Category: Media

Der apfel fält nicht weit vom baum (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree)

Klaus Schwab’s Father Ran ‘National Socialist Model Company,’ Exploited Nazi Slave Labor.

Davos frontman Klaus Schwab’s daddy, Eugen Schwab, while the Third Reich was ravaging Europe in the 1930s and 40s, served as managing director of Escher Wyss Ravensburg, an engineering firm that constructed turbines and fighter plane parts for the regime.

While the elder Schwab worked in this capacity, the Nazis awarded Escher Wyss Ravensburg the prestigious title of “National Socialist Model Company” for all of its hard work in the service of the Führer.

To achieve this recognition, Escher-Wyss Ravensburg, under Eugen Schwab’s leadership, utilized Nazi slave labor and prisoners of war in its facilities.

Ravensburg itself, aside from the slave factory, was the site of numerous Nazi crimes against humanity, such as forced sterilization for the purpose of “racial improvement.” But to Eugen Schwab, that was just the cost of doing business with the Third Reich.

You want to make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs, right?

Klaus Schwab’s sanitized Wikipedia page contains none of the gruesome details of his daddy’s wartime activities, other than to say “his parents had moved from Switzerland to Germany during the Third Reich in order for his father to assume the role of director at Escher Wyss.”

Newsweek ran a corporate “fact check” in which they cherry-picked a falsely attributed image of Eugen in a Nazi uniform as a way to seem to disprove his connection to the Third Reich entirely. But deep into the article, Newsweek subtly admits that it’s all true — which almost no one will get to, thanks to short attention spans:

The posts shared online in May, 2022, claim Klaus Schwab’s father, Eugen Schwab, was a close ally of Hitler, and include a photo of the World Economic Forum leader alongside a man in Nazi uniform… the photo shared online is not of Eugen Schwab, but of Nazi general Walter Dybilasz… Klaus Schwab’s father, on the other hand, was the managing director of a subsidiary of Zurich-based engineering firm Escher Wyss. 

The history of Eugen’s relationship with Nazism in general is complex… Eugen Schwab was a member of some National Socialist organizations, but that alone does not prove any relationship to German high command or a belief in Nazi ideology. While the Escher Wyss branch in Ravensburg, Germany, (which Eugen managed) used prisoners of war and forced laborers, it is not clear whether the company was forced to do so by the Nazis or because of a lack of workers.

So, Eugen Schwab was an avowed National Socialist, and yes, okay, his firm did use Nazi slave labor. But, you see, that doesn’t mean he was a Nazi. And maybe Escher Wyss had to use slave labor to make their products for the Nazis because of a worker shortage.

This is a common tactic in corporate media: Take a false claim that circulates on the web (in this case, an image incorrectly identified as Eugen Schwab) and use that single post to discredit the entire factual connection between Schwab and the Nazis.

DID GUN CONTROL JUST ADMIT FIREARM MANUFACTURING IS A NET POSITIVE FOR COMMUNITIES?

A recent column in The Atlantic on the decline and despair of New Haven, Conn., caught my attention. It’s an area that many of those associated with the firearm industry are, at least, aware of. For me, it’s a little closer to home. It’s where my family’s roots run deep – both in the city and in the firearm industry.

When I read the author, Nicholas Dawidoff, lamented the decline of the city and pined for the days when Winchester Repeating Arms Company had a solid presence, it caught my eye. It was curious to me that a left-of-center publication made the tacit admission that a firearm manufacturer was a pillar that held the city up. When it was gone, the city fell into decay.

It was even more curious when The Trace, the mouthpiece of billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety gun control group, echoed the author’s understated findings. Solid manufacturing jobs were good for New Haven. Dawidoff spoke glowingly of the immigrant and African American heritage that comprised the community and filled the factories. It was a working-class community. It had its struggles, but it was home and it was safe.

“Nobody locked their doors,” Dawidoff wrote.

Continue reading “”

BOLD-FACED LIE: Gun Control Groups Twist Heritage Foundation Data Out of Recognition in Court Documents

A conglomerate of gun control groups has filed a brief in federal court supporting the District of Columbia in a lawsuit challenging the city’s prohibition on civilian possession of magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds.

This was not at all surprising.

What was quite perplexing, however, was the gun control groups’ citation of two of my recent monthly articles for The Daily Signal on defensive gun use. The groups claim the two articles “support” the premise that the District’s ban doesn’t negatively affect law-abiding gun owners, because none of the cases I cited “involved the use of anywhere close to 10 rounds of ammunition.”

