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January 2017

Trump signs order to move Keystone, Dakota pipelines forward

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on Tuesday to move forward with construction of the controversial Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines, rolling back key Obama administration environmental actions in favor of expanding energy infrastructure.

While oil producers in Canada and North Dakota are expected to benefit from a quicker route for crude oil to U.S. Gulf Coast refiners, a revival of the projects would mark a bitter defeat for Native American tribes and climate activists, who vowed to fight the decisions through legal action.

Trump campaigned on promises to increase domestic energy production and before taking office indicated he supported completion of the Dakota pipeline and re-starting the C$8 billion ($6.1 billion) Keystone XL project, which was rejected in 2015 by then-President Barack Obama.

Protesters had rallied for months against plans to route the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline beneath a lake near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, saying it threatened water resources and sacred Native American sites.

It is not yet clear how exactly the orders will move the projects forward.

In a statement, the Standing Rock Sioux said they would fight the decision.

“Americans know this pipeline was unfairly rerouted towards our nation and without our consent. The existing pipeline route risks infringing on our treaty rights, contaminating our water and the water of 17 million Americans downstream,” said Dave Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock tribe.

NEW YORK NEWS

BEST SITE
www.empirereportnewyork.com … including:

Hillary Mayor Run ’50-50’…
Onondaga County Cops Ambushed last night, car shot at 10 times…
Cuomo greedy with his pork and ziti…
Legislator censured for Obama comments…
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Rep. Chris Collins headlines Gay GOP event…
5 busted in Hudson Valley Prostitution Sting…
2 bodies pulled from Icy Upstate pond…
Matt Wing: how the press should spice it up with Spicer…
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Page Six: Ladies love MyPillow King…
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NYC City Council Speakers Race Heats Up…
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Why Are People Taking Medical Advice from Gwyneth Paltrow? No one should be taking lifestyle lessons from this woman. By Katherine Timpf

In case you haven’t slammed your head against a wall today, I’m here to report that Gwyneth Paltrow’s “lifestyle publication,” Goop, is now telling women to put $66 egg-shaped jade gemstones into their vaginas to increase “chi, orgasms, vaginal muscle tone, hormonal balance, and feminine energy.”

Oh, and it gets worse: The item is sold out on Goop’s online store — which means that actual people are actually doing this.

(Note: In case you yourself happen to be sitting there with an overpriced rock in your crotch because the lady from Shallow Hal told you to put it there, please, please just know that it’s not a good idea. As Dr. Jen Gunter, an OB/GYN for Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco, told the Washington Post, not only is it “biologically impossible” for a rock to have an effect on your hormones, but it’s also a great way to cause problems like bacterial vaginosis and toxic shock syndrome. Sexy!)

Now, it would be one thing if this were the only stupid idea that Paltrow was offering, but unfortunately, that’s far from the case. She’s also advised women to “steam” their vaginas — which is not only weird and gross, but also yet another thing that doctors warn can cause health problems — and to start every day by drinking a smoothie made up of ingredients that cost approximately $200 . . . and have approximately zero actual proven health benefits.

One of the ingredients in that smoothie, by the way, is “Moon Juice” — which comes in these tiny little jars of what she calls “medicinal grade” (LOL) powder that you can buy on Goop. They come in formulas such as Sex Dust, Brain Dust, Beauty Dust, Spirit Dust, Goodnight Dust, and Action Dust, and cost up to $65 a pop. Much like with the crotch-rocks, it gets worse: All of the formulas I just mentioned are — you guessed it! — sold out.

Come on, people. We’re smarter than this. You don’t need to be a doctor to know that shoving rocks in your vagina or squatting naked over extremely hot water is a terrible idea; pretty much anyone over the age of five could tell you that.

And the most confusing thing about all of this is that no one should want to be like Gwyneth Paltrow. This is a person who, in 2005, told Conan O’Brien that she would “rather die than let my kid eat Cup-a-Soup,” and, in 2012, told the Guardian that she doesn’t “like drunk women” because it’s a “bad look,” adding: “I think it’s very inappropriate and I don’t like it.” She is the least fun person ever.

