Friday, December 1, 2023

It’s Time to Unite Behind Trump If We Want to Win in 2024

The ice is melting beneath our feet and Trump is our life raft


The 2024 Presidential election is rapidly approaching. In many ways it can’t come soon enough. Americans have now spent nearly three painful years waking up every day astonished to learn that the Biden administration has outdone its previous act of insanity.

The shocking revelation, for example, that the Biden Administration is covertly flying illegals into the interior of the U.S. is quickly forgotten when new revelations emerge that the same Administration is sabotaging Texas’ efforts to secure the border—ordering federal agents to cut through the wire barriers erected by the state of Texas.

After botching the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan—which left 13 U.S. service members dead and both Americans and billions in American military equipment behind, while turning the country over to the Taliban—Biden invited Russia to invade Ukraine with his “minor incursion” remark. The Biden administration has since sent billions in U.S. military equipment and munitions to Ukraine, not to mention more than $100 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Fears of a Biden-caused nuclear World War in Eastern Europe have faded, only to be replaced with the even more realistic and frightful prospect of an imminent Third World War in the Middle East. Biden, like the Obama administration before, has inexplicably funded the hostile Iranian regime, which in turn funds the very terrorists that seek the annihilation of both Israel and the U.S.

The upshot of all this—three years of “governance” by either the most incompetent or otherwise malevolent administration in American history—is an American citizenry vacillating constantly between a state of angst and denial; as if we are all trapped on a frozen pond as the temperature continues to rise. For many this denial has become a coping mechanism to survive the day to day dread.

How many more days can we endure life under the Biden administration? Nearly ten million illegals have entered the country in less than four years. The border remains open and illegals continue to pour in even as the threat of a radical Islamic terrorist attack crescendos and a steady stream of Americans die from fentanyl made in Mexico with Chinese sourced chemicals.

Problems and crises are neither addressed nor resolved by the Biden administration; only ignored and forgotten by the introduction of new or greater crises of the administration’s own seemingly deliberate making.

Does anyone remember the mystery Chinese spy balloon? The four times deported illegal that murdered his five Texas neighbors in Cleveland, Texas? The cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline? How are the victims of the chemical spill and subsequent aerosolization of toxins from the still-unexplained “controlled burn” in East Palestine, Ohio faring? Has Biden made his promised visit yet?

The failures of the Biden administration are so frequent and numerous so as to almost have a beneficial effect for the pretend President. Americans suffer collective amnesia. Our memories can hardly retain—much less process—the catastrophes of today before our minds are bombarded with a whole set of new tragedies.

If Americans can’t remember the Biden Administration’s failures yesterday, can these same Americans honestly recall the Trump successes of yesteryear?

Even still, Americans seem to have at least a vague recollection that they were at least generally better off under the Trump administration than they are today under the Biden Administration.

Poll after poll now shows Trump narrowly leading Biden—and even others like Newsom—in hypothetical matchups for 2024. Polls themselves can certainly be inaccurate but so too can they accurately represent public sentiment. Why shouldn’t Trump be leading Biden given the historic failures of the Biden administration?

And yet while all historical indications point to what ought to be virtually a guaranteed Trump victory in 2024, many Republicans choose to remain dubious; not just dubious but actively engaged in sabotaging GOP chances, as if they themselves would rather will Trump’s defeat than his victory.

Consequently, while 2024 can’t come soon enough it may also come too soon if Republicans continue to both inexplicably deny Trump’s ability to win and actively undermine it by searching for and even manufacturing reasons to hate Trump.

Trump’s supposed unelectability is a spurious claim with little basis in reality. If Trump is so unpopular, why did he receive ten million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016?

Most of those Republicans who now would point to Trump’s loss in 2020 as evidence that he cannot win in 2024 ignore the fact that he did win in 2016 and have developed a curious amnesia as it relates to the Democrats’ unprecedented mail-in ballot strategy of 2020; a strategy these same Republicans once claimed was utilized to steal the election.