Worse, the gun control groups spun this as The Heritage Foundation, among others, having “acknowledged that the ability to fire more than 10 rounds of ammunition without reloading is not necessary for defensive purposes.” (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

These are incredible claims in the most literal sense: They lack any credibility.

At best, the legal brief’s characterization of my monthly articles on defensive gun use is lazy to the point of recklessness and wrongly attributes to my employer, The Heritage Foundation, a policy position that it doesn’t hold. At worst, this constitutes an intentional effort to manipulate a federal court with a blatantly misleading representation of Heritage’s work on defensive gun use.

Continue reading “”

Everything in the Narrative, nothing outside the Narrative, nothing against the Narrative. (with no apologies to the deadhead fascist)

Total media blackout of the scariest Second Amendment story of 2022

Stephen Gutowski at The Reload, one of the rare honest voices in firearms-related journalism, published some bombshell revelations two weeks ago. What was uncovered, in my opinion, is the biggest Second Amendment story of 2022. The extent and depth of what happened at the CDC is flat-out alarming.

Gun control activists know that Defensive Gun Uses (DGUs) are a thorn on their side because they make selling gun control harder. Therefore, in what can be uncharitably described as a conspiracy against the civil rights of The People, they mounted a months-long pressure campaign, using influence from a Democrat Senator and the White House, to privately meet with CDC officials to get higher-end DGU statistics removed from the CDC website.

One CDC official called the gun control activists “partners” in an email.

Beth Reimels, Associate Director for Policy, Partnerships, and Strategic Communication at the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention, said in one email to the three advocates on December 10th. “We will also make some edits to the content we discussed that I think will address the concerns you and other partners have raised.”

While conspiring with gun control activists behind closed doors, the CDC at the same time did not bother reaching out to the researcher whose higher-end DGU estimates were yanked from the CDC website:

Kleck, Professor Emeritus at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, stood by his research. He said the CDC did not reach out to him for his perspective before making the change. He argued the removal of the reference to his estimate was “blatant censorship” and said it was evidence of the politicization of the agency.

Not everything was recorded either:

The three advocates met with CDC Acting Principal Deputy Director Deb Houry, Associate Director of Science for the Division of Violence Prevention Tom Simon, and Associate Director for Policy, Partnerships, and Strategic Communication Beth Reimels. The half-hour meeting was conducted over Microsoft Teams, but a transcript of the call either wasn’t kept or wasn’t turned over as part of the FOIA request. The CDC did not respond to questions about what was said during the meeting.

[…]

Some of the FOIAd emails also show officials setting up plans to talk about potential changes “off-line.” Additionally, 18 of the 131 pages released by the CDC were completely redacted.

There was a failed attempt at redacting a comment about the connection between activists from different organizations:

The CDC attempted to redact Mercy’s comment about the tie between GVA and the gun-control group, but it only applied the redaction to one of the several copies of the exchange included in the release.

The CDC did not bother talking to the researcher whose work they yanked at the behest of the gun control activists.

Kleck, Professor Emeritus at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, stood by his research. He said the CDC did not reach out to him for his perspective before making the change. He argued the removal of the reference to his estimate was “blatant censorship” and said it was evidence of the politicization of the agency.

What the CDC did was indeed censorship, but there’s more censorship at play here. And that’s the mainstream media’s complete and total blackout of this story. I have been following the news just about daily to see who does and doesn’t cover this story. So far, to the best of my knowledge, the only coverage from a large media organization has come from Fox News, who reported on the collusion between the CDC and gun control activists, and then followed up with another story on some Republicans in Congress demanding that the CDC reinstate the statistics. Other than these stories, there’s minor coverage at The Daily Caller, Real Clear Politics, and the New York Post which reports it as the “grumbling” of a researcher.

This is not the first time that the CDC has been up to no good, but that an agency that was founded to combat malaria has been repurposed to attack the very rights of the people who created it with their hard-earned money and vested it with its powers is infuriating to say the least.

The Fourth Estate is supposed to keep an eye on things like this. Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty, and when the mainstream media abdicates its duty, liberty is imperiled.

Well, it isn’t often referred to as ‘Peoples Public Radio’ (as in how commie China’s calls everything “peoples”) for nothing. And I don’t like my tax money funding either.

