Elon Musk Takes Massive Stake in Twitter Purchasing $2.89 Billion

Many people are wondering what the purpose and intentions are of Tesla CEO Elon Musk after reports drop that he has purchased over 9% of Twitter stock valued at $2.89 billion.

Last month, Musk asked his followers on the platform for their opinion of Twitter’s position on free speech.  Now many people are wondering if the passive position purchased by Musk will be used to leverage a change in the Big Tech platform.

(CNBC) – Outspoken Tesla CEO Elon Musk purchased a giant stake in Twitter that makes him the largest outside shareholder in the social media stock, not long after criticizing the company for what he said was its failure to uphold the tenets of free speech.

Musk owns 73,486,938 shares of Twitter, which represents a 9.2% passive stake in the company, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission 13G filing released Monday. The stake is worth $2.89 billion, based Twitter’s closing price Friday.

The purchase comes less than two weeks after Musk criticized the company, polling people on Twitter about whether it adheres to free speech principles. “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy,” Musk tweeted. “What should be done?” (read more)

Musk Could Save Society From Those Looking to Control It

Brandon Morse reporting for RedState

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hasn’t even done anything with it yet, but after effectively becoming the largest shareholder of Twitter, a lot of doors that were locked shut suddenly flew open.

Musk took his status as the richest man in the world and used his wealth to purchase up a massive chunk of shares to one of the most influential and yet diseased social media platforms in the west. He obtained 9.2 percent of the company, in fact, and the resulting control shift sent Twitter’s stock skyrocketing like a SpaceX rocket — a whopping 25 percent.

(BREAKING: Elon Musk Makes a Huge Move Buying up Billions in Twitter Stock)

The move had been teased with Musk making the statement that “Free speech is essential to a functioning Democracy,” followed by questions about what should be done about Twitter, the “de facto public town square.” Musk, as he tends to do, made a move that changes everything not long after.

The question now is: What will Musk change and how will that change us?

Firstly, we need to focus on something that another famous man once said. The comedian Dave Chappelle commented that he was being mobbed by transgender activists on Twitter after being accused of being “transphobic.” He commented that he didn’t care, because Twitter isn’t a real place, and he’s right.

It doesn’t mean it can’t be.

For years, people were thrown off the platform for merely saying things that rubbed the hard-left sentiments of Twitter’s hard-left employees the wrong way. It became increasingly clear that Twitter’s terms of service were, like the pirate’s code, more guidelines than actual rules. If someone said something that hurt the ego, the Twitter employee could somehow label the person saying it as dangerous and have them banned.

One notable example is Carpe Donktum, a conservative meme maker who oftentimes created hilarious and effective videos that made the left look bad and Trump look good. Donktum never actually did anything wrong and if he broke any rules he complied with Twitter’s takedown demands. At one point, he made a hilarious video about CNN’s habit of misreporting the news. Twitter told him to take it down after the creator of the original video requested it, which Donktum did. A few days later Twitter issued him a suspension notice out of nowhere with no way to get his account back.

As Jennifer Van Laar commented at the time, despite complying with every demand of Twitter and never actually breaking any rules, Donktum was tossed off the platform in 2020. He was banned, not for breaking any rules but because he was capable of doing something the left couldn’t do, and that was effectively making people laugh at his political opposites.

Two years prior to this in 2018, I covered how the bias at Twitter had grown out of control to the point where actual threats were being made against the children of right-wing figures and Twitter was doing absolutely nothing about it. Meanwhile, they were suspending conservatives for merely stating that Islamic extremists were committing violence against the innocent, which they were. This was accompanied by footage from Project Veritas that showed employees admitting they were banning pro-Trump Twitter users off of the platform for simply being pro-Trump.

Most recently, the satirists at Babylon Bee had their account suspended for making a joke about Rachel Levine, the transgender activist currently serving as our nation’s Assistant Secretary of Health, being “man of the year.” They’ve refused to take the offending tweet down.

Chappelle’s comment that Twitter isn’t a real place is correct, but that statement is only correct because the town square is controlled so tightly by leftists that the conversation became artificial. There are far fewer right-leaning voices on the platform than there were a decade ago and those of us that are still there are limited in terms of what we can say.

