Category: Media

Remember when Obammy’s communications office tried to pretend he was the anti-1984 guy?

Obama suggests ‘digital fingerprints’ to counter misinformation ‘so we know what’s true and what’s not true.’

Former President Barack Obama suggested in a new interview the development of “digital fingerprints” to combat misinformation and distinguish between true and misleading news for consumers.

Obama sat down with his former White House senior adviser David Axelrod for a conversation on the latter’s podcast, “The Axe Files,” on CNN Audio. During the interview, Axelrod noted he’s seen “misinformation, disinformation, [and] deepfakes” targeting Obama.

“As I’ve told people, because I was the first digital president when I left office, I was probably the most recorded, filmed, photographed human in history, which is kind of a weird thing,” responded Obama. “But just the odds are that I was. As a consequence, there’s a lot of raw material there.”

The former president added that the deepfakes — digitally manipulated images, audio or video that appear legitimate — started with a version of him dancing, “saying dirty limericks” and similar kinds of activity.

“That technology’s here now,” continued Obama, who warned about the issue getting worse moving forward. “So, most immediately we’re going to have all the problems we had with misinformation before, [but] this next election cycle will be worse.”

He then suggested “digital fingerprints” to discern truth from misinformation.

“And the need for us, for the general public, I think to be more discriminating consumers of news and information, the need for us to over time develop technologies to create watermarks or digital fingerprints so we know what is true and what is not true,” he said. “There’s a whole bunch of work that’s going to have to be done there, but in the short term, it’s really going to be up to the American people to kind of say.”

Obama and Axelrod went on to say that today many consumers are only viewing information from sources they are predisposed to agree with and will likely believe what they see.

“Obviously, we saw that during the vaccination stuff. So, I am concerned about it,” added Obama, referring to the COVID vaccine. “And I think the best we’re going to be able to do is to constantly remind people that this is out there.”

The former president said he thinks most people are now aware that “not everything that pops up on your phone is true,” but cautioned misinformation can be used to discourage people from voting by characterizing the system as rigged and corrupt.

“That can oftentimes advantage the powerful,” said Obama. “And I am worried about that kind of cynicism developing even further during the course of this next election.”

The interview came about six weeks after the Obama Foundation on World Press Freedom Day posted a recent video of the former president lecturing about “widespread disinformation” and the need for journalists to create “an information environment” to support democracy.

Last year, Obama announced that his foundation would be launching a new initiative to combat misinformation. Days later, Obama angered conservatives with a speech at Stanford University warning of the dangers of “disinformation.”

During the speech, Obama said, “All we see is a constant feed of content where useful factual information and happy diversions, and cat videos flow alongside lies, conspiracy theories, junk science, quackery, White supremacist, racist tracts, misogynist screeds.”

Critics were quick to point out that Obama promoted the debunked narrative that former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election and that Obama infamously won Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” in 2013 by telling Americans, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” referring to the Affordable Care Act.

More recently, the Biden administration came under fire for trying to start the now-defunct Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Homeland Security. Many Republicans argued such an initiative would act as a Ministry of Truth in a dystopian society by suppressing dissent under the guise of stopping misinformation.

BLUF
About this potential conflict of interest, retired Canadian colonel David Redman recently testified that legacy media outlets are “ministries of propaganda,” with multiple former mainstream media employees also making similar comments about their past employers.

Media blames ‘climate change’ for Canadian wildfires despite arrest of multiple arsonists
While the mainstream media continues to point to ‘climate change’ as the source of the wildfires, reports show that multiple people have been arrested in connection with dozens of intentionally set fires in the country.

(LifeSiteNews) — Despite the arrest of multiple arsonists, the mainstream media in Canada seems intent on attributing the nation’s recent wildfires to “climate change.”

As wildfires continue to spread across western, and now central and eastern Canada, burning forestland and homes, the mainstream media continues to imply that climate change is the main culprit, despite a growing number of reports showing that arsonists have been arrested for allegedly setting dozens of fires.

“Several arsonists have been arrested in the past weeks in different provinces for lighting forest fires,” People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier tweeted. “But the lying woke media and politicians keep repeating that global warming is the cause.” 