PBS openly pushes gun control agenda

American taxpayers help fund PBS. We don’t pay for all of it, but a non-trivial sum of tax dollars go to the network. Any attempt to cut that funding is met with consternation. “How dare you cut funding to [insert innocuous PBS show here]!”

They ignore that this is a network that continually pushes an agenda. Part of that agenda is gun control, and they’re not even really trying to hide it.

On Friday’s Amanpour & Co., fill-in host Sara Sidner devoted a segment to promoting the agenda of a gun control advocate and made no serious effort to challenge her liberal guest’s claims.

In the pre-recorded interview with Dr. Joseph Safran which aired on PBS and CNN International, Sidner promoted such misinformation as claiming that mass shootings are “uniquely American,” and she also overstated the number of mass killings in 2022.

Sidner misleadingly began the segment:

2022 will go down as the second highest year for mass shootings in the United States on record. That means more than 600 mass killings in the past 12 months alone, according to data compiled by the nongovernmental organization, Gun Violence Archive. The shootings come at a disturbing pace, often too fast to grasp — people going about their day suddenly gunned down in schools, supermarkets, night clubs, movie theaters, in the streets, you name it.

She soon added: “Are these tragedies preventable? And why can’t we stop this uniquely American problem?”

But, according to the website she cited, there have been 36 cases of gun-related “mass murder” in 2022, which would also include killings in private residences in addition to public places. Additionally, there are certainly plenty of other countries where homicide numbers are high.

On the subject of mass shootings in public places, Europe has had a worse problem than the U.S., which, unlike the U.S., has even included fully automatic machine gun attacks.

In other words, this isn’t a “uniquely American problem” and it never has been. We just think that because we tend to be far more focused on what’s happening here than elsewhere in the world. I mean, sure, we know that Ukraine and Russia are at war, but do we know who the major opposition members are in Belgium?

Not so much.

So, we focus on American mass shootings because they’re closer to home, then delude ourselves into thinking that these kinds of things just don’t happen anywhere else.

We’ve seen numerous mass shootings outside of American borders. Thailand, for example, or Russia. Those are just two right off the top of my head, and I don’t see all such shootings by any stretch of the imagination.

The idea that this is a “uniquely American problem” needs to be challenged, but PBS didn’t. They advanced it. They present it uncritically as if this is so self-evident that it doesn’t require challenge.

Yet it does. It’s not a factual statement, and the fact that it’s treated as such is a big chunk of why we can’t solve the issue.

If people acknowledged that these shootings were far from unusual in places like Europe, they’d be forced to face the facts that gun control isn’t an answer. They’d have to look elsewhere for a solution, and that could be difficult and potentially messy.

So, they blame guns, pretend it isn’t happening in other places, and get PBS to help push that agenda.

Well, this is why some of us want to cut off taxpayer funding for them. You want to keep them afloat? Then you pay for it. I’m sick of it.

Putting Clothes on the Emperor.

I have been watching the release of the Twitter files. As someone who was shadowbanned, I am watching with interest. I was early to Twitter and my original account got to 10k followers, then never went higher. I got so ticked I finally killed my account. I tried other social media platforms, but they were echo chambers.

Parler was coming on strong to challenge Twitter, and Big Tech used its power to kill it.

I am back on Twitter @pointsnfigures1 and I am paying Elon’s $8 fee for a blue check. I am happy to pay it since you know advertisers will try to leave the platform. It’s a small show of support for what he is doing for the platform. Feel free to follow me if you want.

When you are in a bubble, or you need to perpetuate a bubble, you consciously ignore data that would pop your bubble. For example, people still think Trump colluded with Russia to steal an election despite reams of data showing the contrary. People still think that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a nothing burger and the mainstream news media still hasn’t reported on it. It’s amazing.

Today, Elon tweeted that and the left-wing reacted with predictable outrage.

My guess is this is a hint as to what is coming. It’s already clear that the US government worked closely with Twitter employees to turn Twitter into a mouthpiece for leftist causes and the Democratic Party. The “Twitter Files” are the receipts.

Is Elon doing this stuff to drive engagement to the platform? You bet. I would too if I were Elon.

As an aside, Musk is kind of an amazing guy, isn’t he? He has SpaceX, Tesla($TSLA), The Boring Company, and Twitter. He must be able to recruit some pretty top-notch people to work for him at those companies because it would be impossible to be CEO and “hands-on” at all of them at the same time. It might be fun to work in a corporate culture that is guided by Musk.