Musk can end the tyrannical hold on the conversation and, to be sure, that seems to be his aim.

How or when he’ll start to do this is still up in the air, but judging by Musk’s love of doing things instead of complaining about them, the changes may happen rapidly. When they do, the town square will become more full than it’s ever been, and what’s more, even louder than before.

No longer will the leftists on Twitter have their home-field advantage. They can’t rely on Twitter to silence their opposition for them, and conversations will have to take place on equal ground. Many of those who were kicked off the platform will come flooding back and the left will be forced to engage with more voices who won’t be silenced for speaking the truth now. For a time, the platform will become a warzone of ideas that I’m not sure the radical leftists who rule the platform can win.

I’ve spoken before of a second Rennaisance that would need to occur in our society in order to get it back on track. It would begin when the people decide they’d had enough of the nonsense we see when we get online from activists of every kind. I said something would have to break eventually.

It did with Musk’s takeover of Twitter:

Today we can look around see that things are in a state of pure lunacy. Just logging onto a social media website opens up a world where the news is selling you blood and conflict amidst a population that gobbles it up while signaling virtue after virtue and offering little to nothing in terms of real substance. We have regressed as Sagan said, but something is going to break. People are going to get tired of the nonsense and noise and look for a better way. They’ll refuse to slide back any further, turning, instead, to the wisdom of those who came before us in order to pave the road ahead with knowledge and a thirst for something better.

The second renaissance may not happen today or even in the next few years, but I do believe it’s on the horizon. Humanity has never been one to love wallowing in the mud for long, and soon society will reject those who wish to keep us there and move on to something greater.

Musk’s purchasing of Twitter may be the first sign of a second Rennaisance. Opening up the town square for free discussion is a big deal, and without the careful curating of the radical left, society will be shown ideas and concepts that they hadn’t previously been allowed to see or openly talk about.

Don’t get me wrong, it won’t be pretty, at least at first. Freedom and chaos are cousins and the tumultuousness of having so many opposing voices added all at once will cause quite an uproar, but eventually, that will level out. From there, the open debate will allow good ideas to float to the top, and with good ideas shining as they should, society may very well find itself changing along with it.

Actual science may shine through, biology respected, jokes allowed to be made freely again, sacred cows demolished left and right, and much, much more.

The future is much brighter.

Collins, Romney and Murkowski All Affirm Their Vote to Support Supreme Court Nomination of Ketanji Brown-Jackson

Sundance reporting for Conservative Treehouse 

I have not written much about the confirmation hearings and pantomime for Ketanji Brown-Jackson to take a Supreme Court seat because, well, the entire plan for her installation was obvious from before Joe Biden took office.   If you want to review the map READ THIS from January 6, 2021.

Once you know how to spot the strings on the DC marionettes, the puppet show becomes predictable.  KBJ was always going to be on the supreme court if Joe Biden was installed as president.

However, that said, in absolute affirmation of their UniParty ideology, the usual suspects have once again shown up to display their positions:

WASHINGTON DC – In a 53-47 vote, the Senate voted to advance Jackson’s nomination out of committee, with Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) joining all 50 members of the Democratic caucus in supporting Biden’s high court pick. All three of those senators have now said they will support Jackson’s confirmation to the high court. (link)

{BACKGROUND Story HERE – January 6, 2021}

Garland was made AG because he was on the DC Circuit Court.  Pulling Garland into the AG slot removed the block he represented.

It was always about getting the path for KBJ cleared.

KBJ will deliver rulings identical to those – as if Barack Obama was on the SCOTUS.

Lisa Monaco was appointed and confirmed Deputy AG as an insurance policy for the DOJ intent.

Groomer Fragility

Call a spade a spade.

by Benjamin Braddock for American Greatness

It was easy to see this coming. We knew the moment any Republican legislature pushed back in even the slightest way against gender identity indoctrination in public education the Democrats and the media would lose their minds in a frenzy of wrath. 

One thing I didn’t see coming: The Walt Disney Company going all-in to defend the proposition that 5-year-olds should be exposed to sexualized content in public schools, and committing to further sexualizing their content aimed at young children.

