https://www.frontpagemag.com/that-day-yet-again/ When the U.S. entered World War II, the director Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life) left Hollywood and, at the age of 44, enlisted in the Army, where General George C. Marshall put him to work making pictures for the war effort. The films, several of which were released under the umbrella title Why […]
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/09/11/on-september-11-kamala-harris-likens-trump-supporters-to-the-9-11-terrorists-n1628541 Old Joe Biden said it during his ominous black-and-red speech on September 1: “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” On Sunday, the twenty-first anniversary of the September 11, 2001, jihad terror attacks that killed nearly three thousand people, Chuck Todd on Meet the […]
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/biden-administration-engaged-in-a-massive-censorship-campaign/
In a federal lawsuit, discovery reveals a multi-agency effort to censor and suppress voices that disagree with administration policies.
The bedrock of American democracy, the First Amendment, prohibits Congress from making laws “abridging the freedom of speech.” The Supreme Court has repeatedly applied this prohibition to executive actions, as well.
The Biden administration’s campaign to censor, demonetize, and suppress dissenting voices on social media is much broader than previously known, as demonstrated by an amended complaint filed last month in federal district court in the case of Missouri v. Biden. The complaint, by the Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general along with the New Civil Liberties Alliance on behalf of leading health-care professionals, provides strong evidence of the administration’s vigorous campaign to coerce and collude with social-media companies in suppressing and deplatforming criticism of the administration as well as views with which it disagrees on subjects such as Covid, elections, the Hunter Biden laptop, and climate change, among others.
The evidence shows that at least 80 senior officials have participated in a concerted federal enterprise involving at least eleven federal agencies, including the White House, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Office of the Surgeon General, Census Bureau, and FBI. The manifestly unconstitutional public–private partnership between the administration and Big Tech disregards Chief Justice Warren Burger’s warning that it is “axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”
Responses to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and emails produced in discovery show that White House, DHS, and HHS officials flagged specific content and examples of content for censorship, including factually accurate dissenting views, under the guise of suppressing “domestic terrorism.”
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-forgetting-of-9-11/ How did this coordinated mass murder become so irrelevant? I have written a lot about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 over the years, including a book on United Flight 93, which went down a few hours from my home in central Pennsylvania. In much of that work, I argued for the importance […]
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/biden-declares-war-on-half-the-country/
Joe Biden’s speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on Thursday was one of the most remarkable in living memory. By “remarkable,” I hasten to add that I do not mean “good.” On the contrary, it was a breathtaking act of what the psychoanalysts call “projection,” blaming others for the bad things you do yourself.
The speech itself was a malignant act of demagoguery that will have colonels and generalissimos everywhere catching their breath with envy. The neo-totalitarian stage set, replete with red lighting effects and military personal flanking the shouting, gesticulating Biden, was right out of central casting. Next time, perhaps Biden will wear epaulettes along with his signature aviators.
The speech was billed as a reflection on the “soul of the nation.” Remember, Biden was sold to the country as Mr. Normality, as someone who would bind up the nations’s wounds after four years of the bad, horrible, no good, unacceptable, supremely divisive Donald Trump.
It hasn’t worked out that way, notwithstanding Trump’s occasional zingers and rhetorical molotov cocktails that have kept the fires of outrage burning. In this respect, Biden’s speech typified the new Democratic dispensation, according to which the world is divided sharply in two. The good guys are those who espouse the Democratic agenda. The bad guys are anyone who dissents.
https://www.commonsense.news/p/generation-swipe?utm_source=email
Every generation thinks they have it the hardest when it comes to finding love, but it’s hard to look at mine and conclude that we don’t have a good case. Never before have young people been having so little sex—at least not since we began counting such things. Never before have young people been lonelier. Never before have we been stalked so thoroughly by our past selves, every blunder cataloged in perpetuity.
I know about this and think about it a lot, because I’m smack in the middle of it. I’m a 27-year-old on all the apps. To be safe, I go into every bookstore, slide books off the shelves, and peek through the opening between Normal People and Americanah ready to lock eyes with my forever beau. But it seems all the would-be husbands have been left functionally castrated by porn addictions, or slaving away at a 9-to-5 trying to pay for a tiny apartment, or too distracted by bio-hacking and Reddit boards to go on a date.
By the time my parents were my age, so the meme goes, they had a house and two kids. A lot of men in my generation aren’t even having sex.
One of those men is Shane. Shane, 20, is a junior at Penn State studying economics. He comes from a happy family and says he’s never had trouble making friends. And yet he can’t seem to bring himself to create profiles on the dating apps he downloaded months ago. That’s because he’s never had sex.
“I want a relationship, I don’t want to be a loner anymore,” he told me. But Shane is convinced that he’s not good enough. Specifically, he’s not good enough on the measures that dating apps cull for. He’s short, for one. So Shane’s been calorie counting, protein tracking, and lifting compulsively for about two years in the hopes of achieving the ideal body type: lean and fit. He reads Reddit’s relationship boards to get a sense of what women complain about—bad sex, manners, politics, hygiene, and overbearing in-laws, to name a few—to see how he can be the best date when he finally works up the courage.
https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/10/the-true-soul-of-america/
“The threat to the soul of our nation is real and palpable. Its source is not, however, the one Biden identified. Therein lies both the deepest of ironies and the enormity of the challenge. We are indeed locked into a battle for the very soul of our nation. Joe Biden and his woke followers are not on the side of the angels.”
