Saturday, December 2, 2023

Paul Ryan Tells Wisconsin GOP to Support Nikki Haley Over Ron DeSantis



Then again, on the DeceptiCon playground of the professionally Republican, the cliques are always so tenuous.  Former Ryan endorsed Ron DeSantis now has big sad watching the ‘Never Trump’ GOPe run to Nikki Haley as their best hope to stop Godzilla Trump.

(Via Politico) – […] during a flight from Canada to D.C. on Tuesday morning: former Speaker PAUL RYAN attempting to persuade Rep. MIKE GALLAGHER (R-Wis.) via text message to endorse Haley’s presidential bid.

“I think now is the time for a guy like you to endorse,” Ryan wrote, per photographs reviewed by Playbook. “Plus, Her foreign policy/world views track closest to yours. She brings the most excitement. I like Ron, but don’t think he is the growth stock Niki [sic] is. Just following up per our talk [in] September. Go Packers!”

Said a Gallagher spokesperson, “As Congressman Gallagher has repeatedly said, he has no intention to endorse any candidate at this time.” A spokesperson for Ryan, who opposes DONALD TRUMP’s re-nomination but hasn’t endorsed an alternative, noted that the former speaker publicly praised Haley as “the growth stock” in a CNBC appearance yesterday. (read more)



On the Fringe, Red Pill News, and more- December 2nd

 




Globalism Is a Disease That Deprives Life of Meaning


Two recent statistical surveys keep bouncing around in my head.  One study concludes that one out of every four young people in the world feels lonely today.  The other study finds that 72% of Americans have no interest in defending the United States in a major war.  In other words, a quarter of the planet’s emerging leaders are clinically depressed, and nearly three-quarters of the voters in the world’s wealthiest, most powerful nation have no interest in fighting to preserve the “American dream.”  People, it seems, are so disappointed in the present that they have no appetite for the future.  

Signs of such debilitating malaise should be a smack across the face to those who insist on ruling planet Earth from privileged perches secured behind steel gates at private social clubs such as the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations.  Across the globe and in poor and rich countries, alike, the human race is suffering.  Real leaders would recognize this phenomenon for what it is: a worldwide cry for help.

Does it seem as if the post-WWI eruption of think tanks, international associations, economic clubs, and foreign policy institutes has had a net-positive effect on human happiness?  Has the Council on Foreign Relations successfully steered the planet toward sustained peace?  Have the privately controlled central banks that are empowered to manipulate national currencies at whim safeguarded middle class families from regular economic disaster?  Has the League of Nations’ successor, the UN, prevailed in its self-appointed mission to build a better world?  Or, after a solid century of international busybodies obsessively micromanaging the world’s affairs, is it perhaps time to conclude that a glut of governmental and non-governmental organizations with a penchant for starting wars and triggering economic calamity has, quite demonstrably, done more harm than good?

With so many global institutions dominating private life, is it any wonder why so many people now behave as if they should be committed to institutions?  True meaning — the kind formed through personal struggle, adventure, hard work, religion, community, and family — has been replaced with the incremental oppression of international rule-making.  The sanctity of the family home has been bulldozed, so that a global cabal of atheists — whose only real mission is to severely reduce the human population — can poison the natural bonds nurtured between parents and children.  The blessings of marriage have been paved over with such vulgar elevation of sin as to condemn human beings, who would otherwise have been made whole through matrimonial commitment, to lonely lives — bereft of hope and adrift in promiscuous isolation.  

Culture, marriage, children, and a devotion to God are the bricks that build communities, which in turn fortify nations against the evils propagated by those who lead drab, meaningless lives drenched in self-loathing and hatred for humanity’s existence.  The UN and its sister organizations do one thing well: they vanquish cultural bonds and, by doing so, demolish civilizations.  And with the wreckage that they reap, they extinguish human happiness.

How successfully have these globalist parasites spread their cancer of human meaninglessness?  The Canadian Human Rights Commission claims that the celebration of Christmas perpetuates “colonial” oppression and “intolerance.”  In the United States, a trend has metastasized online in which young Americans who have been indoctrinated to condone the evils of Hamas terrorists now openly express their support for the words and deeds of Osama bin Laden.  Nearly twenty-five years after an Islamic supremacist murdered 3,000 of their countrymen, lost and confused Americans with no sense of their own history or purpose now thank the 9/11 mastermind for his vile service.  And former CIA director Michael Hayden — a Deep State thug who once called for the execution of President Trump — took some time during Thanksgiving to equate Second Amendment-supporting Christians with jihadist terrorists.  These kinds of sicknesses — revolting to their core — are vivid proof that life within the United States and throughout the West must imminently change.