My bet is that Twitter will get bigger, and somehow enter the payments industry. Combining cutting-edge information with payments will be fun to watch.

Should people go to jail, especially former Twitter employees? I am not an attorney but law professor Jonathon Turley thinks the former employees of Twitter ought to be lawyering up. My guess is they have about as much chance to go to jail as Sam Bankman Fried. I’d love to see people like John Brennan charged since they intentionally mislead the American public as well. But, that would be a hard case to prove.

What is sort of amazing to me is the willingness of the sheep on the left to continue to blindly follow the narrative despite clear and transparent releases that show exactly what everyone has been up to.

Continue reading “”

Twitter Files Expose Dangerous Deep State-Big Tech Revolving Door

It’s not just the Forrest Gump of Russiagate — ex-FBI General Counsel James Baker — who is core to the conspiracy to crush the First Amendment

Image

This weekend I was pleased to appear in print in the New York Post to discuss the cozy and corrupting ties between the U.S. government — particularly the security state — and Big Tech revealed in the Twitter Files.

I connect the dots in the Post — dots that I believe collectively depict a key piece of the overall War on Wrongthink picture: A Ruling Class conspiracy to crush the First Amendment in pursuit of total ideological and therefore cultural and political power.

Read the whole thing here.

The Twitter Files were also one subject of our latest “NatCon Squad,” which you can check out below or wherever you get your podcasts.

NY Times Says Most Gun Owners are Law-Abiding, AR-15s are in Common Use, and Confiscation is Futile…Then Calls for 1st Amendment Limits on Gun Makers

It is important, of course, to distinguish between the large majority of law-abiding gun owners and the small number of extremists. Only about 30 percent of gun owners have owned an AR-15 or similar rifle, a majority support common sense gun restrictions and a majority reject political violence. …

Democrats, while they may hope for stricter gun laws overall, should also recognize that they do share common ground with many gun owners — armed right-wing extremists and those who fetishize AR-15s do not represent typical American gun owners or their beliefs. That’s especially true given the changing nature of who owns guns in the United States: women and Black Americans are among the fastest-growing demographics.

This summer, for the first time in decades, Congress passed major bipartisan gun safety legislation — a major accomplishment and a sign that common ground is not terra incognita. It should have gone further — and can in the future: preventing anyone under 21 from buying a semiautomatic weapon, for instance, and erasing the 10-year sunset of the background-check provision. States should also be compelled to pass tougher red-flag laws to take guns out of the hands of suicidal or potentially violent people. Mandatory gun-liability insurance is also an idea with merit.

States and the federal government should also pass far tougher regulations on the gun industry, particularly through restrictions on the marketing of guns, which have helped supercharge the cult of the AR-15. New York’s law, which allows parties like victims of gun violence and the state government to sue gun sellers, manufacturers and distributors, is a good model for other states to follow.

Federal regulators should also do more to regulate the arms industry’s marketing practices, which are becoming more deadly and deranged by the year. They have the legal authority to do so but, thus far, not the will to act.

Americans are going to live with a lot of guns for a long time. There are already more than 415 million guns in circulation, including 25 million semiautomatic military-style rifles. Calls for confiscating them — or even calls for another assault weapons ban — are well intentioned and completely unrealistic. With proper care and maintenance, guns made today will still fire decades from now. Each month, Americans add nearly two million more to the national stockpile.

But even if common-sense regulation of guns is far from political reality, Americans do not have to accept the worst of gun culture becoming pervasive in our politics. The only hope the nation has for living in and around so many deadly weapons is a political system capable of resolving our many differences without the need to use them.

— New York Times Editorial Board in America’s Toxic Gun Culture

 

original:

Image

Reworked to fit the narrative:

Image

 

Cue the shocked meme…..

BREAKING: New Twitter Files Dump Exposes Blacklists, Secret Cabal Censoring High-Profile Conservatives.

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.”

Continue reading “”

BLUF
The larger objective of U.S. involvement in social media has always been monitoring and surveillance of the public conversation, and then ultimately controlling and influencing public opinion.

It’s All Making Sense – Elon Musk Has No Idea What He Purchased with Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop…

… And if he does, the outlook is worse.

