RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/josh-hawleys-plan-to-regulate-social-media-giants-draws-muted-response-on-capitol-hill/

Many Senate Republicans, and some Senate Democrats, appear to be taking a wait-and-see approach to the Missouri freshman’s controversial proposal.

One week ago today, freshman senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) introduced a bill requiring large social-media companies to prove to the Federal Trade Commission that their platforms are not politically biased. Failure to satisfy the FTC in this regard would result in companies such as Facebook and Twitter losing immunity from liability for defamatory content posted by their users, meaning they could be sued out of existence.

Hawley’s proposal drew sharp criticism from several voices on the right, including our own David French, who wrote that the bill is both unconstitutional and unwise. On Capitol Hill, there hasn’t been a groundswell of support for Hawley’s legislation, which currently has zero cosponsors. But neither has there been much pushback from Hawley’s Republican colleagues.

Representative Justin Amash (R., Mich.), a frequent thorn in his caucus’s side, tweeted that the bill is “a sweetheart deal for Big Government. It empowers the one entity that should have no say over our speech to regulate and influence what we say online.” But only one of more than a dozen Republican senators contacted by National Review expressed any criticism of Hawley’s legislation: Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, who “is not a co-sponsor of this government-control approach and has concerns that this could open the door to the left for a new government Fairness Doctrine,” his spokesman, James Wegmann, tells National Review.

“My gut reaction is it’s a pretty blunt instrument. But I’m going to take a look at it,” says John Kennedy of Louisiana.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/26/bias-at-tech-companies-hurts-americans-more-than-you-think/

So regarding this line from Peter Suderman’s piece, critiquing Sen. Josh Hawley and Sohrab Ahmari, titled “The Moral Scolds of the New Illiberal Right Are Coming For Your Internet”: “A private company, like Facebook or Twitter, suspending an account or deleting a post is no more censorship than a bar owner kicking out an unwelcome patron is censorship.”

That’s a particularly libertarian perspective. But is that really how people think about and define censorship? Or is that an uncommon definition at odds with one more commonly held by American citizens?

We have a current example relevant to this question from yesterday in the knitting site crackdown which will permanently ban any accounts posting content in support of Trump or his administration (as representing hate speech and endorsement of white supremacy).

Now, this may not seem like a big deal. But if you’re a mom in Wyoming who’s been making money off of selling your knitted projects for more than a decade – as one of our writers at The Federalist is – does anyone honestly think they don’t view that as censorship? That kids or family don’t view this as grandma getting censored just because of her support of one of the major political parties?

I doubt a narrow definition of censorship which is limited solely to governmental activity sounds that believable to most people. Of course it’s not a First Amendment violation; these are private businesses. But it is pretty obviously a form of market-based censorship: you can’t post on our marketplace if you think X or your product is perceived as supporting X. That view is a lot more common than the narrow “only the government can censor” view.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/so-many-democratic-candidates-so-many-bad-ideas/

So many people want to be president. Unfortunately, many have terrible ideas.

Sen. Kamala Harris wants companies to prove they pay men and women equally. “Penalties if they don’t!” she shouts. But there are lots of reasons, other than sexism, why companies pay some men more than women.

Harris also wants government to “hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms.” But “holding them accountable” means censorship. If politicians get to censor media, they’ll censor anyone who criticizes them.

Sen. Bernie Sanders wants the post office to offer banking services. The post office? It already loses billions of dollars despite its monopoly on delivering mail. Sanders also wants to increase our national debt by forgiving $1.6 trillion in student loan debt.

He wants to ban for-profit charter schools and freeze funding for nonprofit charters. That’s great news for some government-school bureaucrats and teachers unions that don’t want to compete but bad news for kids who flourish in charters when government schools fail.

Sen. Cory Booker once sounded better about charters, saying, “When people tell me they’re against school choice … or charter schools, I say, ‘As soon as you’re willing to send your kid to a failing school in my city … then I’ll be with you.'”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/25/project-veritas-bombshell-video-ruffles-some-feathers/

James O’Keefe’s explosive video exposing Google’s political agenda appears to have ruffled some feathers in the media world.