Globalism — or the secular philosophy that a small group of international elites can successfully govern nation states better than the people who reside within the nooks and crannies of those nations — insists that bureaucratic mandarins in Brussels, Geneva, or New York City should be managing the day-to-day activities of an electrician in Verona, a winemaker in Sopron, a sailor from Cooranbong, and an accountant living in a suburb outside Cincinnati.  

Right now the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference is spending the next two weeks in Dubai deciding just how much energy ordinary folk should be permitted to use to heat their homes and run their businesses in hundreds of thousands of villages and towns throughout the world.  Somewhere there is a fisherman on the Cape West Coast of South Africa whose future livelihood will suffer because of some UN regulation being written and inserted into the twenty-sixth paragraph of section eighty-five of article twelve of the seventh official draft of a new environmental edict that probably does nothing other than protect the monopoly power of a wealthy multinational conglomerate with influential connections but whose passage in Dubai will nonetheless be touted as an instrumental step toward “saving the planet.”  

“Saving the planet” is big business.  Behind every poor worker who struggles that much harder to make ends meet after each new global mandate purportedly constructed to fight bad weather, there is an international oligarch with a corporate board at his side adding new zeroes to his already colossal cache of multigenerational wealth.  Extracting every last penny from the world’s poorest in the form of “green” taxes and fees — so that the globe’s most obscenely rich can buy private armies and islands — is what John Kerry and Klaus Schwab’s “Green New Deal” has always had in mind.  

No form of national government could be properly described as “democratic” or “representative” of the people if it takes its marching orders from the WEF, WHO, EU, or UN.  Globalism seeks nothing less than to create a planetary system of vassalage in which cultural practices, historic customs, religious beliefs, and national sovereignties are all subsumed under the all-powerful dominion of an insular ruling elite.  Speaking the most parseltongued form of “political correctness,” its propagandists denounce “imperialism” while building the most sinister empire the world has ever seen.   

After a century of coercive internationalism in which corporate oligarchs, central bank money-printers, and clandestine security services have conquered the world under an artificial olive branch and deceptive promises of peace, where are we today?  The global population has never been more unhappy.  Apparently, serving as meaningless chits for unelected globalists to trade and control has starved humanity of its zest for living.  

In this black hole of human meaning, however, I see a tremendous opportunity for excising the cancer that causes us so much harm and lifting a world that is desperately in need of saving.  As a Christian, I have always been particularly drawn to one of Jesus Christ’s lessonsIt is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.

The Marxist globalists who seek to rule the world have sunk the world into a morass of misery.  Intentionally destroying culture, marriage, family, national borders, and God have brought nothing but pain and suffering.  The world is sick and requires a spiritual physician.  And for those who see clearly and have accepted a calling to carry God’s light, there is no shortage of patients who seek healing.  

“Great Awakenings” and civilizational rebirths are built on the ruins of unhappiness.  I urge you to see today’s chaos not as the beginning of the end but rather as the prologue to our spiritual and cultural redemption.  Embrace this journey.



The Palestinians Will Always Be Losers


The Palestinians are popular on the left in part because they always play the victim. And people who play the victim may enjoy the pity and gifts, but in the end, they will never succeed or progress. For the Palestinians, if that’s the price for killing Jews, then they’re fine with it.

Our behavior generally reflects who we are and not necessarily what we have. There are very wealthy people who act like misers. One hyper-wealthy athlete famously left the tab for others when they went out for drinks. On the other hand, there are people with almost nothing but when there are guests or special occasions, their tables are filled like those of kings. In Judaism, there are concepts of a “wealth mentality” and a “poverty mentality” completely divorced from the actual conditions in which a person lives.