This is not normal. But it’s also not at all surprising. After all, anyone who has “done the work” to understand the postmodern American Left recognizes this reaction for what it is: groomer fragility. 

The spectacle of America’s cultural elite uniting to defend the propriety of child porn in school libraries, insisting that a gender ideology they had not even heard about until seven years ago must be taught to seven-year-olds, and a presidential administration publicly celebrating the breast amputation, genital mutilation, and sterilization of autistic children, should be utterly appalling to anyone with a shred of human decency. This all has led some on the Right to finally try to do what the Left always does: coin a novel political epithet. 

“Groomer.” It’s not a very nice word, to be sure. But the Right must decide: Do we prefer to play nice with perverts who are very sexually interested in our children? Or do we prefer to stand up for the innocence of childhood against societal forces that seek to mutilate little kids for political gain? 

We can expect most conservative pundits and Republican politicians to choose the first option. Because they crave a simulacrum of respectability above all else, they’re more likely to be offended by association with people who call liberals mean words than by the psychosexual campaign against childhood innocence. You should not take any moral cues from them. You should call a spade a spade. 

When you say “OK, groomer,” the best defense they’ve got is to be outraged as though you’ve just called them a pedophile. And it is, of course, not very nice to go around calling people pedophiles. But don’t let that trouble you. That isn’t what you said. That’s just where their minds jumped. Kind of weird, isn’t it? I mean, look it up in a dictionary. Synonyms: “educate, train, coach, drill, tutor.” Relevant definition: “to get into readiness for a specific objective.” 

The fact that they hear the word “pedophile” when you don’t say it is part of their groomer fragility. Most, after all, don’t intend to acquire direct carnal knowledge of children. (CNN producers, Disney employees, and Epstein’s friends excepted, of course.) But most are accessories to a project of sexualizing and confusing children for political gain. This fact deserves vastly more public attention and scrutiny. And many do seem to derive a very perverted sense of psychic satisfaction from children being sterilized and mutilated in pursuit of a “transgender identity.” Public attention must be drawn to this fact as well. 

The best way to draw public attention to the profound moral abyss that has seized the hearts and minds of America’s liberal cultural elite is to call them out for the perverted groomers that they have become. Sure, we could play by our normal playbook. Sit back, point out the “overreach” in the nicest possible terms, win an election or two, and then lose the issue when the Left’s government institutions and media inevitably resets public morality in their favor. 

Or we could try using their playbook. Fighting fire with fire. Calling things by name. 

The difference, of course, is that we have truth and virtue on our side. The postmodern American Left’s political philosophy is deeply rooted in profoundly perverted ideologues. Michel Foucault, godfather of political postmodernism to whom everything was “power,” was an (alleged) pedophile. Wilhelm Reich, godfather of the sexual revolution, believed that the only way to stop fascism was to smash the “patriarchy” by sexualizing children. John Money, godfather of gender ideology, was a pro-pedophile scientific fraudster. 

Of course, your average American journalist or Democrat apparatchik has barely read or perhaps even heard of any of these guys. No matter. Their commitment to grooming is, as they like to put it, structural and systemic. It might be unconscious. But we shouldn’t give unconscious groomers a pass. 

Last week, the Biden Administration affirmed the goodness and justness of what it calls “transgender affirming care.” “Affirming care.” Such nice words. What is involved in this “affirming care”? Cutting off the breasts of healthy girls. Inducing permanent sexual dysfunction. Sterilizing them. 

Have you heard any conservative pundits or seen any major politicians be so bold as to say: “It’s bad to sterilize kids”?

A little moral clarity goes a long way. Yet here we are, seven years into the grips of a gender identity mania, with relatively little public recognition that the “affirming care” being pushed by Big Pharma sterilizes children. With this mania edging ever closer to institutionalization in American public education, we should try speaking with a little moral clarity. 

As Christopher Rufo, who has done more in a year single-handedly than Conservatism, Inc. has done with billions of dollars over decades, put it: “A group of adults is very interested in your child’s sexuality.” 

They are groomers. Call them groomers. They won’t like being called groomers. But pay no attention to their groomer tears. Have no sympathy for their groomer fragility. Be a mom. Be a dad. Be a normal human being ante-2022. Don’t be afraid to fight perverted adults who are sexually interested in your children.