Why would deeply unpopular GOP Presidential candidates Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley—both polling more than 40 points behind Trump—fare better than Trump in a general election? And why would Democrats be less motivated to use mail-in ballots to their advantage against DeSantis or Haley than Trump?

The reality is that Trump can win. But that necessary outcome becomes less likely the longer Republicans deny Trump’s inevitable nomination, adopt leftist talking points, and attack him with greater vitriol than they reserve for Joe Biden or any Democrat.

Americans have all lived under a Trump and Biden administration. Can any American objectively claim to be better under Biden than Trump? Trump is a great candidate whose record eviscerates the current pretender in the Oval Office.

Casting one’s vote for Trump over Biden or any other Democrat in 2024 ought to be one of the easiest decisions any American has had to make. And it can be.

We have less than a year to persuade Americans to vote to save the country in 2024. Wouldn’t we be better served—and our country—by making the obvious case to re-elect our eventual nominee, Trump, rather than spending our time regurgitating Democrat talking points and lies in an effort to help Democrats win?

The ice is melting beneath our feet and Trump is our life raft. We should be urging Americans to climb aboard rather than trying to convince them it’s a shark. It’s time to unite behind Trump if we want to win in 2024. That’s why I wrote America’s Last Stand: Will You Vote to Save or Destroy America in 2024. 

If I can make the case to save our Republic, you can too. In fact, you must. It’s time to unite behind Trump if we want to win in 2024.



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X22, And we Know, and more- December 1st

 



NCIS has returned to filming, baby! 🥳🥳

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The Unhinged Among Us ~ VDH

Is the pro-Hamas crowd ignorant of Middle East history?


October 7 should have been an open-and-shut case of moral condemnation.

During peace and holiday, invading Hamas gunmen murdered, tortured, mass raped, decapitated, and mutilated some 1,200 Israelis. The vast majority were unarmed women, children, infants, and the elderly.

The cowardly murderers proudly filmed their atrocities and then fled back to Gaza—to cheers from the Gaza street.

Before Israel even retaliated, the mass murdering of Jews earned praise from the Middle East, the international hard left, and especially the faculty and students of elite Western campuses.

When the Israeli Defense Forces struck back, the killers dispersed to the safety of their multibillion-dollar subterranean cities. The cowardly elite architects of the mass murder fled to Arab sanctuaries in Lebanon and Qatar.

From its headquarters burrowed below hospitals, mosques, and schools, Hamas bartered hostages for a reprieve from the IDF and the release of its own convicted terrorists in Israeli jails.

Hamas shot any of its own supporters who refused to shield Hamas gunmen.

It continued launching rockets at Israeli civilian centers. It serially lied about its casualties, expropriating intended relief food and fuel for its underground tunnel city of killers.

Abroad, Hamas supporters also emulated the methods of the pro-Nazi demonstrators in Western cities of the 1930s. Unlike their pro-Israel critics, the pro-Hamas demonstrators in the U.S. and Europe turned violent.

They took over and defaced private and public property. They chanted genocidal anti-Semitic slogans calling for erasure of the nation of Israel.

They interrupted shoppers, blocked highways, attacked businesses, and swarmed bridges. They assaulted police.

The majority wore masks to hide their identities in the fashion of anti-semitic Klansmen.

Why did the doctrinaire left, the youth of the Democratic Party, and the campuses outdo each other in their anti-semitic venom toward Israel?

For the first time in their lives, many of the ignorant protestors suddenly professed concern about refugees, colonialism, disproportionality, innocent civilians, and the rules of war.

But none could explain why the Palestinians who fled Israel in 1947-48 still self-identify as victimized “refugees” when 900,000 Jews ethnically cleansed from Middle-East Arab cities about the same time do not.

The 200,000 Greek Cypriots driven out from norther Cyprus by Turkey apparently do not warrant “refugee’’ status either.

Few protestors knew that Jews have lived in present-day Israel for over three millennia. The longest colonialist presence there were Muslim Turks who brutally ran the Holy Land for 300 years until they lost World War I and were expelled.

How exactly did it happen that the eighth-century A.D. Al-Aqsa Mosque was built within King Herod’s earlier Second Temple enclosure?