The severe nature of the wildfires has caused Canadians to wonder why they have spread so rapidly, especially as many of the affected areas are not typically impacted by wildfires of this degree or at this time of the year.

In the past months, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have arrested several arsonists who have been charged with lighting fires across several provinces including Nova Scotia, Yukon, British Columbia, and Alberta. The motive behind lighting the fires is unclear.  

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CBS News shows why no one should take the media seriously

We here at Bearing Arms have no pretension of being unbiased. As a result, you folks reading this have an idea of where we stand on issues. For those who agree, that’s why you’re here. For those who don’t, you know to filter things through the appropriate lens.

But places like CBS News still want you to think they’re unbiased.

That gets harder and harder every single year. Especially with headlines like this: “Texas senator continues to call for common sense gun safety laws”

Now, let’s start by noting that a Texas state senator continuing calls for gun control is newsworthy to some degree, especially in light of the Uvalde anniversary.

The subject matter is arguably appropriate and as this is labeled as “local news” on the CBS News site, it makes sense. Yet that label also presents a bit of a problem.

See, one of the first things you need to do if you’re going to at least pretend to be neutral is leave your editorializing out of the headline.

For anti-gun folks, they don’t see an issue. Pro-Second Amendment folks, though, can see it plain as day. The phrase “common sense gun safety laws” isn’t an official term rooted in neutrality. It’s the exact way gun control organizations frame the laws they’re trying to push onto the American people.

Had the reporter for CBS News put the phrase in quotations, then he’s just repeating what the senator may have said. Instead, it’s presented to the world as if this is an established fact. I hate to break it to him, though. It’s not.

Take the policy measures mentioned in the piece:

At a 45-minute news conference Gutierrez hosted at the Capitol earlier this month he said, “Every time something happens it’s something else and he’s got a solution for this that’s not related to the common denominator which is guns.”…

In an interview with CBS News Texas earlier this month, Gutierrez told me none of his gun safety bills received a hearing in the Senate, including a raise the age bill, universal background checks, and red flag laws. “It’s very clear here the Republicans’ position on gun reform they don’t want to try.”

Raising the age to buy an AR-15 only looks like it might prevent something bad from happening in a case like Uvalde, but the truth is that most people in that age group who buy those rifles do so because they want something they can use to defend themselves. Raising the age limit won’t stop bad people from getting guns–how many mass shooters have we seen who were too young to own any firearm?–but it will stop these law-abiding adults from owning guns.

That’s just common sense.

Universal background checks only look like a common sense gun measure because the media has done such a near-universal job of making them look like one. They don’t discuss how this doesn’t actually impact black market gun sales, it only inhibits law-abiding citizens transferring guns to one another. That’s literally all it does.

Red flag laws have tons of problems, problems which the media refuses to challenge proponents on. Besides the oft-cited due process concerns, there’s the simple fact that you’re saying someone is too dangerous to exercise their constitutionally protected rights but is just fine walking around on the streets.

Where’s the common sense there?

CBS News editorializing these policy measures as common sense doesn’t change the fact that they’re not. All it does is make it impossible to take anything else they say seriously on the issue of guns.

Their lack of neutrality is clear; so clear that even those on the fence about whether the media is biased should be able to see it for themselves.

Want to know why the polls look to be against us? It’s because the entire media apparatus is doing stuff like this.

This is why the media will never understand gun owners

Most people who read stuff here are either gun owners or know someone who owns a gun. At the very least, they’re sympathetic to having one.

Not counting the hate readers, of course.

The media, however, is full of people who don’t own guns, don’t know anyone they know has them, and perhaps more importantly, don’t want to know anyone who is a firearm owner.

And yet, they routinely write crap like this:

The story of a Pennsylvania church blessing AR-15s made the rounds on traditional and social media last week. The ceremony at the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary ministry in rural Newfoundland, PA, was widely ridiculed as bizarre and out of touch, but once you take away some of the theatrics, how different are these worshippers really from millions of Americans and the NRA?

The answer, it turns out, is not that much.

WhoWhatWhy went to Newfoundland twice last week, attended the gun-blessing ceremony and saw some things that the rest of the media seems to have missed.