X22, And we Know, and more-April 4th

 

Hello. Here's tonight's news:

The Nihilism of the Left ~ VDH

In pursuit of its utopian omelet, the Left cares little about the 

millions of middle-class Americans it must break to make it.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

The last 14 months have offered one of the rare occasions in recent American history when the hard Left has operated all the levers of federal government. The presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the permanent bureaucratic state are all in progressive hands. And the result is a disaster that is uniting Americans in their revulsion of elitists whose crazy ideas are tearing apart the fabric of the country. 

For understandable reasons, socialists and leftists are usually kept out of the inner circles of the Democratic Party, and especially kept away from control of the country. A now resuscitated Bernie Sanders for most of his political career was an inert outlier. The brief flirtations with old-style hardcore liberals such as George McGovern in 1972 and Mike Dukakis in 1988 imploded the Democratic Party. Their crash-and-burn campaigns were followed by corrective nominees who actually won the presidency: Southern governors Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. 

Such was the nation’s innate distrust of the Left, and in particular the East Coast elite liberal. For nearly half a century between the elections of John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, it was assumed that no Democratic presidential candidate could win the popular vote unless he had a reassuring Southern accent. 

How did the extreme Left manage its rare takeover of the country between 2018 and 2020? Certainly, Obama’s election helped accelerate the woke movement and energized identity politics. One could also argue over the political opportunities in 2020 following the devastation of COVID-19. 

In the long term, the medicine of lockdowns and quarantines probably proved more calamitous than the disease, and this crisis mode made doable what had once been unimaginable. State governors such as Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, and Andrew Cuomo did not let the pandemic crisis go to waste. It was a rare occasion to leverage agendas that otherwise had no public support in ordinary times.

In the chaos of 2020, both laws and customs were altered or scrapped—changing the very way we vote. Over 102 million ballots were either mailed in or cast during so-called “early voting”—strangely resulting in far lower rejection rates in most states than in past “normal” years of predominantly in-person voting on Election Day. Indeed, in just one year, Election Day went from an American institution to an afterthought.

The hatred of Donald Trump prompted an influx of hundreds of millions of dark dollars from Silicon Valley to supplant the responsibilities of registrars in key precincts with armies of paid activists. A non compos mentis, basement-bound Joe Biden was cynically given an “Ol’ Joe from Scranton” moderate veneer to pursue a calibrated hard-Left agenda. 

So Americans ended up with a neo-socialist government. It is proving as disastrous as it is bitterly instructive—reminding this generation of Americans what the Left does when it grasps power. As all restraints came off, the hard and now unbridled Left went to work to turn America into something like a looney, one-party California. A wide-open border followed. We may see 3 million illegal aliens cross at the southern border during the first 18 months of the Biden Administration. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been allotted to reward those illegally entering America, who can expect free legal support from the U.S. government to ensure they are not subject to the laws of the United States. 

In a sane world, Biden would have been impeached for deliberately destroying the very federal laws he swore to uphold. On the prompt of his hard Left controllers, he was eager to alter the electoral demography of the nation rather than ensure immigrants came in reasonable numbers, legally, with audit and background checks, and safely in a time of a pandemic. The former illegal arrivals  were seen as needed constituents, the latter legal immigrants too politically unpredictable.

The Left in about a year has negated American gas and oil independence. Biden, who promised to end America’s use of fossil fuels on his watch, cast adrift millions of his fellow citizens to choose between driving and eating. Much of what the Left had traditionally demonized and wanted gone from American life—from gasoline to beefsteak to new pickup trucks—became so inflated in price as to be nearly unattainable. 

The electrician now pays five times more for his wire, the carpenter eight times more for his plywood, the plumber six times more for his pipe—as all three have to pay off-the-books cash for rare workers who prefer to get checks from the Biden Administration. The Biden printing press has destroyed both the idea that all citizens will work if there are just good-paying jobs, and that affordable necessities for life—food, fuel, and shelter—form the basis for a middle-class life.

If the Left did all that in 14 months, imagine what it can still do before losing the Congress in 2022.