The Pro-Hamas crowd has little appreciation that colonizing Arab Muslims have one of history’s longest records of “settling” other countries far from their historic birthland.

They “settled” and “colonized” the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Middle East, Berber North Africa, and southern Spain. Millions of Middle Easterners migrated to—“settled?”— supposedly infidel European cities, where they often self-segregate, and do not assimilate fully with their magnanimous hosts.

As far as “disproportionality,” it is the goal of every power at war, Hamas included.

What protestors are furious about is that Israel is more effective at being disproportionate in retaliation than Hamas and its Iranian supporters were in their preemptive mass murdering.

Targeting innocent civilians? Hamas is among the current greatest offenders in the world.

It rockets Israeli cities without warning. It mass murders Jews in their beds during peace. It exposes Gazans to mortal danger by impressing them as human shields. Hamas shoots those who refuse.

The “rules of war” are violated by Hamas daily. Such protocols require combatants to wear uniforms not to blend in with civilians, not to use them as shields, not to murder noncombatants, not to rape them, not to mutilate them, and not to execute civilians without trial.

Why then would millions ally themselves with this odious reincarnation of the SS?

Are they ignorant of the history of the Middle East?

Are they arrogant since few challenge their hate and threats?

Are they opportunists who feel mouthing anti-Western shibboleths gains them career traction in leftist-run media, academia, and popular culture?

Are they bullies who count on the Western silent majority remaining quiet as they disrupt lives, trash Western tolerant culture, and commit violence?

Like Hamas that they support, do they despise Jews? Why else do they express an existential hatred toward Israelis that they never display to any other group?

Those now on the street utter not a peep about the Sudanese Arab mass killers in Darfur, Chinese oppressors of the Muslim Uighurs, Russians targeting civilians in Ukraine, or ISIS, Syrian, and Yemeni murderers of fellow Muslims.

Yet all of these terrorist killers are guilty of the very charges the protestors falsely attribute to Israel. But they are all not Jewish—and that explains the pass given them by our anti-semitic, pro-Hamas street.



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Media’s 2024 Pitch To America: Be Poor Because Democracy Depends On It



It’s become a favorite pastime of the Biden era to read each day about how poorly voters say they’re doing and simultaneously how great the news media say everything actually is.

Media: Biden is on a roll! Full employment! Inflation cooling! NATO has rallied!

Normal person: I have no money…

Media: Sure ya do! Wages are up! Record spending! Hot diggity dog!

Normal person: I’d like to buy my first home, but interest rates are too high, and I’d like to trade in my car, but even used ones are too expensive…

Media: Nonsense, my boy! Gas prices are down! And have you seen what the president’s done with NATO?!

Normal person: Maybe a hardship withdrawal from my 401K will hold me over…

Media: Now that’s the spirit!

Every poll and survey shows that shoppers are spending more and getting less. Retirement withdrawals are up. Credit card delinquency is rising.

The media will then ask in earnest, “But why aren’t people happier?” and make up some ridiculous theory like that it must be TikTok’s fault.

Seriously. The New York Times, Washington Post, and New Republic each ran articles in recent days positing that what people are seeing on TikTok might actually be a reason why so many say the economy sucks, that they don’t understand why their savings are dwindling, and that that the price of food — even crap food at McDonald’s — is frightening.

And when they’re not proposing the absurd, the media simply blame the public for not getting it.

Charles Blow of the Times never fails to deliver the parody version of what his smarter peers are saying, and this issue was no different. “[T]here are those who just don’t feel the positive impacts of the Biden presidency, whether it’s on the economy or on foreign policy,” he wrote this week. “This isn’t because the administration hasn’t had successes, but because individual citizens sometimes don’t recognize the source of those successes or experience them in ways that they can immediately feel.”

Folks! Biden’s successes are there, folks! You just don’t recognize them, folks! You just aren’t experiencing them in ways you can immediately feel, folks!

Don’t you see? It’s not Biden’s fault. It’s yours for not understanding how good everything is.