Now, the church in question is the Unification Church, whose members are often called “Moonies” after the founder, Rev. Hyung Jin (Sean) Moon.

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Mendacious Media, but I repeat myself

NBC Pushing Lies About the Most Popular Rifle in America, ….Again

In their latest hit piece about an inanimate object, NBC News once again ignores facts, common sense and takes frequent liberties with the truth.

The story, which was somehow labeled news rather than opinion, was published Sunday, titled: “What makes the AR-15 so beloved and so reviled: A rifle with military origins has become one of the country’s most divisive consumer products.”

For the two reporters, problems began from the start. The headline is misleading – the military origins bit. Even the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank infamous for its anti-gun stories and its liberal and laughable PolitiFact website, takes issue with this claim.

In a story published last year, Poynter tracked the origins of the AR-15 and found it was “first developed in the 1950s for civilian use.”

In their story, NBC News gaslights its readers about the effectiveness of Bill Clinton’s “assault weapon” ban, which for ten years banned the manufacture, sale, or transfer of a large number of “assault weapons,” including several handguns and standard-capacity magazines. Joe Biden has frequently taken credit for the ban and falsely claimed it “brought down these mass killings,” which fact-checkers have repeatedly said is a false statement.

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The Data and the Silence

A media pretty incurious as to the motives and manifesto of the Nashville shooter have rushed past the Atlanta shooter, who did not use an AR-15 and was black, so that the media can focus on the Hispanic shooter in Texas who loved Nazis. We’re back to white supremacy as the angle with an AR-15.

They never did go back to the motives and story of the 32 people shot at the birthday party in Alabama. We’re going to spend days on the Texas shooter, though. Though Hispanic, we learned there are white and black Hispanics after George Zimmerman. The intersectional dynamics are going to be thoroughly exhausted and explored.

Meanwhile, back in Atlanta, the shooter’s mother said the shooter struggled with mental health, and the VA system forced the shooter off medicine that worked for him and onto another one that did not because the one that worked was addictive. People died. We had to rush to the gun control conversation and moved on so quickly that we could not pause and question the VA.

It’s like the other current in “gun control” stories we often move past quickly. I asked ChatGPT a question about that issue we are required to ignore and ChatGPT even danced around it. Here’s the exchange:

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ABC News Accidently Admits AR-15s Aren’t as Dangerous as the Dems Pretend They Are

In their latest hit piece on Long Island’s GOP Rep. George Santos, ABC News let a little fact slip about the AR-15.
Santos co-sponsored a bill to name the AR-15 the “national gun of the United States.” ABC News stroked an article about voters protesters showing up at Santos’s office to protest the bill.
The ABC article states, “Research shows an AR-15-style rifle has been used to kill at least 226 people in mass shootings since 2012.”
If my calculator is accurate, that’s roughly 22.6 people per year, or 1.8 people per month, who have been killed by AR-15s in mass shootings.Let me open with this: one death is too many.

And now for my question: why do lefty jackpuddings regurgitate their avocado toast over AR-15s when so few people are killed by them?

Perspective

Let’s take a look at ways in which more Americans die every year than by AR-15s used in mass shootings:

  • Twenty-eight people are killed every year by lightning.
  • Roughly 2,167 Americans die annually from constipation.
  • On average, 951 people are killed by their lawnmowers while another 4,193 are killed by farm tractors and other agricultural equipment.
  • Murderous toasters kill 45 people per year.
  • Eleven teenagers die every day while texting and driving.
  • An estimated 40 people die every year while skateboarding.
  • Roughly 10,206 are accidentally strangled to death while they sleep, and for those who survive the night, another 10,386 will die every year falling out of bed.
  • As per the FBI, rifles of every variation — including but not limited to the scary AR-15 — killed 215 Americans in 2019. But another 1,533 were killed by knives, and 651 people were beaten to death by hands, fists, feet, etc.
  • In 2015, 5,051 people choked to death while eating.
  • Americans average 62 deaths per year by bees, wasps, and hornets.
What Have We Learned?