The Biden Administration’s profligate multitrillion-dollar budget, inflation of the currency, de facto zero interest rates, destructive subsidies that undermined labor participation, and incompetence at addressing the supply-chain and clogged port crises will all by midyear likely achieve a 10 percent annualized inflation rate. Carter-era stagflation is on the near horizon. 

When an American president predicts a food shortage in what used to be the breadbasket of the world, then we see the wages of socialism in all their unapologetic cruelty. When the Left can scarcely hide its glee that diesel fuel hit $7 a gallon in California, the public is finally seeing that the Bidens, Newsoms, and AOCs of the world care nothing for the real-life consequences of their elite utopian green fantasies. How did America ever stoop to begging communist Venezuela, theocratic Iran, and dictatorial Russia to pump oil for us that we have in abundance but will not produce? Which insane person thought up the idea of using Vladimir Putin’s Russia as our mediator to restart the Iran Deal?

The now unfettered woke revolution seeks to Trotskyize American history and its heroes. A disastrous foreign policy of appeasement has ended U.S. deterrence. After the worst military humiliation in 50 years in Afghanistan, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea all seek to capitalize on a rare American Phaethon moment. The world’s superpower has turned over the reins of its deterrence chariot to a ninny and his gurus. And before crashing the country, they aimlessly rebound from one self-created crisis to the next self-induced disaster. 

The Clerks Come Out

Aside from the dismal left-wing political record, the public has also witnessed an unapologetically leftwing federal bureaucracy now completely unbound. Our top echelon of the administrative state is defiant in its weaponized assumption of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. 

We are learning that the likes of Anthony Fauci have all but destroyed the reputation of once time-honored federal health agencies. In their contradictions, about-faces, and deceit, they focused mostly on controlling their multibillion-dollar public fiefdoms, hounding critics, rewarding sycophants, politicizing “science,” hiding culpability about routing money to lunatic gain-of-function research in China, and marginalizing outspoken voices of audit.

The military apparat after Afghanistan—defined as woke Pentagon functionaries, revolving door and politically weaponized corporate generals, and outspoken politicos—managed the impossible: a once revered military now cannot even win a 50 percent vote of confidence from the American public. 

The intelligence agencies are worse. Former kingpins such as John Brennan and James Clapper, both pundits for hire on leftwing cable networks, lied under oath before Congress without consequences. When 50 retired intelligence officials during the Biden 2020 campaign claimed publicly that Hunter’s laptop was likely a Russian plot, what then is left of any semblance of nonpartisan professionalism and integrity? 

James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Christopher Wray have all eroded the reputation of the FBI by fueling the Russian collusion hoax, the Alfa Bank hoax, and the Hunter laptop disinformation hoax. Since when does the FBI go after journalists in their underwear or moms and dads at school board meetings, as if it is now an extension of the teacher union or DNC?

Along with Robert Mueller—who claimed no knowledge of either the Steele dossier or Fusion GPS—the Washington FBI hierarchy did to the agency what Lois Lerner infamously did to the IRS. Just as Lerner became an extension of the Obama 2012 reelection effort and corrupted tax law, so the FBI descended into becoming the wayward Biden family’s retrieval service—eager to keep quiet Hunter’s incriminating laptop and to rescue Ashley Biden’s lurid diary.

When the evidence becomes overwhelming that the collusionary media lied about the laptop or the origins of COVID-19, there is never a retraction, only a Soviet-style silence about past untruth. And then it is on to the next false narrative. 

Add in the conduct of FBI luminaries such as the forger Kevin Clinesmith, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok, who preferred to investigate conservatives rather than enemies of the nation. What characterizes, then, our once revered intelligence agencies is not just institutionalized mediocracy. Rather it is a dangerous zeal to enact by fiat politicized agendas that cannot otherwise be ratified by a legislative vote—all with the expectation that these sanctified agents of political change are above the law and will be rewarded accordingly.

Our Ill Institutions

Americans had tuned out many of our major institutions that are now openly hostile to American exceptionalism. In their nihilism, leftists seek to destroy the very organizations they absorbed. 

Professional sports? Multimillionaire basketball players are more likely to refuse to salute their own flag than to say a word of dissent to their autocratic and often ethnocentric Chinese paymasters.