Yes, Gwyneth Paltrow has said that she’d rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a tin, but I say that I’d rather smoke crack than invite someone so obnoxiously pretentious and judgmental to my party. People who drink are fine. People who eat tins of cheese and Cup-a-Noodles are fine. And people who want to join me in doing all three in a single night? Well, those are the people who are invited first. Call me crazy, but I’d much rather be an actual human being than some ostentatious moonbat who talks down to women for enjoying booze while spending her own life conning people into spending a fortune on useless hippie crap that’s more likely to bring them medical issues than enlightenment.

Prosperity Is Destiny If the economy grows during Trump’s administration, his opposition will dwindle. By Victor Davis Hanson

“Ten thousand cuts an awful lot of family ties.”
— Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch

When Ronald Reagan entered office in 1981 amid negative economic growth, roaring inflation, and high unemployment, his critics immediately grew emboldened and sought to ankle-bite him at every turn: Reagan purportedly had created homelessness all by himself; Reagan was on the verge of ensuring a “nuclear winter” and a “day after” desolation from a likely nuclear exchange, given his nihilistic tough stance against the Soviet Union.

After dismantling the air-traffic controllers’ union, Reagan had supposedly endangered the lives of plane passengers and ruined the idea of unionism itself, replacing it with “let them eat cake” indifference.

Yet four years later — with an economy booming at over 7 percent per year — Reagan breezed to reelection victory. It was suddenly “Morning in America.” His 1984 election opponent, a decent and respected Walter Mondale, was reduced to a cardboard-cutout caricature of fossilized 1960s liberalism.

Bill Clinton did almost everything imaginable to destroy his presidency in his last two years in office: kinky sexual explorations with a young subordinate intern, lying under oath about his tawdry escapades, and a recrudescence of older sexual-harassment allegations. Most Americans believed that he was an inveterate liar and would never leave their teenage daughters in the same room with such a creepy sexual predator. No matter — he was not removed from office even though he’d been impeached. His Republican accusers never quite understood that the American people preferred having an economy with a growth rate above 4.5 percent to removing a sleazy Lothario from office.

George W. Bush got reelected in 2004 despite massive opposition to the ongoing Iraq War because the economy was growing at nearly 4 percent in 2004. He left unpopular in 2009, not only owing to Iraq (evidence was already in by January 2009 that his bold surge had worked) but also because the economy had imploded in September 2008.

One reason that a personally popular, landmark Barack Obama failed as president — aside from doubling the debt, institutionalizing zero interest rates, leaving a mess in the Middle East, and using his un-Midas touch to undermine nearly everything he tapped, from health care to immigration law to race relations — was that he was the first modern president under whose tenure the economy never reached a modest 3 percent economic-growth rate. Had Obama just achieved 4 percent economic growth, Hillary Clinton would be president.

In other words, economic growth and perceived prosperity cut a lot of political ties.

The election of Donald Trump has turned everything in the political world, from the trivial to the existential, upside down. He is the first non-politician without military experience to become president. The polls and press caricatured him for nearly two years as a classic loser. He won despite being outspent and out-organized, and without real support from his own party or the mainstream conservative press. The Left is rightly convinced that he is a danger to the postmodern redistributive state. The Never Trump Right is still invested in his eventual implosion, issuing “I warned you about him” messages in a nonstop effort of self-justification.

Trump’s demeanor, language, and comportment remain antithetical to what we are accustomed to in a sober and judicious president. Cat-like Barack Obama gracefully tiptoed down the steps of Air Force One almost like a prissy metrosexual; a grimacing Trump stalks about as if he were on a work site inspecting the cement on a newly laid foundation. Obama, with his Mussolini-like strutting jaw, conveyed collective revolutionary confidence to the Left; to Left and Right alike, the scowl from a slouching Trump suggests unrepentant payback to come.

The nation’s stunning new First Lady is foreign-born and speaks heavily accented English. Trump is the first thrice-married president and the first billionaire to assume office. All that is just the personal disconnect from norms of the past.

On policy, Trump promises to outdo the reset of Ronald Reagan, who lacked Trump’s Republican-controlled Congress, vast majorities in the state legislatures and governorships, and the blank-check authority bequeathed by Harry Reid and Barack Obama, whose ends-justify-any-means-necessary changes in legislative and executive protocols have fortified the presidency with enormous new avenues of power. Reagan lacked the legislative apparatus to become a true revolutionary; Trump’s windfall Republican majorities almost force him into that insurrectionary role.