Today’s left values victims, real or imagined. How many fake blacks, Indians, and the like have been outed; they played their role because they understood that on the left, victimhood is the currency of the realm. If you can attach as many victim classes to your person—black, woman, trans—then the more important you are in the hierarchy. The problem is that people who see themselves as victims generally never go anywhere in life. They don’t see themselves as successful and they live their lives as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Clarence Thomas was dirt poor in the racist deep South, but because he never bought into being a victim, he pushed his life towards the success of being a Supreme Court justice.

Someone said after the destruction of European Jewry, in which one-third of the worldwide Jewish population was wiped out, that the only thing left was to say Kaddish (the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning) for Judaism. The Jews left in Europe were driven from their former homes, kept in Displaced Person camps, or arrested by the British in their desperate attempts to get to British Mandate Palestine. That person, if he had lived until today, would probably have been shocked. There are fewer Jews today than in 1938 but there are thousands of Jewish schools, thriving Jewish communities on every continent, and a growing Orthodox community worldwide. Chabad opens a new synagogue, school, or the like on average every four days. Jews don’t give up. Yes, maybe an individual Jew might, but as a people, Jews went through the destruction of two Temples and the Babylonian and Roman exiles and kept going. Where are those Babylonians? Romans? Inquisitors? Nazis? Soviets? They have faded into history while the Jews just keep going because that is a central part of the Jewish ethos. 

This can-do or must-do attitude is one of the many strands joining the US and Israel. Israel often seems to invent incredible technologies, and virtually every major tech company has an office between Haifa and Tel Aviv. The US, in creating the atom bomb, getting to the moon and back and flying at over Mach 3 with the B-70 and SR-71, also likes to go “where no man has gone before.” Risk-taking is rewarded. Failure is part of the process.

Between Israel’s founding and its stunning victory in the Six Day War, Israel was seen in the US and the rest of the West as a plucky David against the combined Arab Goliath. After 1967, one of Yasir Arafat’s greatest successes was to flip the script. He created in the mind of Western liberals the concept that the Palestinians were the underdog and that Israel was a colonial superpower. And this impression has stuck in many circles. Barack Obama demanded from Israel concessions to the Palestinians on the belief that Israel is so powerful that it can take risks for peace. The Israelis see those risks, such as giving up control of the West Bank to armed Palestinian terrorists, as essentially an invitation to suicide.

Since the Palestinians started seeing themselves as the victims, they have never stopped. The Palestinians are the only people in history whose descendants are also counted by the UN as refugees. My parents were definitely German refugees as they fled Germany prior to the war; nobody in his right mind would count me or my brother or our families as refugees. Not so with the Palestinians—they are victims, so their great, great grandchildren will be counted as refugees for the sole purpose of expanding the number of people who need redress from Israel. Billions given to Arafat and later Abbas have vanished, with Arafat’s wife famously living large in Europe and shopping at the best stores. Humanitarian aid for Gaza has gone for hundreds of miles of well-equipped, air-conditioned Hamas tunnels. The Palestinians are neighbors of the Israelis yet they have no hi-tech, no gas rigs sending natural gas to Egypt, Jordan and Europe. They wallow in being victims, and there are no victims without victimizers. If you can stomach it, watch the interrogations of the Hamas barbarians from 10/7. They raped, murdered, tortured, plundered, kidnapped, and in their interviews, they put their heads down and talk in soft voices like a kid who was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. They don’t show bravado, they don’t say that they are proud of killing so many Jews; no, they act like….victims.

If you have been to Israel, you know that it is a dynamic country. Twenty percent of the country is Arab, with a large Christian population (the only one growing in the Middle East) and Jews from virtually every country in the world. I have never met a Saudi Jew but have met plenty from Yemen (my wife’s family), South America, Australia, Russia and converts from China and Japan. The Palestinians have no industry. They were offered a state twice after Oslo and turned it down twice. They started to look for gas off of Gaza’s coast and then stopped. They were handed hot-houses that generated millions annually in bug-free organic greens; they tore them apart within days of the Jews being pulled out of Gaza. These are a people who have no interest in progressing. Their only desire is to destroy Israel, and any Palestinian advantage that does not help to do that is of no interest to their leaders and a large part of their population. Seventy-five percent of the Palestinians support the 10/7 slaughter, though it has effectively killed the two-state solution and is turning Gazan buildings into multi-story Swiss cheese.