Higher education? A Yale law school dean contextualizes the loud disruption of free speech by leftist law students at a conference. Only that way can she ensure that rules about open expression remain theoretical, and not real for the woke. 

Entertainment? Hiring, promotions, and awards are now based as much on race, gender, and sexual identity as on merit. 

Forty years ago, face slapper Will Smith would likely have been removed from the Oscar ceremonies for rudely shouting and interrupting the worldwide show. Twenty years ago, he might still have been rebuked for profanity and yelling the F-word in a live televised event. Now he is neither arrested nor even removed for physically assaulting comedian Chris Rock. His belated contrition is belied by his refusal to leave the ceremony and to go dancing and partying into the post-assault wee hours. Will there be open brawling on stage next year?

The Left got what it wanted and now controls academia, the media, the internet, K-12 education, corporate boardrooms, the Pentagon, Wall Street, and Hollywood. And they more or less have turned each of these into versions of Pravda. The sermons, arrogance, and narcissism of these woke cultural imperialists now explain why they are disliked as much abroad as they are at home. 

In sum, we are watching a rare laboratory experiment in which the traditional American fringe is now in control of the government. In pursuit of its utopian omelet, the Left cares little about the millions of middle-class Americans it must break to make it. The result is an unmitigated disaster that not only has tarred the Democratic Party, corrupted once-revered agencies, and alienated half the country from our cultural institutions, but now endangers the very health and security of the United States. 

Larry Hogan Decides to Trash Ron DeSantis

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

Gov. Larry Hogan, who is finishing up his final term in the deep-blue state of Maryland, wants to run for president in 2024. More laughably, he apparently wants to do so as a Republican. Because what do GOP voters love more than a politician who goes on CNN, accepts false premises, and then rails against their own party?

That’s what transpired on Sunday morning as Hogan appeared on “State of the Union” with Martha Raddatz.  As expected, the latter was quick to tee up criticism of Ron DeSantis and Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education law. Hogan, every thirsty for media backslaps, took the bait and played his role as the “good Republican.”

Before I get to Hogan, I want to point out how Raddatz describes the law in question, because I think it says so much about the left. First, she uses the false title “Don’t Say Gay” to describe it, which is hardly surprising given she’s a dishonest hack. But then she goes on to state that the law “bans certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom.”

What classroom are we talking about? Is it all classrooms or is it just K-3rd grade classrooms? If you’ve been paying attention, you know the answer is the latter, but Raddatz doesn’t say that for one simple reason: Even liberals are embarrassed to admit what this fight is actually about. That’s why you’ll never see a Democrat accurately describe the Parental Rights in Education bill in full detail. Because if they do, it becomes obvious how disturbing their opposition is.

But I digress, Hogan decided to take a swing at the king, and he just missed badly.

The first thing that jumps out to me is how much of a coward this guy is. Instead of actually owning what the law says and attempting to dispute it on the merits, Hogan actually claims that he doesn’t know what it says. We are talking about a law that has been at the top of the headlines for months, and he wants people to believe he’s just never bothered to read a summary of it.

Hogan then starts listing things that DeSantis has done, insinuating he’s overstepped his authority in telling businesses what to do. His examples? That DeSantis told local school districts they can’t make kids wear useless masks and that he told cruise lines they can’t discriminate based on COVID vaccination status. On both points, the Florida governor has been proven completely right, as mask mandates and vaccine passports have been shown to be completely ineffective.

Then there’s the biggest problem with Hogan’s commentary, which is that he frames Disney as an innocent bystander in all this. In reality, it is Disney that picked this fight with DeSantis, not the other way around. Further, private companies are not entitled to continue to receive tax breaks and other special treatment, even as they inject themselves into politics in a way that runs directly counter to the will of the voters. DeSantis is very popular in Florida. The Parental Rights in Education bill enjoys wide approval as well. If Disney wants to “take a stand” and push for the sexualization of young children, it can do so without further taxpayer-funded incentives.