Jen Gennai, the Google executive seen talking to Project Veritas undercover journalists about Google’s plans to prevent “the next Trump situation,” has already published a response complaining that she was taken out of context.

And the bombshell video didn’t last even a full day on YouTube before it was removed from the platform.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, removed the video due to privacy complaints about the footage.

“We have strong privacy guidelines in place, including the ability to file a complaint if someone feels their privacy has been violated,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement. “When complaints are received, we may also provide the uploader a chance to remove or edit private information in their video.”

The powerful video can still be viewed on BitChute, Vimeo, and on Project Veritas’ website.

Meanwhile, Gennai, Google’s head of innovation, has weighed in on O’Keefe’s report at Medium.

In her piece, she complains that she was duped by Project Veritas and as a result, was being besieged by “an enormous collection of threatening calls, voicemails, text messages and emails, from people I’d never met.”

Yes, her crisis management team advised her to play the victim card:

Someone wrote “Your ideology will be shredded to pieces, just moments before you got executed for treason…you are living lended time, enjoy till then”. There were plenty more threats like this. I’ve never been so fearful.

https://quillette.com/2019/06/20/my-testimony-to-

Editor’s note: Coleman Hughes delivered the following testimony at a United States House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Bill H.R. 40 on June 19, 2019. If passed, the bill would establish a commission for reparations.

Nothing I’m about to say is meant to minimize the horror and brutality of slavery and Jim Crow. Racism is a bloody stain on this country’s history, and I consider our failure to pay reparations directly to freed slaves after the Civil War to be one of the greatest injustices ever perpetrated by the U.S. government.

But I worry that our desire to fix the past compromises our ability to fix the present. Think about what we’re doing today. We’re spending our time debating a bill that mentions slavery 25 times but incarceration only once, in an era with zero black slaves but nearly a million black prisoners—a bill that doesn’t mention homicide once, at a time when the Center for Disease Control reports homicide as the number one cause of death for young black men. I’m not saying that acknowledging history doesn’t matter. It does. I’m saying there’s a difference between acknowledging history and allowing history to distract us from the problems we face today.

In 2008, the House of Representatives formally apologized for slavery and Jim Crow. In 2009, the Senate did the same. Black people don’t need another apology. We need safer neighborhoods and better schools. We need a less punitive criminal justice system. We need affordable health care. And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery.

Nearly everyone close to me told me not to testify today. They said that even though I’ve only ever voted for Democrats, I’d be perceived as a Republican—and therefore hated by half the country. Others told me that distancing myself from Republicans would end up angering the other half of the country. And the sad truth is that they were both right. That’s how suspicious we’ve become of one another. That’s how divided we are as a nation.

If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further, making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today; we would insult many black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors; and we would turn the relationship between black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction—from a union between citizens into a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-fraudulent-paper-trail-through-the-anti-trump-c

Remember the simple rule: Anyone who pronounces on Trump–Russia from the baseline of, “Yes, the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC),” or its current, fuzzier iteration, “Russia interfered in the 2016 election,” is either directing, party to, or victim of a seditious campaign of deception against the U.S. people based on a series of untrustworthy if not downright fraudulent documents.

As a longtime student of “Russian interference,” I hasten to add I never rule out “Russian interference”; I just expect to find it inside the anti-Trump conspiracy. But that’s another story.

The outrageous fact is, a stack of dodgy documents makes up the shaky foundation of one of the most virulent attacks on our nation in history; to date, though, they have largely passed inspection. Even as they variously come under scrutiny and dispute, they remain in place, undergirding escalating attacks on the legitimacy of the 2016 election and the presidency of Donald Trump.

There is simply no coming to terms with this conspiracy inside the U.S. government until the U.S. people are able to recognize the fraudulence of the paper trail that got it started, and see that those involved in perpetrating these frauds upon us, the People, are, as we often say but never do, brought to justice.