Probably the biggest single stumbling block to peace is that Westerners think that Arabs, including the Palestinians, think like them. They do not. They do not want to make a deal. They do not want to progress. Sure, the smarter ones leave and find jobs in Europe or the US. But these people would rather kill Jews than have a state, destroy Israel even if it meant that they were destroyed with it. In short, the Palestinians will always be losers.



DeSantis May Have Just Saved the House in 2024 After Crucial Ruling on Florida Congressional Map


Bonchie reporting for RedState 

After embarrassing Gavin Newsom during Thursday night's landmark debate, Ron DeSantis got right back to winning on policy on Friday. 

In a big blow to Democrat electoral hopes, an appeals court has reversed a prior ruling finding that the governor's congressional map, which changed Florida's District 5 from a 200-mile-long racial gerrymander to something that makes sense proportionally. Democrats sued, claiming that the more consolidated district violated legal provisions on minority representation. The First District Court of Appeals in Florida has officially disagreed, upholding the originally-passed map. While this decision could end up in front of the Supreme Court, it's highly unlikely, given the political makeup of the court, that they would disagree with the appeals court's decision.

It's important to note that this fight didn't start with the judicial system. First, DeSantis had to browbeat his own party into not completely surrendering on redistricting before the 2022 election. As RedState reported, Republicans in the Florida legislature were set to essentially give away the state's census gains, possibly forfeiting two to three House seats in the process. The governor wasn't impressed and decided to engage in a months-long battle with GOP leadership in the state, eventually getting them to relent and allow him to put forth a map to vote on. It passed, and along with key victories in New York, Florida's redone map delivered the majority to Republicans.

This latest legal victory is a direct result of DeSantis standing up and fighting when others wouldn't. That's to his credit, and has been a continual trend of his time in office. If you leave most Republicans to their own devices, they'll fold almost every time. DeSantis doesn't roll that way, and because of that, he has stacked win after win in what was formerly a very purple state. 

Further, and most importantly, he may have just saved the House for the GOP in 2024. With a razor-thin margin already, made even thinner by the expulsion of George Santos, Republicans need every single seat they can get come election day. Saving even one seat in Florida could be the difference between Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries as the Speaker of the House.

It depresses me to think of what could have been if a sizable chunk of the Republican Party hadn't decided DeSantis needed to be destroyed for petty political reasons. We are watching an artist continue to paint his masterpiece, and to not have DeSantis at the forefront of the party in the future, even if he's not the nominee in 2024, would be such a waste of generational talent. I sincerely hope he weathers this storm and Republicans, even if they prefer Trump for this election, come to their senses and understand the winner they have in their midst for the next one.



California’s Record Of Felonies, Feces, And Failure Should Kill Newsom’s Political Career But It Won’t



Thursday night’s debate between Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis and California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom was a total crapshow for Newsom — literally.

When the Democrat darling wasn’t getting lambasted for violating his own Covid restrictions and allowing homelessness and human feces to plague California’s major cities, Newsom was justifying the presence of pornographic materials in school libraries and defending the surgical mutilation of minors, even without parents’ knowledge. Meanwhile, DeSantis stuck to the facts and tackled major culture war issues most Republicans are often too afraid to mention.

Things got so bad for Newsom that his wife reportedly stepped in to prevent the debate from continuing beyond the original 90-minute discussion agreed upon by the governors.

But Thursday’s back-and-forth wasn’t just a heated discussion between two high-profile politicians. It was a symbolic display of the stark spiritual divide encapsulating the country. While DeSantis represented positions of truth, logic, and common sense — like protecting kids from disfiguring transgender surgeries, for example — Newsom embodied the lies, deception, and propaganda of his fellow leftists.

Even when confronted with facts — some of which were displayed in front of him — Newsom simply lied or pivoted to launching ad hominem attacks against conservatives. Such is the way of the modern left.

In a sane world, DeSantis’ beatdown of Newsom and the Democrat Party’s extremist agenda would end the California governor’s prospects for higher office. But America doesn’t exist inside a sane world anymore, and the sad reality is that many of the leftists who watched Thursday’s debate probably came away believing Newsom’s falsehoods — or worse, knew he was lying but simply didn’t care.