We’ve learned that if you want to cut down on needless deaths, you’re better off handing out prune juice than trying to purloin AR-15s, as we Americans are roughly 10 times more likely to die as Elvis did — on the toilet — than by an AR-15 in a mass shooting. We’re 50 times more likely to be beaten to death. We’re roughly 1,000 times more likely to be killed — either by accidental strangulation or falling — from our beds than by an AR-15.

BONUS LESSON: None of this info will help you in a debate against your liberal sister-in-law and her pink-haired, gender-uncertain boy?-partner freakshow because facts are useless against the bolshies who want us defenseless.

So why do the apparatchiks on the left want your A5-15? The same reason you want to keep it — it’s the best gun available to fight tyranny — either foreign or domestic. And with the terrifying number of military-aged Chinese men crossing the southern border, we might find ourselves fighting either, or both.

Fox News covers us pointing out that the Louisville Mass Murderer attacked yet another Gun-free Zone

Finally, some news coverage on gun-free zones. The question we have continually been asking: “Why isn’t it newsworthy that time after time these mass murderers pick targets where their victims are defenseless?”.

The tragic shooting at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, that left five people dead and eight others injured appears to be another instance of a shooting tragedy unfolding at a gun-free zone, a recent report found..

Police in Louisville began receiving calls at 8:38 a.m. Monday of shots fired at an Old National Bank location in the city, just minutes before the bank was set to open at 9 a.m. Louisville Metro Police Department Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel said that officers “unflinchingly” engaged with the shooter and prevented further loss of life..

The Crime Prevention Research Center reviewed the national bank’s team-member handbook, which outlined various rules employees must follow or risk disciplinary action or even termination. Among the list of rules, employees must act in a professional and honest capacity at work, they are also prevented from taking firearms into a bank premises..

“Possession of dangerous or unauthorized materials, such as explosives, firearms, or any type of weapons inside the workplace or on company premises. In some states, there are additional laws about this subject,” the handbook, which was also reviewed by Fox News Digital, states under a list of “examples of some of the infractions or conduct that may result in disciplinary action.”.

A spokesperson for the bank told Fox, when approached for comment on the handbook and gun-free zones, that the company is currently not commenting “on team members or company documentation in the wake of this incident.” Kentucky is a permitless carry state but still prohibits firearms in certain locations, such as police stations and government buildings..

Shooter Connor Sturgeon was a 25-year-old employee of the bank who carried out the attack with a rifle, according to investigators. .

“Importantly, the bank’s employee handbook makes it clear that carrying a permitted concealed handgun into the bank is a fireable offense. This employee would have known that the employees were banned from having guns,” the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) wrote in a post Tuesday. “Why isn’t it newsworthy that time after time these mass murderers pick targets where their victims are defenseless?”.

CPRC founder and President John Lott has repeatedly spoken out about how gun-free zones could serve as magnets for murderers who want to cause as much bloodshed as possible..

“The media just refuses to cover that these killers purposefully pick targets where they know victims can’t defend themselves. The media also continually ignores that these murderers explicitly explain why they pick these targets,” Lott told Fox News Digital on Tuesday..

“These mass murderers may be crazy, but they aren’t stupid. Their goal is to get media coverage, and they know the more people they kill, the more coverage they will get, so they go to places where they know victims can’t defend themselves,” he added..

Just last month, a shooting at the Covenant School, a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, left three students and three employees at the school dead. The shooter, Audrey Hale, allegedly “looked at” two other schools but did not carry out the attack at those schools because “the security was too great to do what she wanted to do,” Nashville City Council member Robert Swope told the New York Post last month..

Emma Colton, “Louisville bank shooting appears to be another instance of tragedy striking in gun-free zone,” Fox News, April 11, 2023.

America’s Censorship Regime Goes on Trial
Missouri v. Biden will test the government’s ability to suppress speech in the name of fighting ‘misinformation’

Ernest Ramirez, a car-wash technician in a small, south Texas town, led a simple but fulfilling life with his son, Ernesto Junior. Junior was a “wonderful child, full of smiles.” Ramirez had raised his son alone; he’d never known his own father and sought to provide Junior with the paternal love he had missed. A talented baseball player, Junior dreamed of playing professionally. The two lived paycheck to paycheck but were happy because, as Ramirez put it, they had each other.