According to both the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI), via Chairman Mark Warner, and the House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) via Mike Turner, the Chinese social media platform TikTok represents a “national security risk” to the United States.  South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, soon to be the vice-presidential candidate for the DeSantis-Noem 2024 ticket, has also called TikTok a national security threat and banned it in the state. Now, think about that carefully.

What is it about a social media app that allows short video sharing that would constitute a national security risk?  The answer is not about dog and cat videos, or dancing diatribes or funny, weird or goofy content; nor is the national security risk attached to any data of the app users or content providers.  The national security risk is found in the ability to influence public opinion that is not under the control of the United States government, or more specifically the Dept of Homeland Security (DHS).

The need for control is a reaction to fear.  TikTok, as a social media platform, is not considered a national security threat because the Chinese government can control it.  TikTok is considered a national security threat because the United States government does not control it.

Continue reading “”

 

Matt Taibbi

1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES

2. What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter. 
3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer. 
4. Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time. 
5. In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” 
6. As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.
7. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly. 
8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.”Image

Continue reading “”

I’ll paraphrase Mussolini:
“All within the narrative, nothing outside the narrative, nothing against the narrative.”

Controversial Take: It’s Bad To Put Words In The Mouths Of Murder Victims
On Ben Collins and the scourge of opportunistic post-tragedy commentary

On Tuesday’s Morning Joe, Ben Collins, who “covers disinformation, extremism and the internet for NBC News,” gave what I found to be a very strange soliloquy about Club Q, an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs where five people were killed and about 18 injured by a man named Anderson Lee Aldrich on Saturday night.

Collins subsequently tweeted a link to it (archived here):

Collins starts by asking, “Am I doing something wrong here?” Then he runs down his and his colleagues’ tireless coverage of anti-LGBT rhetoric on the right, reading a bunch of headlines that are splashed on-screen:

He then says, “And I’m just wondering — what could I have done different? Seriously. As reporters, what can we do different?”

To be blunt, I found this obnoxious and solipsistic. Not everything is about journalists. The probability that any mass murder has anything to do with anything Ben Collins or his colleagues did (or didn’t do) is approximately nil. This is just a very strange, self-absorbed way to understand the world.

Continue reading “”

MEDIA LOSES ITS MIND OVER “RAMBO STYLE KNIFE” USED IN IDAHO QUAD-MURDER

That the media is prone to hyperventillation over anything weapon-related should hardly come as a shock. Our friends in the firearms community face it all the time when the media label what to many is just a light range trip worth of guns and ammunition an “arsenal”. Well they are at it again, and this time it is the knife community’s turn in the barrel, as the media frenzy over the quadruple homicide in Moscow, ID rages.

If you haven’t tuned into the news this week, 4 University of Idaho students were brutally stabbed to death over the weekend, and the Police seem to be at a loss. Their decision to focus on the potential murder weapon, looks to this reporter like an attempt to give the media anything in the face of very few public leads. The murder weapon remains undiscovered.

I am not a forensic expert by any means, though I took a few forensic anthropology classes in graduate school and I understand how the coroner reached their conclusion as to the nature of said weapon. The wound channels from the stabbings would have particular characteristics in terms of size and shape, and from this they have deduced that they match the characteristics of one of the most, if not the most mass-produced and iconic American fixed blade knives, the USMC Mark 2., commonly known as the KA-BAR.

KA-BAR USMC MK. 2 (from KABAR.com)

From Idaho Statesman:

Moscow police appear to be searching for a “Rambo”-style knife involved in the killing of four University of Idaho students, a store manager said Wednesday. Scott Jutte, general manager of Moscow Building Supply, told the Idaho Statesman that police have visited the store more than once to ask whether the retailer sold anyone Ka-Bar brand knives, which are also known as K bar knives. Idaho State Police spokesperson Aaron Snell told the Statesman on Thursday that detectives visited several local hardware stores that may carry “fixed-blade type knives,” but that they weren’t solely asking about Ka-Bar knives.

Ka-Bar, of Olean, New York, manufactures military-grade blades that were originally designed for use by American troops in World War II.

Jutte said a police officer stopped by the home improvement store and lumber yard off North Main Street in Moscow to speak with him on Monday. “They were specifically asking whether or not we carry Ka-Bar-style knives, which we do not,” Jutte said in an interview. “If we did, we could’ve reviewed surveillance footage. But it wasn’t something I could help them with.” Jutte said he is familiar with the military-style weapon, even though his store doesn’t sell it.

