RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-twitter-files-are-damning-to-government-and-the-media/

There are two pieces of deeply disturbing news to emerge from the “Twitter Files” released by Elon Musk. The first is that Twitter, under its old management, was not the open, politically neutral platform it pretended to be. Journalist Bari Weiss has shown that Twitter had secret “blacklists” and related methods specifically designed to limit the reach of conservative commentators. When Twitter’s old management denied that bias, as it did repeatedly, it was lying.

Second, we are learning that Twitter worked closely with like-minded government bureaucrats to squelch legitimate news, information, and discussion. They did so to protect favored candidates (Democrats) and political positions (progressive). We will undoubtedly learn that Facebook, Google and other media giants had similar ties to Washington. We certainly need to know.

The government’s role here is damning. Its primary job under the First Amendment is to protect free speech, not to kill it. It botched that vital job, and it did so deliberately to increase its own control over private speech in public fora and, apparently, to promote certain political views.

The only good news here is that Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, is exposing the old management’s efforts to suppress speech and promote political bias on its platform. To expose those malign efforts, he ordered some of Twitter’s internal documents be given to two journalists: Matt Taibbi (who quickly published some of his findings as tweets) and Bari Weiss (who is beginning to publish some findings and promises to publish a longer analysis).

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/08/these-7-trump-critical-gop-senators-have-no-plan-to-deal-with-unconstitutional-election-altering-censorship/

The Federalist asked the seven senators if they have a plan to remedy the unconstitutional censorship of voters and news during the 2020 election. Not one of them responded.

Seven Republican U.S. senators who slammed former President Trump for suggesting that new censorship revelations warranted a reconsideration of the 2020 presidential election results have no plan to address the First Amendment-violating censorship Trump was reacting to in “The Twitter Files.”

More and more evidence is exposing how our corrupt FBI brazenly violated the Constitution by dictating to social media monopolies what speech to censor from public and private discourse ahead of the 2020 election. Yet GOP senators are more preoccupied with Trump talking about altering the Constitution than they are with the deep state committing actual violations of it.

After revelations uncovered that Twitter colluded with the Biden campaign to censor content in the lead-up to the election and misused its “hacked material policy” to annihilate the Hunter Biden laptop story, Trump posted to Truth Social:

So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!

Trump clarified his comments on Monday, saying that he does not want to terminate the Constitution, but that there was “‘MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION’” that has been “irrefutably proven in the 2020 Presidential Election” and “steps must be immediately taken to RIGHT THE WRONG.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/08/the-fake-and-real-domestic-terrorists/

To hear the government tell it, a homeless guy who lived in the dilapidated basement of a vacuum repair shop with no running water is as much a danger to society as was Timothy McVeigh and the Tsarnaev brothers.

Adam Fox, according to the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Michigan, should spend the rest of his life in prison for conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020. After a jury could not reach a verdict in Fox’s case last April, the Department of Justice retried Fox and his remaining co-defendant Barry Croft, Jr. in August; both men were found guilty the second time around.

In what must be one of the most dishonest motions filed by the government perhaps in recent history—for example, prosecutors insist two men acquitted during the same April trial are Fox’s co-conspirators despite being cleared of all charges by a jury—the Justice Department described the kidnapping plot as an act of domestic terrorism in a memo arguing 

Fox, 38, should die in jail. Fox, who had to use the Mexican restaurant in the same strip mall where his vacuum repair flophouse was located to brush his teeth, somehow had the wherewithal to attempt to “light the fire of a second revolution,” assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Birge wrote in Fox’s sentencing memo.

“While the plot to kidnap a sitting state governor is shocking for its temerity, it is not without recent antecedents. For Fox’s paranoid fantasies of government ‘tyranny,’ one need look no further than the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The defendant’s plan to use homemade explosive devices to kill and maim recalls the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.” (Fox also was convicted of planning to use a weapon of mass destruction.)

Setting aside the government’s despicable comparison of Fox’s half-baked (and sometimes, literally baked) bull-session planning to two deadly terror attacks, both of which resulted in the murder of children, the plot to kidnap Whitmer existed only in the “paranoid fantasies” of agents and informants working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-beheading-in-philadelphia/

EXCERPT

In the Lawndale section of Philadelphia recently, a 41-year-old woman, Leila al Raheel, was decapitated by her 34-year-old husband in the kitchen of their home. Ahmad Shareef was apprehended six blocks from the scene of the murder, hiding behind a clump of bushes. The mainstream news media reported the crime as yet another example of “generic” domestic violence. The police even called it a “domestic homicide,” without elaborating or speculating on a motive, as well as hiding the fact that the alleged killer was Muslim.