Then, on April 19, 2021, 16-year-old Junior—who had no previous health problems—received the first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Five days later, the young athlete collapsed while running. By the time the elder Ramirez arrived at the hospital, having been told he could not ride in the ambulance with his son, Junior was dead.

According to the autopsy report, the cause of Junior’s death was an “enlarged heart.” Upon receiving the news, Ramirez lost all desire to go on living. But after the initial shock subsided, Ramirez decided to travel and speak about Junior’s fate, in hopes that he could help other families avoid similar tragedies.

That plan proved more difficult than Ramirez anticipated. In September 2021, GoFundMe removed an account he had opened to raise money for a trip to the nation’s capital to share his son’s story. “The content of your fundraiser falls under our ‘Prohibited Conduct’ section,” the company’s email explained. Ramirez lost the donations he had thus far received. Two months later, Twitter took down a photograph Ramirez had posted depicting him standing beside Junior’s open casket, along with the caption “My good byes to my Baby Boy” followed by three brokenheart emojis. Even a father’s simple expression of grief was apparently forbidden by the social media platform’s government-supported censorship regime.

Around that time, Ramirez met Brianne Dressen, a 40-year-old woman who had volunteered for the AstraZeneca vaccine trials and suffered a severe adverse reaction diagnosed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as “post-vaccine neuropathy.” Her varied and acute symptoms at times required use of a wheelchair and drastically curtailed her ability to participate in her young children’s lives.

For a time after her diagnosis, Dressen fell into a severe depression. However, during the spring of 2021, she discovered online support groups for vaccine-injured individuals and their family members. Connecting to others who understood her plight greatly improved her outlook on life, and she began serving as an administrator of several of the groups.

But in July 2021, less than 24 hours after Dressen participated in a press conference with U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Facebook shut down one support group’s account. Though participants had merely discussed their often-harrowing personal experiences and shared medical treatments that they found helpful, Facebook claimed they were spreading harmful “misinformation” that warranted the group’s removal.

The cascade of shutdowns of support groups and accounts belonging to the vaccine injured on Facebook and other social media platforms continues to this day. Ramirez, Dressen, and others learned that when their accounts weren’t suspended or removed, they were shadow-banned—meaning that the platforms’ algorithms buried their posts so that they were rarely, if ever, viewable, even to like-minded individuals facing similar health problems. In Dressen’s words: “The constant threat of having our groups shut down and our connections pulled apart left me and many other members and leaders frozen, unable to communicate and connect with those who needed our help the most. We spent more time managing the chaos of the censorship algorithms that continued to evolve, than we did actually helping people through the trauma of their injuries.”

The obstacles encountered by Ramirez, Dressen, and thousands of other individuals with similar experiences and opinions were in no way coincidental or accidental. Nor were they the result of a series of errors in judgment made by low-level employees of social media platforms. Rather, they were the products of concerted efforts at the highest levels of the American government to ensure that individuals with opposing viewpoints could not be heard, contrary to the guarantees made to every American citizen in the Bill of Rights. One purpose of these unconstitutional actions to violate the rights of American citizens was political gain.

As COVID-19 inoculations became widely available to the American public, the Biden White House came to view vaccine hesitancy as a significant political problem. Beginning in spring 2021, the administration explicitly and publicly blamed social media platforms for vaccine refusal: By failing to censor “misinformation” about the vaccines, the president infamously alleged, tech companies were effectively “killing people.” The president’s incendiary accusation was accompanied by threats of regulatory or other legal action (should the companies refuse to comply) from various high-ranking members of the administration, including former White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Psaki boasted that government officials were in regular touch with social media platforms, telling them what and in some cases even whom to censor.

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The Louisville Shooter’s Inconvenient Social Media Being Conveniently Scrubbed

“Another Democrat killer,” Sebastian Gorka tweeted Monday as some of the Louisville shooter’s social media accounts came under scrutiny.

With credit to someone named Andy S., Gorka reposted the killer’s “anti-Trump and pro-lockdown posts on a Reddit under an account with the same name at his already nuked Twitter account.”