The choice for president next year is all but certain to be between reelecting everything we currently have or attempting to go back to what we had. To the extent that you can believe polls on the matter, it looks like most people are ready to choose the latter, which, according to the media, is a threat to democracy!

What do you mean you want cheap food and fuel? Don’t you care about democracy?

“[T]he threat Trump poses hasn’t diminished,” Blow continued. “It has increased. He’s more open about his plans to alter the country and our form of government if he is returned to the White House. And yet, some Americans simply aren’t registering that threat as having the potential to harm in the way that it obviously can.”

Aren’t you scared? You should be!

It’s quite the sales pitch: Be poor. Save democracy. Biden 2024.



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The Truth About Corporate Journalism Was Just Perfectly Put by Glenn Greenwald


Might seem odd that a journalist is writing an article about how journalists shouldn't be trusted, but I've always been very up-front and honest about what a journalist is. We are...humans. We're fallible beings who are often driven by emotion and with a bias developed by years of life experience, social pressures, and circumstances just like you are. 

I've made it very clear in past writing that I don't believe there is such a thing as an unbiased journalist or, by extension, an unbiased news outlet. 

This doesn't make journalists or news outlets useless by any means. If the journalist is honest with both themselves and their potential readers about who they are and where they stand, then the reader can judge what they're being told far more accurately. For instance, I have a bias toward libertarian ideals with a Christian backdrop. My writing and opinions will be heavily influenced by these philosophies. 

You will never hear me say that my take is unbiased, nor that you should just stop reading about a thing after you've heard me talk about it. My personal take on a thing is one idea. There are a ton more about the thing out there that you should read to get a fuller idea about it. 

I know I will. 

But there are journalists out there who don't want to admit their bias. They want you to believe that they're the picture of impartiality. They want you to believe that what they're serving up is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help them (insert corporation they work for here). 

These people aren't here to tell you the story. They're here to intentionally serve you a narrative. 

This was perfectly explained by Glenn Greenwald in a video he recently released defending Elon Musk and his recent "f*** you" to journalists trying to take him down, by lying about his stances and taking his quotes out of context. 

Greenwald made the point that too many journalists don't take that same attitude, and in fact, embrace the guidelines and neutering of their reporting in order to appease corporations or people in power. They welcome censorship to the point where what they're doing is no longer reporting, it's dispensing propaganda: 

We need way more journalists willing to say, go f**k yourself to people who try and limit what they say.  The problem is, is that the people who are hired by these major media corporations, and who thrive in them and succeed in them are people who have the opposite instinct. Their instinct is to assuage and serve and placate establishment power, not to defy it. Even though the purpose of journalism is to be adversarial to establishment power.

Once journalism started getting corporatized, no longer owned by families dedicated to journalism, or local communities, but by major corporations that have all kinds of other interests besides their media division. And, what kind of attributes are awarded at major corporations?  People who avoid controversy who avoid conflict, who avoid displeasing and angering powerful people. That's the corporate ethos, and the corporatization of media meant that that kind of attribute was imported into journalism. 

And that's why almost no one who works for large media corporations or the media corporations themselves has the courage to say this. They're shocked. They think it's a sign that he's unhinged when in reality, it's just a sign of how cowardly and craven they are.


This is a great point, and I'd like to add to it. 

Perhaps these kinds of "journalists" don't necessarily qualify as being "journalists." Perhaps a more accurate description would be "product." 

They are a thing being sold to you, not as a way of telling you what's going on in your world accurately, but in order to get you to believe a perspective and idea that would greatly benefit that particular corporation or person in power. Like a catchy jingle in a commercial, they'll get you to repeat their easy-to-remember lines and story beats during conversations with friends and family. 

Then they'll turn around and tell you that they have no bias, they speak nothing but the truth, and they're pure as the driven snow. 

These aren't journalists. They're products. 



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The Reality of Goodness, Not the Perception of It


Elon Musk is under attack by the authoritarians in our society. That much is certain. 

