the Constitution can’t stop non-governmental megacorps. Their censorship weapons against hate, however, seem to only point one way.

The Republican Party that millions support for as many reasons is dismissed as “the front organization of American neofascism.” It follows if you exercise certain rights (such as support free speech, own a legal weapon, read this website) you are inherently wrong and evil, not just your ideas. You can’t be persuaded, and you are not worth listening to, only punching. Even two of America’s whitest dads, Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama, demonize many of us as toxic in their podcasts.

Imagine that, a human being wrong simply based on the skin and sex he was born with. There should be a word for that.

Many people are savvy enough to know Twitter, et al., are just acting out and the daily wallop of threats are without merit. We get the desire to out-shock one’s competitors with claims such as “whites are a public health crisis” and the like. We know it’s mostly bull from bindle-toting grifter “journalists” who call themselves wypipologists.

But more and more these angry, hateful performances can cause someone to lose his livelihood over a misunderstood Facebook post, or false testimony about harassment granted cardboard credibility by #BelieveWomen. They can make the jump from online to the real world, with real world consequences. That does alarm even steady people willing to dismiss much as just rhetoric. There is danger from sticks and stones.

Leaving Dr. King’s dream of a world where color does not matter, progressive America is purposefully seeking a return to circa-1950 when color mattered a lot. We are encouraged to hate reciprocally. Progressives believe they can control the monster, so that favoring color (or gender, or political stance) means advantages at work and school for blacks, and whatever nibblers they can attract from the mountain of “people of color” who in many cases see little of themselves in black activism.

The new progressive world damn well intends to base things on color, relying on the most crude and crumbly definition of racism: If the percentage of black (mortgage holders, Harvard grads, inmates) is different than the percentage of black Americans in society, that means racism. So in the real world an institution like Brigham and Women’s Hospital wants to charge black patients less than white, and allocate medical resources on the basis of race to fix whatever disparities they believe are traceable to 1619. They might as well jump to the conclusion and just install separate drinking fountains.

The best arguments will echo those made for affirmative action, that a little bit of “good” discrimination is the bitter medicine needed to correct a bigger problem, with the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause set aside for the greater good. How’s that been working out? Seems if it had helped we wouldn’t be here, now.

Seeing color as an essential part of identity is what America spent 160 years fighting against. The progressive reversal is little short of a confession that that idea, including the civil rights movement and Dr. King, et al., failed. Their answer is to declare a mass of Americans must be downgraded, if not eliminated, for others to progress. We will never otherwise get black Americans to make up 13.4 percent of everything, they say as if that goal rivaled the moon shot in the national mind.

This solution validates the worst racist impulse—color matters—and the worst version of a society, that there are only so many chances, never enough to go around, so our group will have to take some from yours. It is essentially a version of the racist theory of white displacement. And it takes nothing more than watching toddlers, or puppies, fighting over limited toys to know how that has to end.

And that is frightening. We saw a taste of what’s to come in the election of Donald Trump. Democrats want to fob that off as a one-time thing, powered by foreign intervention. Joe Biden was supposed to have been the ideological palate cleanser. But Biden is instead fanning the flames in slavish debt to the people who reluctantly voted for him as the lesser of two evils. Open the borders! Gun control! More quotas and empowerment! Reparations!

Biden is at best passively following a pre-written social justice agenda (who knows what he believes himself, or is even aware of), and counting on manipulating the complexity of how we vote to re-elect his party (hence the muscle tussle over Georgia’s voting laws.) He ignores how lousy a candidate and how clumsy a president Trump was—yet the latter still polls high in defeat.

It is most accurate to look at Trump not as an anomaly but as version 1.0 of who we’ll elect someday. Trump said the right words to Americans who felt disenfranchised, and did well with many others despite being often embarrassing. But he dragged around too much baggage from decades of public life and never learned how to get things done in Washington. His opposition meanwhile was comical, clinging like Jack on that Titanic raft to a fully false Russian narrative for three years.

But with eye toward how this has evolved among rightists in Europe, think about the next guy, who is articulate and smart, who can subtly turn the volume knob up or down as needed when addressing angry unemployed workers or impatient suburbanites whose kids can’t get into a good school due to quotas, both groups worn by taxes imposed to pay for the Democratic vision, both groups suffering from rising crime even as leaders call for defunding the police. Think of a Keanu, not a Pompeo.

Put that slicky boy candidate into a world where the media which backstopped Biden is even more granular, where the big guys like CNN matter even less, and new platforms emerge to make Twitter and Facebook less significant. The media’s credibility is heading toward the bottom anyway. Some 58 percent of us already think “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public.” They’ll still make money off the clicks of their converted cleric audience, but they will not influence others as much.

The kind of candidate likely to emerge from all this will promise to take charge, to roll unwanted change backwards, and will manipulate the newly validated laws which say discrimination by race is what people want. He will find an audience grown larger by ham-handed efforts to impose a partisan rough splash of social change against the majority will.

He will be called a fascist or an authoritarian and he may be so, but he will also be seen as the least bad answer to a system that has already swung way too far from center.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/this-has-just-been-the-beginning/

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