Louisville Shooter

The killer locked down his Twitter account “a bit back,” according to another user who claims “he RT’d and followed other stuff that’s more antifa/far left such as Vaush & antifa doxxing blog left coast right watch.” The amateur sleuth summed up the killer’s Twitter feed as “AOC fan, anti-trump, NRA hater, etc.”

The correct Twitter account seems to be “sturg__” and not the “csturg41” handle he used on Reddit and Instagram.

There’s nothing on the killer’s Reddit more recent than four months ago, but at least some of the lefty stuff he posted can still be seen here and here. Mostly, his Reddit is filled with sports, videogames, complaints about women, and parental issues.

But what was he posting to his more public accounts? We might never know.

UPDATE: Sure enough, Reddit scrubbed the csturg41 account just as I was wrapping up this column. Soon he’ll be as invisible as the Nashville trans shooter’s manifesto.

ASIDE: As a matter of personal policy, I don’t mention the names of mass shooters. Whatever fame/ignominy they seek in this life or the next, they won’t get any help from me. Remember their victims instead, please.

“Most of [the killer’s] accounts have been wiped,” according to Twitter user Darth Crypto. “I found songs he liked on SoundCloud, High School basketball pictures, family members, a Pokemon obsession, but nothing else.”

That matches what little I’ve been able to dig up. He also seems to have been active on a site called loveforquotes.com, but it’s been doing nothing but returning server errors when I try to dig into the “csturg41” links.

The killer also had an Instagram account, which has also been nuked. Nevertheless, at least one screencap survives, including threats made Monday morning right before the massacre.

Intel Point Alert posted that he “reportedly texted friend before shooting saying he was feeling suicidal and ‘would shoot up the bank’.”

The 25-year-old killer’s LinkedIn profile is still active and shows the obligatory “he/him” preferred pronouns. (No link because it displays his name.)

This is a developing story and I’ll post more as I’m able to find it — assuming there’s anything left to find.

I think Crenshaw is trying to regain some of the respect he lost when he was off advocating Red Flag laws.

USA Today actually frames scope of mass shootings correctly

When it comes to framing the discussion around mass shootings, USA Today has a, well, let’s call it a spotty track record. After all, they’re the same ones who thought the chainsaw bayonet was an actual, common thing that people attach to their AR-15s.

That doesn’t help their credibility in the least.

Yet it seems they’re trying to do better. For example, a recent story actually gets a few things right with regard to the awful tragedy of children being killed by gunshots. Basically, school shootings aren’t as big of an issue as many think.

More than two-thirds of parents worry a shooting could happen at their children’s school, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. But home is a far more dangerous place for kids.

In the five years ending in 2022, at least 866 kids ages 17 and younger were shot in domestic violence incidents, according to an analysis by The Trace of data from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive; 621 of them died. In that same time frame, 268 children were shot at school, 75 of them fatally, according to an analysis of data from the CHDS School Shooting Safety Compendium, a federally funded tracker launched after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.

All told, three times as many children were shot in domestic violence incidents as in school shootings and eight times as many died. The majority of those children were intentionally shot by a parent, stepparent or guardian – the very people expected to protect them.

Now, don’t think this is a pro-gun or even gun-neutral article. The author works for The Trace, so you know it’s still anti-gun.

However, the truth of the matter is that whole mass shootings get a lot of attention, they’re a small fraction of the violence that can claim a life.

That applies to kids as well.

Where the author doesn’t really step up, though, is in telling you there are 73.6 million children in the United States.

While the loss of any child is tragic, the truth is that those numbers above are for a five-year span, so if you break it down annually, things look different.

Take these domestic shootings, for example. That’s 173.2 per year.

According to the CDC, in 2020, 607 kids were killed in car accidents. That puts those numbers in stark contrast.

None of this is to say that we don’t have an issue. The idea of any parent or guardian killing the child in their charge is troubling, to say the least. It’s representative of a very real problem, one we need to address as a nation in some way, shape, or form.

However, additional gun regulations–something the author does seem to favor later in the piece–aren’t likely to keep children alive. After all, a violent parent or guardian has alternatives for taking a child’s life if that’s what they want to do.