And why not? He's given the people a popular platform where they speak freely and exchange information that would make the lives and goals of these authoritarians all the harder to accomplish. One has to wonder how many narratives the left has tried to get off the ground that absolutely would have five years ago, but are crashing before they can truly take off thanks to Musk's "X" platform. 

This has naturally made Musk and X the target of various leftist groups, and these groups have been working to cripple the free speech outlet Musk created. Musk is understandably angry and frustrated about this, and to the advertisers that abandoned him at the whims of these leftist groups, he had a heartfelt response. 

"Go **** yourself." 

But that wasn't the most interesting part of that interview. The most interesting part was this: 

“I’m saying what I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it," Musk said. "And what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil.”

Musk is right. These advertisers that pulled out did so because they wanted to look like they were too virtuous to be on Musk's platform, a man who was taken far out of context with some things he said and was accused of antisemitism when it's clear he's not an antisemite, a fact I'm sure many of these companies are well aware of. 

Still, the withdrawal from X was supposed to be the reinforcement of a look of goodness while, as Musk noted, they practice great evil. Disney, for instance, is a company that has busied itself over the last few years in creating radical leftist propaganda while attempting and failing to come between parents and their children in Florida's school systems. Its attempts to push homosexuality and transgenderism on children are nothing short of contemptible, yet Disney puts on the mask of being pure as the driven snow when it comes to where it advertises. 

Disney is not a good company, but it wants you to think it is. It's lying to you about its moral character through this action against Musk. 

But it's going to fool a lot of people because perception of a thing is easier to define something with than the truth of the thing. 

Here's the brutal truth about goodness; it rarely looks good. Goodness is putting a dying animal out of its misery. Goodness is oftentimes not giving the homeless drug addict money. Goodness is the inconvenient truth that is likely going to upset a lot of people and hurt a lot of feelings. Goodness is necessary violence. Goodness is often punishment for an unruly child and solo defiance against a wayward mob. 

Goodness is often the dirty work that has to get done for a society to maintain order. It can look mean, brutal, and uncaring, but the results of true goodness are beyond questioning. It's kind of hilarious that we think goodness looks pretty and clean, because more often than not, it isn't. 

Virtue signaling, the act of looking "good," is often a mask for nothing good. Virtue signaling usually costs nothing, but virtue signal about something long enough and the bill will eventually come due. It's what you do when you want to fool someone into trusting you while doing nothing to earn their trust. 

In today's age of the internet, virtue signaling is easy to do and it's done to great effect. You can even weaponize your fake virtue into making goodness seem like an enemy of the people. You saw that quite a bit during the pandemic. 

Musk's platform might play host to a bevy of trolls, liars, thieves, and evil people, but it's also where the truth thrives, and the truth unleashed tends to eat those who would push evil alive. Musk's platform might not look pretty but it's a force for good. 

Can Disney say the same?

Yes. They can say it. But that's virtue signaling for you. It's speaking good and doing evil. 

I'll side with Musk's imperfect platform where a never-ending fight for the truth and goodness is happening and leave behind the false order of the virtue signaling left. 



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Jim Jordan Subpoenas Two Infamous Biden White House Censorship Czars



On Thursday, House Judiciary Chair Rep. Jim Jordan subpoenaed two of the White House’s most infamous censorship czars, former White House Senior Advisor for the Covid Response Team Andrew Slavitt and former Director of Digital Strategy for the Biden White House Robert Flaherty.

Both men were ordered to appear for a deposition related to the Weaponization Committee’s investigation “into how and to what extent the Executive Branch has coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech,” the Judiciary Committee wrote in a press release.

Thus far, Slavitt and Flaherty have refused to voluntarily comply with Jordan’s request to appear before his committee, saying through their lawyers that the lawmakers should instead contact the White House. In letters to Slavitt and Flaherty, Jordan stated that the former White House officials’ excuses for not complying with Congress are “unpersuasive.”

The Weaponization Committee’s investigation has largely been informed by the explosive Missouri v. Biden, which exposed several instances of illegal censorship directed by the White House and various federal agencies. The case is expected to be heard by the Supreme Court sometime before the end of next June. Below is a list of just a few instances of censorship directed specifically by Slavitt and Flaherty.