Joanne Otero-Cruz, who runs Women Against Abuse, a nonprofit in Philadelphia, was quoted in reference to the above murder as saying, “A lot of people actually experience this. There is help out there.”

Let’s step back a moment.

Most female domestic abuse victims do not experience decapitation. Decapitation with a knife by a “loved one” has a decidedly Muslim flavor — but of course it was impossible for Otero-Cruz to reference this subtext, or to bring up the possibility of an honor killing. Had she done so this would have led to charges of stereotyping and “Islamophobia,” as every mainstream news reporter by now realizes. Multiple reports of the Lawndale murder kept to the “generic” domestic abuse scenario, as if something had gone terribly wrong in (yet another) Brady Bunch household.

Freedom Center website Jihad Watch, the notable exception when it came to reporting about the murder, published the following headline:

“Philadelphia: Muslim accused of beheading woman who was treated like a slave.”

Finally, some honesty…

Most of the big news media outlets mentioned nothing about the victim being treated like a slave, although NBC10 did manage to quote a neighbor of the victim, who said, “The woman…they treat her like a slave. She runs in and out of the house barefoot. She really never goes anywhere else. She carries all of their bags in. They scream at her…”

The neighbor, Nyiha Richardson, also told reporters that she had witnessed “several problems at the home in the past, including Shareef running outside half naked and threatening neighbors to the point in which one family moved away.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/what_is_treason.html

“Some 1.7 billion dollars was sent by Obama and Kerry to Tehran, in cash. There was no consent by Congress. That cash was the giving of aid and comfort to funders of international terrorism while America remains at war. That is the very definition of treason.”

The charge of treason is thrown around by people on both ends of the political aisle who fail to show an understanding of what the word legally means in America.

Treason has a very narrow definition that prevents most people accused from having committed actual treason.

18 USC Ch. 115, S2381 defines Treason as:

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

In order for an American to commit treason, war must be declared by Congress. Without war against a declared enemy, there can be no aid and comfort given to an enemy, which means there can be no treasonous activity committed.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were not tried for treason since war was not declared against the Soviets. They were convicted and sentenced to death for espionage.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2022/12/08/karine-jean-pierre-storms-out-of-a-white-house-briefing-in-a-huff-n1652100

Another day, another disaster for White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Eventually, she is going to burn out on the continual slapstick comedy bits that the press briefings have become. She can only wipe the pie off of her face so many times before she hands in her two weeks’ notice. Then she’ll take a gig with CNN where nobody will ask her anything and she can become the star she was destined to be.

That will be a sad day, since waiting for the story of the latest flub or blooper has become a bit of a tradition. A fun, if cringe, Advent calendar, if you will. And while these moments in which the White House yet again becomes a whoopie cushion are somewhat entertaining, one stares at them with the same mixture of horror, curiosity, and fascination as one does a crash scene.

The Daily Caller reports that the latest episode of the wheels coming off a White House presser took place on Thursday. Simon Ateba is a reporter for Today News Africa. He had a question for Jean-Pierre about the U.S.-Africa Summit, in which President Biden will host leaders from 50 African nations. A perfectly reasonable expectation for a reporter from an African news agency at a White House presser. In fact, I can’t think of a better venue.

Not only did Jean-Pierre not answer the man’s question, but she also would not explain why she could not answer the question. She became so frustrated that she called an early lid and left the room. You can watch the exchange below:

https://pjmedia.com/columns/paula-bolyard/2022/12/08/breaking-new-twitter-files-dump-exposes-blacklists-secret-cabal-censoring-high-profile-conservatives-n1652131

Independent journalist Bari Weiss took to Twitter on Thursday night to unload a second trove of internal memos and documents exposing how Twitter officials silenced the voices of prominent conservatives on the platform. Radio host Dan Bongino, Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, and activist Charlie Kirk were among those Twitter censored or blacklisted, along with the popular “Libs of TikTok” account.

“A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users,” Weiss, a former New York Times reporter, wrote. “The authors [of the Twitter Files] have broad and expanding access to Twitter’s files. The only condition we agreed to was that the material would first be published on Twitter.”