So Trump is intent on overturning Obama’s therapeutic foreign policy, slashing federal spending, rebuilding the military, exporting fossil fuels, waging a cultural war against political correctness and the liberal media, and enforcing immigration law. In other words, from his person to his policies, Donald Trump is a revolutionary, with a huge target on his back that the foundations, universities, networks, major newspapers, Hollywood, and the coastal-strip elite will always have in their scope.

Indeed, in that regard, the Trump revolution’s mantra of “drain the swamp” is a sort of political RoundupTM strategy: The root causes of progressive hysteria must be addressed by fundamentally recalibrating approaches to the media, the universities, and immigration. It seems that Trump means to challenge the tactics that to date have fueled left-wing agendas that otherwise would not gain support from a majority of the public.

Political observers, left and right, assume that Trump’s mouth and personal recklessness will derail his agendas. Heraclitus’s “a man’s character is his destiny” (an obscure fragment [ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων] that could be translated in a variety of quite different ways) is quoted ad nauseam to suggest that Trump’s intrinsic and immutable flaws will inevitably lead to overweening arrogance and thus catastrophe, as nemesis catches up with him at precisely the most opportune — and embarrassing — moment.

Perhaps.

But it’s far more likely that Trump’s fate will hinge on his economic reforms. Achieve 4 percent–plus GDP growth rate and then Black Lives Matter, the residuals of Occupy Wall Street, the hysterical House Democrats, and the assorted unhinged fringe of Michael Moore, Lena Dunham, and Madonna will recede into the woodwork.

In truth, we are on the cusp of a great experiment. For decades, conservatives, both traditional and pro-growth supply-siders, have preached that deregulation, reasonable and predictable Federal Reserve interest rates, reduced government, a radically simplified and pruned-back tax code, new incentives for investment, an open energy market, and a can-do psychological landscape that encourages entrepreneurship will make the economy soar at rates of 4 percent GDP and more.

We shall soon see. If Trump unleashes American know-how and strengthens the economy, then his cultural and domestic agendas, as well as his personal demeanor and language, however radical and jarring, will probably be accepted. In contrast, if he blows up the deficit and sees interest rates spike at Carter levels and the cost of debt service soar, if he allows unemployment to grow — while never exceeding Obama’s dismal economic growth rates — then the Trump agenda will stall and the media will be liberated to obsess over the tweets, gaffes, and bombast of every nanosecond of his presidency.

Trump-Hating Protestors, Deceit and Willful Blindness Unveiling the Left’s lies about immigration, drugs and terrorism. Michael Cutler

On January 20, 2017, the very same day that President Donald J. Trump was inaugurated, protestors who opposed Trump’s election and his campaign promises took to the streets in Washington, DC and elsewhere. They falsely equated securing America’s borders and enforcing our immigration laws with bigotry and racism.

The protestors carried signs with a variety of slogans including a slogan favored by Hillary Clinton during her failed bid for the presidency, “Build bridges, not walls.”

Where were these protestors when Obama violated the Constitution, released hundreds of thousands of criminal aliens, commuted the sentences of record numbers of drug dealers and ignored the findings of the 9/11 Commission and imported millions of foreign workers to take Americans’ jobs?

Ironically, on that same day, the Justice Department issued a press release, “Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera Faces Charges in New York for Leading a Continuing Criminal Enterprise and other Drug-Related Charges.”

El Chapo was the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel that smuggled multi-ton quantities of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana into the United States and used extreme violence and corruption in order to achieve their criminal goals that included the smuggling of huge quantities of illegal drugs into the United States.

The press release contains links to the Detention Memo and the Indictment and begins with these two paragraphs:

The indictment alleges that between January 1989 and December 2014, Guzman Loera led a continuing criminal enterprise responsible for importing into the United States and distributing massive amounts of illegal narcotics and conspiring to murder persons who posed a threat to Guzman Loera’s narcotics enterprise.