Shadow Banning Tucker Carlson 

On April 14, 2021, Slavitt demanded the censorship of a post made by Tucker Carlson because of its “anti-vax message.” Facebook responded by assuring Slavitt that it had “demoted” the post. Despite the shadow banning, Carlson’s post was able to garner 40,000 shares, prompting Flaherty to follow up with Facebook.  Flaherty even apparently phone-called a Facebook executive demanding an explanation for the post’s virality. Facebook responded by insisting that the video was given a “50% demotion for seven days and stated that it would continue to demote the video.”

Deplatforming Alex Berenson

On April 21, 2021, Flaherty, Slavitt, and other HHS officials attended a “Twitter Vaccine Misinfo Briefing” with Twitter executives. The invite stated the Biden officials would be briefed on ways Twitter and “the White House could ‘partner’ in product work.’”

During the meeting, White House officials wanted to know why Alex Berenson had not been “kicked off” Twitter, with Slavitt describing Berenson as “the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.” Berenson was subsequently suspended and later permanently deplatformed.

Removing Vaccine Humor Content 

In January 2022, Facebook reported to Flaherty, Slavitt, and other White House officials that it had “labeled and demoted” comedic vaccine posts that may discourage vaccination. Facebook also assured the White House that it “labeled and ‘demoted’ posts suggesting natural immunity to a COVID-19 infection is superior to vaccine immunity.”

‘Immediately’ Banning Biden Parody Account

On Feb. 6, 2021, the White House asked Twitter to ban a “parody account linked to Finnegan Biden, Hunter Biden’s daughter and President Biden’s granddaughter.”

“Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately,” Flaherty wrote. “Please remove this account immediately.” Within 45 minutes, Twitter suspended the account.

“The Committee and Select Subcommittee have obtained documents that demonstrate the central role that Slavitt and Flaherty played in communicating the Biden White House’s censorship efforts to social media companies, including the White House’s demands to censor true information, memes, satire, and other constitutionally protected forms of expression,” the Judiciary Committee wrote in its statement. “Testimony from Slavitt and Flaherty will inform the Committee’s and Select Subcommittee’s legislative reforms aimed at preventing the Executive Branch from wielding its immense power to pressure social media platforms to censor disfavored viewpoints.”



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Testimony before Congress shows 1984 is here, and Obama started it


Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, two honest men who worked on the Twitter Files, exposing how the government collaborated with Twitter to affect the 2020 election, testified before the House today. What they said should terrify you. Beginning in January 2017, under then-president Obama’s direction, the government instituted a social media manipulation system intended to game the 2020 election through censorship and controlled information (which, to my mind, amounts to misinformation). It was unconstitutional, but it worked. And now, using the vehicle of the corrupt criminal action against Trump, the government is bypassing manipulating information and is planning to target ordinary Americans.

I’ll keep this post simple. First, here is the opening statement from Michael Shellenberger. I’ve appended a transcript of his testimony to the end of this post.

Second, here are highlights from Matt Taibbi’s and Michael Shellenberger’s testimony. The tweet itself includes some transcribed material:

Third, now that you know how the government, acting under Obama’s instructions, manipulated social media to destroy Donald Trump’s president and game the 2020 election, you need to know that, in 2024, the Deep State will have upped its game. This time around, the Deep Staters aren’t just doing a global campaign to control the flow of information on social media. Instead, using discovery in the federal criminal litigation against Donald Trump, Jack Smith has gathered information for their use that’s specifically about you.

The Last Refuge (aka, for us oldsters, The Conservative Treehouse) writes that Jack Smith’s request for a list of all Twitter users who followed Trump’s account or liked and/or retweeted his tweets is much more sinister than it sounds. It’s bad enough that, with its persecution…er, prosecution of Trump, the government is hunting down the names of anyone who likes Trump or his ideas. But buried within Jack Smith’s warrant demand, which the court granted, Smith asked for “all associated logs and metadata.” Sundance explains,

That’s billions of billions of datapoints on millions of American citizens, their locations, their devices, their ip addresses and ultimately their real identities and connected activity as attributed to -and connected with- their connected social media accounts.  Essentially, turning Donald J Trump into the center of a surveillance virus.