Sometimes a speech can reveal important truths contrary to those the speaker hoped to convey. Joe Biden gave the country a perfect example with his “Soul of the Nation” speech on September 1 in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.
Biden provided perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the deep spiritual crisis roiling our nation. We are mired in a struggle between two spiritual traditions: The biblically grounded American spirit of our founding and a contemporary wokeism grounded in utopian socialism.
The White House insisted the speech was not political. In a narrow sense, that denial may have been accurate. Souls are not fit subjects for politics. Nor are they fit subjects for economics or for science. The soul is not an empirically observable quantity. It has no observable existence apart from the body (though the converse is not true; bodies do exist after the soul has departed). The soul is the part of human existence that remains after all observable, testable, measurable components have been labeled and studied. The soul is inherently and quintessentially metaphysical. Discussions of the soul belong exclusively to the realm of spirituality.
https://americanmind.org/salvo/class-homicide/
Massive inequality and the rise of a new feudal system have nearly destroyed the chances of social mobility.
There’s much talk today, from left and right, about threats to democracy, yet little focus on the social dynamic critical to its survival. In this respect, we may see the current, and troubling, escalation of violent political rhetoric, and even political violence, not so much as the cause of polarization but the result of changing class dynamics, most notably the increasingly perilous state of the yeoman middle class.
The United States, and much of the high-income world, is going through a revision of class relations resonant with gilded age, or even feudal models. A recent British parliamentary study projects that by 2030, the top one percent will expand their share to two thirds of the world’s wealth, with the biggest gains overwhelmingly concentrated at the top one percent of the top one percent—the top 0.01 percent.Similarly, in this country, since the mid-1980s, the share of national wealth held by those below the top 10 percent has fallen by 12 percentage points, the same proportion that the top 0.1 percent gained.As one conservative economist put it succinctly in 2018, “The economic legacy of the last decade is excessive corporate consolidation, a massive transfer of wealth to the top 1 percent from the middle class.”
Hierarchy triumphs over merit and even luck
In the process, the aspirational character long essential to American society is being transformed. According to one study, the chances of middle-class earners moving up to the top rungs of the income ladder has declined by approximately 20 percent since the early 1980s. Data from the Census Bureau show that the share of national income going to the middle 60 percent of households has fallen to a record low.
In the economy, hierarchy is rapidly replacing opportunity. Banking and finance, treated amiably by Washington during the Financial Crisis, have become increasingly concentrated while many smaller regional institutions have either been acquired or driven out of business. Growing corporate concentration has now seeped into the once dynamic tech economy in both the U.S. and Europe. In Silicon Valley now, the renowned garage culture has morphed into a Gargantua of giant firms with market power unprecedented in modern times, controlling in some cases 80 to 90 percent of key tech markets.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-feds-coordinate-with-facebook-twitter-white-house-social-media-emails-covid-instagram-11662761613?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
One nagging question in the social-media age is how online platforms like Facebook and Twitter choose to “moderate” speech—and why, and whether the government is leaning on them to step it up. Hundreds of pages of emails between federal officials and the big social sites were recently dropped in court, and they make for instructive, if not definitive, reading.
The civil case was brought by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana, who allege that misinformation crackdowns by the tech giants are legally “government action,” since they involve “open collusion” with public officials. In a court filing last week, the AGs posted some of what they have already obtained, which they call “a tantalizing snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise.’”
Well, maybe. Many of the email chains read like good-faith interactions between public officials and internet companies worried about clearly false information. What raises eyebrows in some communications, though, is an oozing solicitousness toward top White House advisers. This week the judge granted additional discovery, meaning more emails soon.
***
The trouble with seeing all of the correspondence, some of which dates to the Trump Administration, as inherently illegitimate is that much of it seems to involve actual misinformation. The White House flags the Instagram user anthonyfauciofficial, apparently someone posing as Dr. Anthony Fauci, and asks: “Any way we can get this pulled down? It is not actually one of ours.” The answer from Facebook (most of the names are redacted): “Yep, on it!”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-lessons-of-9-11-are-still-unlearned/
Twenty-one years have passed since the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, and our foreign policy establishment and ruling elite still have not learned the lessons of that horrendous carnage. The Romans thought even fools could learn from experience, but our credentialed mavens can’t break free of their institutional orthodoxy and narratives. As a consequence, our foreign policy and international relations continue to put our national security at risk.
This misinterpretation of modern Islam’s traditional resistance to infidel hegemony began with the Iranian Revolution, the first of subsequent jihadist attacks on the U.S. that culminated on 9/11. The West filtered that religious revolution through the old ideas of anticolonialism and national self-determination encoded in the Versailles settlement. Barack Obama, in his cringing flattery of Islam during his 2009 Cairo speech, recycled this stale received wisdom, blaming “tensions” between Islam and the West on “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”
This ahistorical orthodoxy had been explicitly rejected 30 years earlier by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who proclaimed the traditional Islamic universalist goals of the Iranian Revolution: “We shall export our revolution to the world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds throughout the world, there will be jihad.” Nor was Khomeini an outlier among Muslims. Hassan al Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, similarly said that his designs for transforming Egypt into an Islamic state ruled by sharia law would be a “springboard for universal expansion ‘until the entire world will chant the name of the Prophet.’”