Guzman Loera is also charged with using firearms in relation to his drug trafficking and money laundering relating to the bulk smuggling from the United States to Mexico of more than $14 billion in cash proceeds from narcotics sales throughout the United States and Canada. As part of this investigation, nearly 200,000 kilograms of cocaine linked to the Sinaloa Cartel have been seized. The indictment seeks forfeiture of more than $14 billion in drug proceeds and illicit profits.

Leaders of Drug Trafficking Organizations, alien smuggling rings and terrorists seeking to enter the United States surreptitiously could not devise a better slogan than “Build bridges not walls” to promote their criminal interests.

Perhaps, given the numerous reports about tunnels under the U.S./Mexican border, the open borders/immigration anarchists should amend their signs to read, “Build bridges and tunnels not walls.”

Ethno-Nationalists Against Jeff Sessions “We have got to eliminate the gringo. . . .” Alex Mayfield

The National Council for La Raza has been at the forefront of the campaign against Senator Jeff Sessions as well as President Trump’s promise to enforce our immigration laws honestly and equally. Last weekend, the group arranged a march with Rev. Sharpton to protest the Sessions appointment. It has also organized news conferences on the issue, published an anti-Sessions attack on its homepage, are actively promoting the Twitter initiative #StopSessions, and had this to say about the senator in a recent email to its members: “[H]ow can we trust someone with ties to extremist anti-immigrant groups to oversee the lives of immigrants and the Latino community?” His views are “diametrically opposed to those of the Latino community… Tell your senators to protect and defend the rights of all Americans by opposing the confirmation of Sen. Sessions. Adelante.”

The organization’s attack against racial politics and ethnocentrism may leave some scratching their heads given the group’s own forceful ethno-nationalist mandate and long-time racialist ties to anti-white racist UT-Arlington professor Jose Angel Gutierrez. Before becoming a teacher, Gutierrez created a string of extremist ethno-nationalist organizations, including La Raza Unida (“The United Race”), a political party based in Texas, and the beret-and-combat-boot-wearing Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO). He was also a key player in the Brown Berets, a paramilitary organization also from the late sixties that’s recently had a resurgence following its alliance with Black Lives Matter.

Notably, La Raza’s gone out of its way to separate the group from Gutierrez. As it states on its website, Gutierrez “never had any connection to NCLR.” A modest amount of investigative research, however, does indeed show not only does La Raza have connections with Gutierrez, those connections are substantial. The following quotes, taken from throughout the man’s career starting in the late sixties as a key figure in the “Chicano Rights” movement, show why La Raza’s perhaps now wised up to create distance between the two:

[Narrow down to 4-5 if needed]

We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him. (Source).
We are millions… we just have to survive… we have an aging white America… they are not making babies… they are dying… it’s a matter of time… the explosion is in our population. (Source).
Our devil has pale skin and blue eyes (Source).
Is it the duty of every good revolutionary to kill every newborn White baby? (Source).
It’s too late for the Gringo to make amends. Violence has got to come (Source).
We realize that the effects of cultural genocide takes many forms—some Mexicanos will become psychologically castrated, others will become demagogues and gringos as well and others will come together, resist and eliminate the gringo. We will be the latter (Source).
We are the future of America. Unlike any prior generation, we now have the critical mass. We’re going to Latinize this country (Source).
See recent picture of Gutierrez here holding signs reading 1st Illegal Alien in US: Pilgrim and 1st Illegal Alien in Texas: Sam Houston, Davey Crocket, Sam Bowie, etc.

Around the time Gutierrez made the above “aging white America” quote, La Raza, which again states emphatically it “never had any connection” to him, presented the man with its “Chicano Hero Award”, a reward for his apparent ‘service’ to the Hispanic community.

A Millennials’ Guide to Angela Davis and Other Stalinists “History cannot be deleted.” Lloyd Billingsley

On Friday, January 21, Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States. The next day, the leftist hordes descended on Washington and cranked up the volume. C-SPAN identified one keynote speaker only as Angela Davis, so millenials, GenXers, and even baby boomers should understand what she is all about.

“We represent the powerful forces of change that are determined to prevent the dying cultures of racism, hetero-patriarchy from rising again,” Davis said, adding: “history cannot be deleted like web pages.” Davis had a lot to say about the evils of America but did not get into her own colorful history of speeches before presidential elections. In those the African-American Davis always showed a flair for all-white, all-male totalitarian dictatorships.