To summarize, not only did Hogan not have the facts about the law he was commenting on, but he thought it was a great idea to then mispresent DeSantis’ tenure because the Maryland governor was too spineless to make moves in his own state to protect individual rights. At the end of his remarks, you see Hogan smile at Raddatz, as if to lovingly absorb her approval. It’s all just so pathetic, and it’s why this guy doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell come 2024.

Young French Jewish man beaten by gang, killed by tram, family claims

 

The family of French Jewish man Jeremy Cohen, who died after being hit by a tram two months ago, stated:  "Jeremy's death is linked to an attack of which he was the victim - by a gang of young people immediately before being hit" according to a report by Radio Shalom in France.

Cohen, according to the report, was hit by a tram in Bobigny, a town in the northeastern suburbs of Paris, France in February.

"You've probably heard of it, a young Jew dies when run after being hit by a tram in Bobigny" the radio's site stated on Monday, "Jeremy Cohen died after being hit by a line 1 tram. The victim, taken to the hospital in a state of emergency, did not survive his injuries. Against all odds, his brothers set out to find testimonies."   

According to Radio Shalom, who interviewed the family, Cohen's family "distributed flyers around the city, asking the public for witnesses to come forward and collect videos of the young man's death."

The French Jewish news site added that "It turns out that he was attacked by a gang just before the facts" – according to testimony by his father Gérald, his brother Raphaël and other representatives of the community in an interview by Bernard Abouaf.  

Far-Right Jewish French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour tweeted about the case, writing: "These images are chilling. The death of yet another of our children and the deafening silence on the facts revolt me. Did he die to escape scum? Did he die because he was a Jew? Why is this case hushed up?"  

French MP Meyer Habib: "The circumstances of the death of Jeremy Cohen, a 31-year-old religious Jew, appear to have been much more dramatic. The victim, who according to all the evidence wore a skullcap on his head, tried to escape, as the video clearly shows, from a gang of thugs who attacked him. As he runs away from them, he did not see the train traveling in his direction. The pictures are awful.  It breaks everyone's heart. Today I turned to the interior minister who confirmed to me that the authorities take the issue very seriously and that the case is being dealt with by the justice system. I also contacted the Justice Ministry and I am waiting for his answer on the subject."  

MK Yomtob Kahlfon (Yamina) who made aliyah from France added that "The incident happened a month and a half ago... only now is the story coming to consciousness in France - something that raises concerns once again about an attempt to cover up an antisemitic murder as happened with the late Sarah Halimi. I expect the French authorities to act to decipher the case soon and give explanations."  

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-703197   

Ron Johnson Is Asking All The Hunter Biden Questions The Media Should Be

It ‘ought to concern every American,’ Johnson rightly concluded. 

But when will it start concerning the corporate media?

Kylee Zempel reporting for The Federalist

MADISON, Wis. — Although the media are finally acknowledging, way too little too late, that the Hunter Biden laptop and its incriminating contents are actually legitimate, it is largely burying the lede, neglecting to give the scandal the attention it deserves and refusing to ask important questions.

Two GOP senators, Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, are the only lawmakers who seem much to care. Over the last week, they’ve released a series of reports including bank receipts showing that the president’s son received payments from foreign oligarchs that show “the extent to which President Biden might be — and almost certainly is — compromised.”

For its part, the media should take a cue from Johnson, who is asking all the questions they should be. In response to inquiries from The Federalist at a parent town hall in Madison, Wisconsin, on Friday, Johnson shed more light on the investigation.

For starters, Hunter wasn’t the target of Johnson and Grassley’s investigation, the senator stressed. It all started with an investigation into the Russia collusion hoax and the federal law enforcement agencies involved, such as the FBI and Department of Justice, but during the Trump impeachment regarding his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the “conflict of interest of Hunter Biden in Ukraine just got on the radar.”

Unlike the corporate media, which stayed fixated on Trump’s nothingburger phone call, the senators began looking into the Biden family’s conflicts of interest.

“As we started digging into that, we found a vast web of foreign financial entanglements that certainly concerned us how that might impact and compromise a potential President Biden, and I think now we’re seeing that concern right here,” Johnson said.

Johnson added that although his report was “widely ignored by the media,” more information will continue to surface from Hunter’s infamous laptop. Although the corporate press downplayed as “Russian disinformation” in the run-up to the 2020 election to help Joe Biden get elected, Johnson said it is a “treasure trove of troubling information” that “should concern every American.”