People then say how could the Jack Smith special counsel possibly comb through all of those users and all of that connected metadata.  The answer is Artificial Intelligence; but the serious concern comes when you combine the metadata, AI organization and the previous announcements from DHS.

Technically, writes Sundance, the DHS has promised not to use Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) “to improperly profile, target, or to discriminate against any individual…or to use AI technology to enable improper systemic, indiscriminate, or large-scale monitoring, surveillance, or tracking of individuals.”

Impropriety, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. With the metadata and AI, DHS will say that it’s entirely proper—probably “to save our democracy”—to profile, target, and discriminate against Trump supporters or those who agree with his ideas without even supporting him specifically and to engage in systemic, indiscriminate and large-scale monitoring, surveillance, or tracking of those same people.

Sundance, as always, has lots of details, but here’s the important thing to remember. In every legal action, whether civil or criminal, there is the primary goal of nailing the defendants. However, in this modern information age, the other goal, always, is data mining. And we are being mined.

It’s 1984, and the Democrats hold Big Brother’s cards.

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Opening statement from Michael Shellenberger (emphasis mine)

Nine months ago, I testified and provided evidence to the subcommittee about the existence of a censorship industrial complex, a network of government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, Government Contractors, and Big Tech media platforms that conspired to censor ordinary Americans and elected officials alike for holding disfavored views.

I regret to inform the Subcommittee today that the scope, power, and law-breaking of the censorship industrial complex are even worse than we had realized back in March. Two days ago, my colleagues and I published the first batch of internal files from the Cyber Threat Intelligence League [“CTIL”], which show US and UK military contractors working in 2019 and 2020 to both censor and turn sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics developed abroad against the American people.

Many insist that all that we identified in the Twitter files, the Facebook files, and the CTI files were legal activities by social media platforms to take down content that violated the terms of service. Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and other big tech companies are privately owned, people point out, and free to censor content, and government officials are free to point out wrong information, they argue.

But the First Amendment prohibits the government from abridging freedom of speech. The Supreme Court has ruled that the government may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish. And there’s now a large body of evidence proving that the government did precisely that.

What’s more, the whistleblower who delivered the CTIL files to us says that its leader, a “former British intelligence analyst,” was” in the room at the Obama White House” in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to “stop a repeat of 2016.”

The US Department of Homeland Security, Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency, CISA, has been the center of gravity for much of the censorship, with the National Science Foundation financing the development of censorship and disinformation tools and other federal government agencies playing a supportive role. Emails from CISA’s NGO and social media partners show that CISA created the Election Integrity Partnership, EIP, in 2020, which involved the Stanford Internet Observatory and other U.S. government contractors.

EIP and its successor, the Virality Project, urged Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms to censor social media posts by ordinary citizens and elected officials alike. EIP reported that they had a 75% response rate from the platforms and that 35% of the URLs that they reported were either removed, labeled, or throttled or soft-blocked.

In 2020, the Department of Homeland Security, CISA, violated the First Amendment and interfered in the election, while in 2021, SISA and the White House violated the First Amendment and undermined America’s response to the COVID pandemic by demanding that Facebook and Twitter censor content that Facebook said...that Facebook itself said was “often true,” including about vaccine side effects.

All of this is profoundly un-American. One’s commitment to free speech means nothing if it does not extend to your political enemies. In his essential new book, Liar in a Crowded Theater, Jeff Kosseff, a law professor at the United States Naval Academy, shows that the widespread view that the government can censor false speech and or speech that “causes harm” is mostly wrong.

The Supreme Court has allowed very few constraints on speech. For example, the test of incitement to violence remains its immediacy.

I encourage Congress to defund and dismantle the government organizations involved in censorship. That includes phasing out all funding for the National Science Foundation’s track F, Trust and Authenticity and communication systems, and its secure and trustworthy cyberspace track. I would also encourage Congress to abolish CISA in DHS.