In 1980 and 1984 Angela Davis was the vice-presidential candidate of the Communist Party USA, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union. That was how the Russian Communists interfered in the American electoral process, by running their own candidates or supporting proxies in other parties, such as Henry Wallace in 1948.

In 1980 and 1984, Davis was on the bottom of the ticket under white Stalinist Gus Hall, like her a real barrel of laughs. Davis and Hall twice lost to Ronald Reagan and George Bush, big time, but that defeat could not prevent Davis from becoming professor of the history of consciousness and feminist studies at UC Santa Cruz. Before that she gained fame for supporting violent male convicts such as Black Panther George Jackson, who killed a guard at Soledad Prison.

As this article described it, Davis brought the “arsenal of weapons” to spring Jackson. On August 7, 1970, “George Jackson’s 17-year-old brother, Jonathan, charged into a Marin County courtroom and took several people hostage, including Judge Harold Haley, the prosecuting assistant DA, and two jurors. The assailants taped a sawed-off shotgun (owned by Davis) to Haley’s chin. In the ensuing escape attempt, a shootout took place during which Haley’s head was blown off, and Jonathan Jackson was killed.”

The pro-gun Davis fled but was arrested in New York. At her 1972 trial more than 20 witnesses implicated her in the plot to free Jackson, but Davis gained acquittal. That made her a national figure and helped launch her political career.

In 1979, Angela Davis won the International Lenin Peace Prize, awarded by the Soviet Union. The award helped her rise in the Communist Party, but she was not America’s only star Stalinist.

Paul Robeson boasted huge talents as a singer, actor and athlete but spent much of his life defending the all-white Communist dictatorship of the Soviet Union during the worst of Stalin’s repressions. The USSR duly gave him the Stalin Peace Prize, which Robeson proudly accepted.

President Trump Should Dump the Media Kick the press corps out of the White House. Daniel Greenfield

Last week the media lost its mind over reports that press briefings might be moved from the White House back to the Eisenhower Office Building next door where President Eisenhower held the first ever televised press conference.

Media outlets issued panicked reports of being “evicted,” “kicked out” or “exiled” from the cramped theater that used to be the White House’s indoor swimming pool. There was outrage at the thought that they might have to take an equally short walk to the White House Conference Center where they had already worked while the Bush White House spent millions in taxpayer money renovating the room.

“The press went crazy, so I said, ‘Let’s not move it.'” President Trump finally reassured them.

He got as much gratitude for it as President Nixon did for ruining a perfectly good indoor pool and as President Bush did for spending a fortune renovating it. Instead the media began spreading the same conspiracy theories accusing Bush of plotting to permanently banish them from the White House.

And that’s exactly what President Trump should do.

“There’s no way the people are being served if they kick the people’s representatives out of the People’s House,” Ron Fournier absurdly postured.

The people elected President Donald J. Trump. Nobody elected Ron Fournier. The National Journal he works for, like most of the Atlantic media properties, specializes in inside baseball for insiders.

Trust ratings and approval levels for the media are so far down in the toilet that it would take a plumber to find them. If the media are the people’s representatives, then the people want to elect different ones. Those are some of the same representatives that the media is trying to ban from social media with a fake “Fake News Crusade” and by resisting any expansion of press briefings with threats and warnings.

“We’ll have to consider doing things other than protesting and whining,” Fournier threatened. “We’ll have to think about what we can do to bring some pain to make our point.”

Do what?

Run items accusing President Trump of being a traitor, a liar, a racist, a rapist and a Batman villain? The media has already done all of those. What else is it going to except shout more lies even louder?

Red Caps, Pussy Hats Daphne Anson

First, the red caps.
They’re what the smart gals in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, have been wearing on top of their niqabs, while taking part in a mass parade and military display in support of the Houthi movement. Brandishing weapons, this chapter of the Israel-hating Sisterhood chanted: “Death to America! Death to Israel! A curse upon the Jews!” Second, the “pussy hats”.