There are questions begging to be asked, and if the media refuse to dig into them, Johnson has made clear he will do it himself:

“Why did, for example, President Biden cancel the sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline? Why did he cancel the China initiative, which was designed to investigate and uncover Chinese theft of our intellectual property here at universities?” Johnson asked. “Could it be because of these financial foreign entanglements? A part of his family cashing in on his political position? Is he compromised?”

These questions demand answers, but corporate journalists have relinquished their primary duty of uncovering and communicating the truth to instead protect some of the most powerful people in America because it serves their partisan ends.

As Biden family information continues to come out, the media will almost assuredly ignore it as they have been doing — or at least do all they can to make it seem as unsensational as possible. For instance, when the New York Times finally admitted that the Hunter Biden laptop was legitimate, it did so in a bland article about a tax investigation — and just casually mentioned the laptop’s validity nearly 25 paragraphs into the story.

“I think there’s going to be more information coming forward, but we do need to get to the bottom of this because I might not know, the American public might not know, all the details of the Biden foreign financial entanglements, but I’ll tell you who does know: Chinese intelligence, Russian intelligence, probably Iranian, North Korean intelligence — I would guess there are probably elements within our own intelligence agencies, law enforcement that know, but they’re just not going to tell us,” Johnson said.

“That ought to concern every American,” he rightly concluded.

When will it start concerning the corporate media?

The Ukraine war proves it:

The Ukraine war proves it: 

The West needs to end its reckless war on energy

New York Post - 

By 

Post Editorial Board

It's time for the West to acknowledge an inconvenient truth: We will all need carbon-based fuel (and nuclear energy) for the foreseeable future. REUTERS/Richard Carson

Maybe now the West will wake up to the foolishness of its war on energy, which has left it badly dependent on the Kremlin Killer and other scum for oil and gas.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is creating ginormous energy-related headaches for Europe, with Germany moving to ration natural gas amid looming shortages, along with sky-high prices (particularly on oil and gas at the pump) there and here.

Yet energy prices were surging well before the war, largely thanks to the West’s attempts to do away with its own fossil-fuel industries, despite the lack of viable alternatives. That’s especially true in Europe, which has been madly racing away from gas and oil — closing natural-gas plants, for example, and discouraging investment. Germany has even moved away from nuclear energy.

Yet the West lacks anything like enough substitutes to handle its energy needs. Besides, renewables like solar or wind power are unreliable, as Europe learned the hard way over the past year or so when both sunshine and wind were in short supply. The Ukraine war has only driven home those points.

Germany, of course, has long known renewables won’t cut it, which is why it’s sought to buy ever-increasing amounts of natural gas from Vladimir Putin, with the help of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. That’s left it foolishly reliant on him.

In 2018, President Donald Trump said in a UN speech, “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course,” and German ambassadors laughed. 

Indeed, Russia’s been supplying 30% to 40% of Europe’s energy needs — which is why it’s been so hard for the European Union to cut off Russian oil and gas in wake of the war.

Meanwhile, as prices at US pumps spike, President Joe Biden’s been reduced to begging OPEC and thugs like Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro for more oil, as well as stunts like raiding the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, as he did again Thursday. Lord knows what perilous concessions his team’s offering Tehran to restore the flawed 2015 nuclear deal, with the hope of new oil supplies from Iran.

To help Europe, Biden announced a deal to supply it with an extra 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas this year. Yet LNG plants in America are already at capacity, and anyway that amount won’t come close to replacing the 155 bcm Russia provides. And though America has plenty more gas, restrictions on drilling, fracking, gas pipelines, new LNG facilities and the like stand in the way of larger output.

Heck, the European Union could produce more oil itself — if its western members lifted their foolish, unscientific bans on fracking. (Same for high-energy-cost US states such as California and New York, an issue we’ll return to this week.)

It’s time for the West to acknowledge an inconvenient truth: We will all need carbon-based fuel (and nuclear energy) for the foreseeable future. Refusing to exploit our own resources simply leaves us buying from, and enabling, the world’s most vile regimes.