Short of taking those steps, I would encourage significant guardrails and oversight to prevent successorship from happening again. In particular, it’s very easy to see the line in CISA. They say they’re covering physical security, cyber-security, but they added a third one, cognitive security, which is basically attempting to control the information environment and how people think about the world, including the stories that they tell.

Finally, I would encourage Congress to consider making Section 230 liability protections contingent upon social media platforms, known in the law as interactive computer services, to allow adult users to moderate our own legal content through filters that we choose and whose algorithms are transparent to all of us.

I would encourage Congress to prohibit government officials from asking the platforms to remove content, which the Supreme Court may or may not rule on constitutional next year when it decides on the Missouri v. Bidencase. Should the Court somehow decide that the government requests for censorship are constitutional, then I would urge Congress to require such requests be reported publicly, instantaneously, so that such censorship demands occur in plain sight.

Thank you very much for hearing my testimony.



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Dan Goldman Is A Hunter Biden Laptop Truther



One New York Democrat remains in denial over the reality of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Despite the last three years featuring multiple forensic analyses, federal investigations corroborating the hard drive’s authenticity, and even a tacit admission from the younger Biden himself, Rep. Dan Goldman still says the laptop was “manipulated” by Russian actors.

At Thursday’s House Judiciary hearing on the weaponization of the federal government, Goldman retreated to the debunked Democrat narrative that the laptop was an instrument of Russian disinformation.

Speaking to Michael Shellenberger, an independent journalist and co-author of the “Twitter Files,” Goldman suggested the laptop’s contents, reviewed by the New York Post in 2020, were fake.

“You are aware, of course, that the laptop, so to speak,” Goldman said, “was actually a hard drive that the New York Post admitted here was not authenticated as real.”

“It was not the laptop the FBI had. You’re aware of that, right?” Goldman asked.

One week after the New York Post’s first bombshell story revealing the Democratic presidential nominee had lied about contacts with his son’s business partners, Fox News revealed the FBI seized the laptop as part of a probe into money laundering. IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley told lawmakers this summer the FBI knew the laptop was authentic a year before the agency pressured major online platforms to suppress its content. The FBI even admitted to Twitter, now X, that the laptop was legitimate while demanding the California tech giant censor it.

The laptop obtained by the New York Post and investigated by the FBI, Shellenberger said, were “the same contents.”

“How do you know?” Goldman asked. “You would have to authenticate it to know it is the same contents. You have no idea. You know hard drives can be manipulated.”

“Are you suggesting the New York Post could participate in a conspiracy to construct the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop?” Shellenberger said.

“The problem,” Goldman replied, “is that hard drives can be manipulated by Rudy Giuliani or Russia.”

“You’re engaging in a conspiracy theory,” Shellenberger said.

President Joe Biden peddled the same conspiracy during the second and final debate with President Donald Trump days after the laptop surfaced from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who gave the hard drive to the Post.

“Giuliani,” Biden said, “is being used as a Russian pawn. He is being fed information that is not true.”

Biden made the claim despite on-the-record statements denying Russian interference in the form of the laptop by the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Department of National Intelligence, and the State Department.

Goldman previously defended the FBI’s handling of the laptop at the last hearing with the House Weaponization Committee to feature Shellenberger in March. In this hearing, the New York congressman argued the FBI had no involvement with Twitter’s decision to suppress the New York Post’s stories surrounding the laptop. The agency’s effort to bury the computer in 2020 was the focus of the “Twitter Files: Part 7” by Shellenberger.

“Are you aware that the FBI had nothing to do with Twitter’s decision to pause the New York Post story?” Goldman asked.

“I am not aware of that,” Shellenberger said.

Goldman then read the Feb. 8 testimony from Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of safety, who denied the company’s censorship was the consequence of a federal censorship campaign. In his second round of questioning, Goldman argued the government giving companies “direction” was far from compulsory censorship.

“Mr. Shellenberger, in all of the emails that you reviewed, did the FBI ever direct Twitter to take down any accounts or remove any posts?” Goldman said.

“Yes,” Shellenberger said.



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