They’re the specially knitted pink or red chapeaux with the little pointed ears that anti-Trump feministas (who typically say not one word of condemnation of Islamic misogyny but, rather, tend to be in the forefront of the Useful Idiot and anti-Israel movement) have been sporting at anti-Trump marches this weekend.

Why didn’t these women march in support of the sexually assaulted women of Cologne in January last year? Against the Muslim youths who have made Sweden the rape capital of Europe? Against the truly benighted patriarchal attitudes that Islam is introducing into Europe?

The hats can be seen at this march in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the crowd is at least seemingly good natured (the video bears last year’s date in error).

How nauseating yet utterly predictable, given the Left’s proven track record of hypocritical absurdity, to see, here, “Hanoi Jane” smiling approvingly at Miley Cyrus, whose obscene stage acts have done more to degrade women and perpetuate the “sex object” stereotype than Trump’s admittedly appalling adolescent-level lewd boastings have!

Crazy feministas making hijabs for themselves (out of the American flag):

Malevolent madness in Merkeland: at Berlin march an anti-Trump feminist intones a certain Islamist supremacy phrase while other feminists listen enraptured!:

Germany’s New ‘Ministry of Truth’ War against Free Speech by Stefan Frank

It seems that all ideas suspected of being “populist” — or simply those ideas without the blessing of the elites – will now be banned in Germany. This restriction applies to criticism of the government (especially regarding immigration and energy policies), of the EU, of Islam, of government officials and of the media.

As in communist dictatorships, the more obvious the failings of the government, the more aggressively the establishment attacks those who speak out about them.

Large companies such as Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), BMW, Mercedes-Benz and the supermarket chain REWE obeyed straightaway and promised to place “Breitbart” on the blacklist immediately and never to advertise there again.

A plucky little pizza delivery service that responded to the blacklisting demand by declaring that it was “not the morality police”. The company was denounced by Der Spiegel as “inept”, and after “protests from customers”, it ended up capitulating, as the newspaper reported with much satisfaction.

The elites and intellectuals are apparently now counted among the German minorities in need of protection.

Toward the end of last year, Germany experienced a previously unheard-of boycott campaign – funded by the German government, no less — against several websites, such as the popular “Axis of Good” (“Achse des Guten”). The website, critical of the government, was suddenly accused of “right-wing populism”.

The German government’s efforts at thought control seem to have begun the with the victory of Donald J. Trump in the US presidential election — that seems to set the “establishment” off. Germany’s foreign minister and the probable future federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier — one of the first to travel to Iran after the removal of sanctions there to kowtow to the Ayatollahs — called America’s future president a “hate preacher”.

Germany’s newspapers were suddenly littered with apocalyptic predictions and anti-American fulminations.

For hard-core Trump-haters, however, a witch hunt by itself is insufficient; they want activism! Since November, Germany’s left-wing parties have had a strong increase in membership, as reported by Der Spiegel. At the same time, the federal government evidently decided, at least regarding the federal elections taking place in 2017, that it would no longer count on journalists’ self-censorship. The German government, instead of merely hoping that newspapers would voluntarily — or under pressure from the Press Council — refrain from criticising the government’s immigration policies, decided that it, itself, would inaugurate censorship.
The Federal Government’s “Ministry of Truth”

To this effect, as reported by Der Spiegel, the Federal Interior Ministry, intends to set up a “Defense Center against Disinformation (“Abwehrzentrum gegen Desinformation”) in the fight against “fake news on social networks”. “Abwehr” — the name of Nazi Germany’s military intelligence agency — is apparently meant to demonstrate the government’s seriousness regarding the matter.

“It sounds like the Ministry of Truth, ‘Minitrue,’ from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984”, wrote even the left-leaning daily, Frankfurter Rundschau.

Frank Überall, national head of the German Association of Journalists (DJV), bluntly stated: “This smells like censorship.”

It seems that all ideas suspected of being “populist” — or simply those ideas without the blessing of the elites – will now be banned in Germany. This restriction applies to criticism of the government (especially regarding immigration and energy policies), of the EU, of Islam, of government officials and of the media.

The Federal Agency for Political Education — the information agency of the Interior Ministry – is quite open about it: “Anti-elitism”, “anti-intellectualism”, “anti-politics” and “hostility toward institutions” are the “key characteristics of populism”.