If Newsom were to run for another statewide office in California today, there’s no reason to believe the vast majority of Democrats in the state wouldn’t vote for him. Even if it means having to pay higher taxes, subsidize illegal immigrants, and dodge human feces, used needles, criminals, and homeless encampments on the streets, Democrat voters will not abandon their dystopian belief that the state is almighty.

For the left, politics is religion. It’s what drives them, shapes their nonsensical worldview, and permits them to justify the most demonic policies imaginable, such as murdering innocent unborn babies and conducting irreversible surgeries on minors without parental knowledge. There is no belief in objective morality or truth on the left because Democrats’ view is that morality and truth are whatever they want them to be, facts and logic be damned.

Leftism is a heck of a drug, and no matter how much pain and suffering it causes, Democrats won’t stop taking it.



WATCH: Former Mob Boss Sammy 'the Bull' Gravano Blasts Biden's 'Treason,' Other Scandals


Mike Miller reporting for RedState 

As evidence continues to drop in the Biden Family Business scandal, the side stories continue to grow more interesting. Now a former "notorious" mobster has analyzed the myriad of charges and allegations.

Former mob boss Sammy "the Bull" Gravano appeared on "Jesse Watters Primetime" on Thursday night to weigh in on the matter, at one point telling Watters he believes that Joe Biden not only committed "treason," but also that he (Gravano) was a choir boy compared to Joe. 

Watters kicked off the segment with a "Fox News Alert."

Brand new developments in the Biden bribery scandal. You remember how Joe Biden cashed a $40,000 check that came from China? The White House says Biden's brother was paying Joe back. ... And now we have proof that they lied. A money-laundering investigator blew the whistle. 

Background: herehere, and here.

Watters then brought Gravano on air. "Here now, notorious former mobster, Sammy "the Bull." How ya doing, Sammy?" Gravano dove right into the issue at hand.

I'm doing pretty good. I heard your opening monologue, and it's an incredible story. I mean, it's mind-blowing. I don't understand how the country is just sitting back, listening to these things, and no action is being taken. 

If you want my opinion, there are so many guys that I know who would go to prison for 20-to-life-time sentences for this kind of stuff. And when it comes from the president, the vice president, people like that, it's beyond theft; it's treason to a country. 

I remember when I was younger and I was in the military. Treason was something that you would face the death penalty for because you're robbing every man, woman, and child — every race; black, white, Hispanic, [and] Asian. You can't get a more disgusting crime than this.

I've been hearing it, over and over again, and I don't understand why there's no action.

Be honest — you didn't expect that from a former "notorious" mob boss, right? Me, neither.

Watters asked Gravano to clarify his allegations against the Bidens:

So you're saying that the Biden family is treasonous, and the feds know they're dealing with a treasonous family, but [that] many honest people in the federal government are afraid to speak out because they'll be fired and destroyed.

Again, Gravano went bottom-line — including about the state of the FBI and the federal government as a whole, as he sees it.

Yes, without a doubt. I cooperated years ago — everybody knows it was the FBI, the federal government, different prosecutors — and they were so honest, it was unbelievable. I was proud to be with them for a while. I'm still friends with a lot of them, and some of them tell me, 'Sammy, I spent my whole life in the FBI. I'm embarrassed to tell somebody I'm an ex-FBI agent.' And I say, 'Don't feel like that. Let's get out [and] speak, talk against it, do something.' 

"Our forefathers died for this country," he continued. 

"I'm a veteran, I go to the V.A. Hospital, and I see people walking around with a leg, without an arm, they fought for us. ... How do you think these people feel when they go home and look in the mirror? Everything they gave for us, and we're sitting back and doing absolutely nothing. I don't care how much power they got [sic] on their side. We have the people. The people are the power. If we don't talk, if we don't say something, then we're part of it — we become complicit with what's going on."

Amen. From a former mob boss, no less.

The Bottom Line

While Gravano spoke in broad generalizations — "No action is being taken," "Nobody's doing anything about it," et al. — the power of his message could not have been truer. I found that profound, particularly given his background. I hope you did, as well. 

As the never-ending story of the Biden Family Business drags on, we need more Sammy "the Bull" Gravanos in this country and fewer people who simply fire up social media and pontificate about it.