It makes more sense to deal with this at the source in the first place by addressing the reasons for domestic violence. Undermine that and you have nothing to worry about going forward.

Gaslighting: ‘Crazy Conspiracy Theories’ Proven to be True This Year

The Left frequently uses the term “conspiracy theorist” to smear and belittle anyone who questions the agenda of the Democrats or the narratives being pushed by the allies in the corporate media.

Over time, it’s become clear to many that a so-called “conspiracy theory” is simply information that conflicts with or disputes the Left’s agenda.

However, several “conspiracy theories” have been proven to be actual facts in 2023 already.

Here is a selection of stories that have now been proven to be true but were previously suppressed by the media and written off as “conspiracy theories.”

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Anti-gunners need to face reality on gun manufacturer

The firearm community consists of two primary groups: The gun owners and the gun manufacturers and sellers. The firearm industry provides the goods and services we all need in order to enjoy our Second Amendment rights.
Going after gun owners is, typically, a losing strategy for anti-gunners. It doesn’t take much to show that gun owners are law-abiding folks and that if we were all dangerous, with over 400 million guns in private hands, violent crime would be much worse.
So, they’ve long gone after gun stores, but they haven’t exactly left gun manufacturers alone.
In fact, a recent op-ed tries to blame them for a whole lot.
We often talk about where and how weapons are purchased — but rarely where and how they are manufactured. These realities challenge the conventional way we talk about guns in terms of a “culture war” between red and blue states.
For example, the blue states of Massachusetts and Connecticut have some of the strictest regulations on firearms carrying and possession. But they are also major sites of gun manufacturing in this country. The weapons used in the 2018 Parkland shooting, for example, were manufactured by Smith and Wesson, a gun manufacturer based in Massachusetts.
The deeper and bigger point is that the U.S. is the world’s principal supplier of weapons.
The U.S. weapons industry makes both heavy weapons like military aircraft, bombs, and missiles, and small arms like rifles and handguns. As of 2021, over 40 percent of the world’s exported arms came from the United States — many of them manufactured in deep blue states.
Blue states with strict gun laws often suffer gun violence when weapons are trafficked in from red states with looser gun laws. Similarly, many countries surrounding the U.S. with high rates of gun violence, like Mexico, obtain guns both legally and illegally from this country.
With no system to effectively control and track who ends up with those guns, these weapons are often obtained by military units or police that have committed human rights abuses or who work with criminal groups.
In other words, literally every sin ever committed with a gun rests on the gun manufacturers’ heads.
However, I’m going to clue the writers–there are two of them, so they’re clearly twice as ignorant–on a few facts about how gun distribution works in this country.
First, let’s talk about domestic gun sales.
The gun manufacturer builds a given firearm and then sells it. It’s true that, in theory, anyone can buy that gun and have it shipped to pretty much any city in the nation…to a point.
The weapon needs to first be legal in that state, for one thing. An AR-15 that’s legal in Georgia isn’t legal in Massachusetts, so local laws need to be obeyed.
Second, that gun must go to someone with the proper licensing. Since most people don’t have an FFL, they are generally shipped to a gun store, which then conducts all the required background checks and whatnot. As such, the gun manufacturer can ship it out trusting that everything required will be done.
Yet after it leaves the store, they have absolutely no control over what happens. That customer could have the gun stolen or he could just hand it off to someone else. They have no say.
Then the writers talk about atrocities abroad as if companies like Colt are to blame.
Except, those companies can’t just export guns because someone cut them a check. Due to federal law, weapons exports must be approved by the State Department. Again, Colt can’t ship a bunch of M-4s somewhere just because they want to. They need government approval to do so lawfully.
Once they’re sent, the gun manufacturers are, once again, powerless to do anything about what happens with those weapons.
See, our intrepid authors are convinced that these gun makers are the scum of the Earth, but they can’t seem to grok that they’re ruled by numerous regulations other industries simply don’t have to deal with. They couldn’t be the merchants of death they’re painted as even if they wanted.
Frankly, these two should be embarrassed by what they wrote and the publication that printed it should be embarrassed as well. What we have here is a screed dictated by ignorance with a few links thrown it to make it look like they did their research.
They should actually try doing some next time.