She noted that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who tried to shed light on how the Covid lockdowns were harming children, was on a “Trends Blacklist,” meaning Twitter took action to ensure he would not appear in the Trending topics section of the platform.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/09/i-am-a-misinformation-denier/

Misinformation does not and cannot – by definition – exist.Correct information, incorrect information, true information, false information can all certainly exist, as can partial, missing, complete, and detailed.Just not misinformation – same with disinformation, by the way.

So why is the term used with such vitriolic abandon?  Why not call something a lie and leave it at that?

Because misinformation is not about describing factual information but about dismissing and denigrating personal opinion and belief.  It is about changing when someone says “I think…” into “I know” and then claiming that person is spreading a factual misrepresentation.

Like the famous Jordan Peterson BBC interview in which the host over and over again said “so what you’re saying is …” to Peterson even though he had said no such thing (see the interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54&t=966s ), it is a fallacious rhetorical gambit. As one of the commenters put it: if Peterson had suggested going to the movies the host would have snapped back “so you think women can’t read?” a purposefully decontextualized mischaracterization intended to dishonestly ignore and negate the actual meaning of the statement – that is how the term works.

Labeling something as “misinformation” has no bearing on its relationship to the truth of a given situation – it is labeled as such because it is not a lie but simply problematic for those who wish it to be one, or at least perceived as one.

In other words, the epithet of misinformation is used most often, begging Al Gore’s pardon, to describe an inconvenient truth.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/politics/house-vote-ndaa-military-vaccine-mandate/index.html

The House voted on Thursday to pass sweeping legislation that would authorize $858 billion in national defense funding and rescind the US military’s Covid vaccine mandate. The measure passed with wide bipartisan support with a tally of 350 to 80.

House lawmakers approved a final negotiated version of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2023, which sets the policy agenda and authorizes funding for the Department of Defense. Following passage in the House, the measure will next need to go to the Senate to be approved before it can be sent to President Joe Biden to be signed into law.

As part of its $858 billion topline for national defense funding, the measure authorizes $817 billion specifically for the Department of Defense. The massive bill includes a vast number of policy provisions. Among them, it would authorize a 4.6% pay raise for military service members. It includes provisions to strengthen air power and land warfare defense capabilities as well as cybersecurity. It also aims to bolster US support for Ukraine and NATO.

The provision to rescind the military’s Covid vaccine mandate comes after congressional Republicans pushed for its repeal. In a statement Tuesday night, House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy said, “the end of President Biden’s military COVID vaccine mandate is a victory for our military and for common sense.”

The White House declined to say on Wednesday whether President Biden will sign the must-pass annual defense bill if it includes the provision to rescind the military Covid vaccine mandate, reiterating that the president continues to support a mandate but leaving the door open to a repeal.

“We continue to believe that repealing the vaccine mandate is a mistake. Making sure our troops are ready to defend this country and prepared to do so that remains the President’s priority and the vaccine requirement for Covid does just that,” National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby told reporters Wednesday when pressed specifically on whether Biden would sign the NDAA if the mandate stayed in the final legislation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/brittney-griner-goes-free-russia-vladimir-putin-viktor-bout-paul-whelan-11670536789?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The release of WNBA star Brittney Griner on Thursday from a Russian prison labor camp is welcome news. The price was high, as the White House negotiated a prisoner swap for notorious Russian arms deal Viktor Bout, but there should be relief when any American is sprung from hostile and unjust captivity.

Yes, Ms. Griner was foolish to enter Russia in February with vape cartridges containing hashish amid rising U.S.-Russia tensions. But she was clearly treated harshly, and handed a nine-year sentence, because she is American. She was arrested shortly before Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion, and he viewed her as political leverage.

Some on the American right are grousing that, at the height of the George Floyd protests, Ms. Griner called on the WNBA to stop playing the national anthem before games—implying she had forfeited her right to the government’s support. But political views should be irrelevant when it comes to rescuing Americans held abroad as political hostages.

More troubling is that the prisoner swap didn’t include Paul Whelan, a former Marine and businessman held in Russia on trumped-up espionage charges. Ms. Griner is a celebrity with prominent backers, while Mr. Whelan’s public lobbyists are few beyond his family. President Biden said Thursday that Mr. Whelan is “unjustly detained”—and vowed that his Administration will keep fighting for his release.