Democrats’ Panic Over Biden Candidacy Hits High Gear


Ward Clark reporting for RedState 

I've written before - several times - about President Joe Biden's sad and obvious deterioration, and how Democrats are increasingly wanting to see someone other than him or his life insurance policy, Kamala Harris, as the 2024 candidate. This is a bad situation for the Democrats, and it may be past the time when they can do anything about it; increasingly, the Democrats and their water-bearers in the legacy media are becoming very, very worried. As we enter into the last month of the year, that panic seems to have shifted into high gear.

Prominent Democratic operative and analyst David Axelrod, who remains close to former President Barack Obama and is reflective of Obamaworld thinking, has warned that Biden has no better than a 50-50 shot at reelection.

“But no better than that, maybe a little worse,” Axelrod told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. “He thinks he can cheat nature here, and it’s really risky. They’ve got a real problem if they’re counting on Trump to win it for them. I remember Hillary doing that, too.”

Axelrod previously mused on X, formerly Twitter, about Biden giving serious thought to whether he should continue to pursue a reelection campaign.

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman went a step further than Axelrod.

“I think Biden’s done a lot of good things. But I think his legacy will not be a good one if he is the nominee,” Ackman told Bloomberg Television. “I do think the right thing for Biden to do is to step aside and to say he’s not going to run and create the opportunity for some competition.”

There's a fair amount of cognitive dissonance in those statements. Mr. Ackman claims that President Biden has "...done a lot of good things," but it's difficult in the extreme to point out what any of those good things are, unless one is inexplicably in favor of inflation, skyrocketing gas and grocery prices, the disintegration of our major cities, and an Administration headed by the most deeply and fundamentally corrupt political figure since Huey Long - maybe since Caligula.

The one hope Democrats seem to be holding out for is Donald Trump being the Republican nominee, and that may be a forlorn hope after all.

Part of what is driving this sentiment is that Trump is, in their view, so manifestly unfit to serve that no viable Democratic nominee should ever trail him.

Yet Biden is 1.9 points behind Trump in the RealClearPolitics polling average. The sitting president also trails Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) by 0.8 points and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley by 4.

“In 2016, Trump led Hillary Clinton for all of five days in the national RealClearPolitics average, each of those days in the immediate aftermath of the Republican convention,” election analyst Sean Trende wrote. “He led in 29 polls taken over the course of the entire campaign, 10 of which are recorded in the RCP averages as Los Angeles Times/USC tracking polls.”

How much are these polls telling us? Well, an individual poll may or may not mean anything (Opt-in polls and Twitter surveys are egregiously bad and should be ignored,) but trends are interesting to watch, and that's where the RealClearPolitics average is of interest, as averaging a range of polls can remove some of the noise, and following them over time can reveal trends; if you look at the history of the RCP average over the last few months, the trend is distinctly towards the GOP.

It's unlikely, as well, that the choice of running mates could make a difference. It's unclear at this point what Democrats can do to push aside the execrable Kamala Harris, while Trump has a large and anxious field to choose from.

We've had some bad Presidents in the history of the Republic. Andrew Johnson comes to mind, as does Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama. However, history may well view Joe Biden as the worst to date, and mind you he's up against some pretty stiff competition; the fact that he is losing ground in polls against a man who the legacy media and leftist prosecutors and judges have been desperately trying to take down since the day he announced his candidacy in 2015, speaks volumes. 

I will here repeat my standard disclaimer: The general election is a long way away, not one primary vote has yet been cast, and a lot can happen between now and then. But it sure looks like that, if the general election were to be held today, Donald Trump would be sending Joe Biden off to whatever retirement he retains the capacity to enjoy.

Joe Biden's administration has been marked with and characterized by one thing: Incompetence. His 2024 re-election campaign is no exception. The Biden campaign, with just a tad over eleven months to go until the 2024 election, is already crashing to earth like the National Christmas tree. That's a bad thing for them - but it may be a good thing for America.

One more thing: Could last night's California/Florida debate have given us a preview of 2028? That, folks, will be a very interesting discussion - for another time.



Dem Witness In Weaponization Hearing Contradicted Her Own Opening Statement



The Democrats’ witness in Thursday’s House Weaponization hearing on government censorship contradicted her own opening statement.

Olivia Troye, a former advisor to Vice President Mike Pence, stated unequivocally in response to a question from GOP North Carolina Rep. Dan Bishop that she had never declared state censorship a “conspiracy.”