I hate to say it, but I have a hard time believing we ever will see justice. Still, for the record, here is a list of dodgy documents that set us off on this dangerous voyage through U.S. sedition. Reading through, do bear in mind this rule of thumb from West’s Encyclopedia of American Law: “Evidence is not relevant unless its authenticity can be demonstrated.”

https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/24/insider-blows-whistle-exec-reveals-google-plan-to-prevent-trump-situation-in-2020-on-hidden-cam/
BIG UPDATE: YouTube has REMOVED the video from their platform. The video is still available on this website page.
UPDATE 1: Congressman Louie Gohmert issued a statement, saying “Google should not be deciding whether content is important or trivial and they most assuredly should not be meddling in our election process. They need their immunity stripped…”
UPDATE 2: Google executive Jen Gennai RESPONDED to the video, saying, “I was having a casual chat with someone at a restaurant and used some imprecise language. Project Veritas got me. Well done.” 
Insider: Google “is bent on never letting somebody like Donald Trump come to power again.”
Google Head of Responsible Innovation Says Elizabeth Warren “misguided” on “breaking up Google”
Google Exec Says Don’t Break Us Up: “smaller companies don’t have the resources” to “prevent next Trump situation”
Insider Says PragerU And Dave Rubin Content Suppressed, Targeted As “Right-Wing”
LEAKED Documents Highlight “Machine Learning Fairness” and Google’s Practices to Make Search Results “fair and equitable”
Documents Appear to Show “Editorial” Policies That Determine How Google Publishes News
Insider: Google Violates “letter of the law” and “spirit of the law” on Section 230

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/24/the-steele-dossier-has-been-discr

The three-year orchestrated campaign to discredit Donald Trump and destroy his presidency is littered with sketchy reports authored by partisan characters motivated by power and revenge.

From the Steele dossier and the personal memos of former FBI Director James Comey to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, a trove of dubious documents is burnished as compelling evidence to show the president is an illegitimate occupant of the Oval Office, a Kremlin stooge, or worse, a criminal in plain sight trying to subvert the rule of law and torch our democracy.

What truly should alarm Americans—and, one hopes, interest future historians far removed from this debacle—is how these clearly questionable materials earned the imprimatur of the world’s most powerful law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

The Trump-hating media, once filled with skepticism about how intelligence-gathering violated individual rights in service of wanton political pursuits, regurgitate every outlandish accusation as undeniable fact.

One example is the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin directly interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency. Two weeks before Trump was inaugurated the 45th president of the United States, Barack Obama’s top security chiefs—acting on a directive from the departing president—issued an official report to suggest that Trump’s victory was tainted.

According to Obama’s FBI, CIA, and NSA, Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/06/24/5g-were-

Economic numbers can be confusing — and scary. Tax reform charged the economy up. Trade wars have added uncertainty. Unemployment is at historic lows. Oil is possibly set for a price spike.

At times like this — when optimism, pessimism, and uncertainty all coexist, it would be beneficial if the government would speak with one voice. Unfortunately, it currently seems that one hand of our government doesn’t appear to be in sync with the other. And that is causing more — and more importantly unneeded — uncertainty.

An example of this unneeded uncertainty is the government’s role in the global battle for 5G dominance.

Many elements of the Trump administration have taken strong action to support U.S. 5G leadership and to stop Huawei — seen by most as an arm of the Chinese government — from gaining control of 5G. At the same time, part of the government continues a lawsuit begun by the Obama FTC to hobble the one company that can help us maintain that leadership — even turning to Huawei to help its case.

The leader in the U.S. in 5G technology is Qualcomm. Qualcomm developed the foundational technology that enables 5G and everyone else is building upon that. Huawei in China is still behind, but they are working hard to stay close. And this lead over the rest of the world gives both Qualcomm and the U.S. an economic advantage that other countries are understandably jealous about.

President Trump made sweeping policy decisions in an attempt to defend the U.S. leadership advantage in 5G, and also protect Qualcomm. He has also made the Chinese theft of U.S. intellectual property a primary talking point of his administration’s trade talks.