“I have never said this was a conspiracy. You have not heard that comment from me,” Troye said.

Except just an hour earlier in her opening statement, Troye railed against the committee’s proceedings as grounded in conspiracies.

“Instead of continuing to spread conspiracy theories about government censorship,” she said, “this committee should instead focus on the very real and very dangerous threat posed by the leading Republican candidate.”



Thursday’s House hearing of the Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government featured independent journalists and authors of the Twitter FilesMichael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, for a second time. The pair testified before lawmakers on government speech control two days after publishing the “CTIL Files” chronicling how the “Censorship Industrial Complex” was activated after the 2016 election. Whistleblower documents revealed the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), which was officially launched as a volunteer project by data scientists and intelligence community veterans, became the premier “anti-disinformation group” whose tactics were ultimately adopted by the federal government.

“The whistleblower’s documents describe everything from the genesis of modern digital censorship programs to the role of the military and intelligence agencies, partnerships with civil society organizations and commercial media, and the use of sock puppet accounts and other offensive techniques,” they wrote.

“Two days ago,” Shellenberger said in his opening statement, “I published the first batch of internal files from the Cyber Threat Intelligence League which show U.S. and U.K. military contractors working in 2019 and 2020 to both censor and turn sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics developed abroad against the American people.”

Democrats in the hearing made a point to defend the dystopian censorship regime as a necessary barrier to counter online disinformation while spreading disinformation themselves. New York Rep. Dan Goldman repeated the debunked line that the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, made public by the New York Post, was a manipulated vehicle of Russian interference. The laptop exposed new details about the Biden family business operations, which are now under investigation by House Republicans in a presidential impeachment inquiry.

In a Substack post on Friday, Taibbi called the Democrats’ performance “bizarre.”

“Democrats not only show they don’t care,” Taibbi wrote, “they announce themselves as the chief advocates of new speech-control programs.”



Thomas Massie Eviscerates Witness Claim That Government-Funded Censorship Is a 'Conspiracy Theory'


Jeff Charles reporting for RedState 

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) set the record straight during an exchange on the House floor with Olivia Troye, a former adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, who claimed that government-sponsored censorship was a “politically motivated fantasy detached from reality.”

During a hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Massie challenged Troye’s argument, pointing to a specific instance in which one of his posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, was flagged by the Stanford Internet Observatory, a government-funded entity. The social media company later censored the post.

Massie asked Troye if one of the conspiracy theories to which she was referring concluded that “government-funded agencies were flagging and trying to censor official congressional accounts on social media.”

“I would have no knowledge of that. I’m not aware of that,” Troye responded.

Massie turned to Michael Shellenberger, one of the individuals involved with the release of the Twitter Files, and referenced a tweet he had posted that was censored. Shellenberger noted that the tweet was one that the “Virality Project at Stanford Internet Observatory had flagged to Twitter for misinformation,” and that it was “censored in some way other way.”

He also noted that the project is funded by the state, at which point Massie asked if Troye believed that it should have been flagged. “Depends on whether you’re spreading inaccurate information,” she answered.

Massie pointed out that the tweet referenced a study from Israel showing that immunity to the COVID-19 virus “due to prior infection is the same as for the Pfizer vaccine.”

Troye doubled down, claiming that Massie’s tweet “was flagged for a reason,” to which the lawmaker retorted:

What's the reason? Is there ever a good reason to censor a member of Congress? This is my official account. This is not a personal account. This is not a campaign account. This is my communication with my constituents. By the way, I bring this up not to claim that members of Congress have more right to free speech than the general public. In fact, I don't even think the press or the media has more rights to the First Amendment than the general public. The general public has the same rights that we have. I bring this up to show, number one, that your testimony is false. But number two, if they can do this to a member of Congress's official account, they can do it to anybody.

And therein lies the crux of the matter. Stanford Internet Observatory, along with a slew of other organizations, is being funded with taxpayer dollars to help social media companies censor content that contradicts the government’s line on the coronavirus and other issues. This problem came to light in full force when Elon Musk decided to release inside information showing how the company operated before he took over.

Despite the denials from Troye and others seeking to gaslight the public, it is abundantly clear that the government has been paying various entities to silence dissenting views on digital platforms, which is a brazen example of the government being weaponized for political purposes.