He says he is “familiar with the “military style weapon””…

I am trying to figure out what is specifically “military” about the KA-BAR, other than its history of course. The name of the Mk. 2 in Government-bureaucratese is “Knife, Fighting Utility”. Fighting is a verb, something you could do with it, not a description. I can fight you with a stapler. An entrenching tool is a devastatingly effective melee weapon. We don’t call a “Fighting Shovel”, no matter how efficiently it can be used as such.

Utility is a good descriptive word, as they are used for everything from prying open crates to opening ration cans. The “KA-BAR” (originally made by Camillus, PAL, and others under WWII contract) was much better at these tasks than the WWI era M1918 Trench Knife, with its more fragile, less utilitarian stiletto blade and single grip knuckle-duster hand guard.

The USMC Mk.2, now manufactured by KA-BAR Knives Inc. of Olean, New York, remains one of the most popular fixed blade outdoor knives in existence. A good portion of this is due to its military heritage. Many a serviceman or has carried the knife on deployment, even into combat just like their grandfathers before them. They are an heirloom quality tool, and it is entirely possible that someone actually carried their Grandfather’s own knife in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Of course plenty of civilians, this writer included, own one as well. It is an extremely robust and useful knife to have in the woods. It can shave, baton, drill, and all of the other tasks one might need in the field. I imagine that there is at least one in 20% or more of households in Idaho given the lifestyle and demographics. And that doesn’t count other fixed blade hunting knives as well of which Idaho most certainly has an abundance.

I feel for KA-BAR, which is being dragged by the media online. They slant their coverage to imply that anyone who owns this most common of fixed blades is some sort of survivalist nutball. It is expected, but disheartening.

Where they have made a heck of a jump is to apply the “Rambo” label to the knife. Rambo carried two different Jim Lile custom knives in the First Blood Movies:

Continue reading “”

The Government Can’t Fix Social Media Moderation & Should Not Try

Washington, DC – -(AmmoLand.com)- Despite their increasingly bitter differences, Democrats and Republicans generally agree that content moderation by social media companies is haphazard at best. But while Democrats tend to think the main problem is too much speech of the wrong sort, Republicans complain that platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are biased against them.

The government cannot resolve this dispute and should not try. Siding with the critics who complain about online “misinformation” poses an obvious threat to free inquiry and open debate. And while attempting to mandate evenhandedness might seem more consistent with those values, it undermines the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment in a more subtle but equally troubling way.

Under a Texas law that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit declined to block last week, the leading social media platforms are forbidden to discriminate against users or messages based on “viewpoint.” The “censorship” that Texas has banned includes not just outright removal of content and cancellation of accounts but also any steps that make posts less visible, accessible, or lucrative.

That means platforms are obliged to treat all posts equally, no matter how objectionable their content. With narrow exceptions for speech that is not constitutionally protected, Facebook et al. are not allowed to favor tolerance over bigotry, peace over violence, or verifiably true historical or scientific claims over demonstrably false ones.

While such neutrality is constitutionally mandatory for the government, imposing it on private actors violates the First Amendment right to exercise editorial discretion.
The companies that challenged the law cited a line of Supreme Court decisions recognizing that right in a wide range of contexts, including a newspaper’s selection of articles, a utility’s control over the content of its newsletter, and a private organization’s vetting of participants in a St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

Even assuming those cases established a general right to exercise editorial discretion, the 5th Circuit said that is not an accurate description of what social media platforms are doing when they decide that certain posts are beyond the pale. Because they rely heavily on algorithms, do not review content before publication, and take action against only a tiny percentage of messages, Judge Andrew Oldham declared in the majority opinion Facebook et al. “are nothing like” a newspaper.

Writing in dissent, Judge Leslie Southwick objected to that characterization. While “none of the precedents fit seamlessly,” Southwick said, a social media platform’s right to curate content is analogous to “the right of newspapers to control what they do and do not print.”

That right has never been contingent on whether editors do their jobs thoughtfully, consistently or fairly. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit observed when it blocked enforcement of Florida’s social media law in May;

“private actors have a First Amendment right to be ‘unfair’ — which is to say, a right to have and express their own points of view.”

Oldham rejected the argument that social media companies are expressing a point of view when they make moderation decisions based on “amorphous goals” like maintaining “a welcoming community” (YouTube), fostering “authenticity, safety, privacy, and dignity” (Facebook), or ensuring that “all people can participate in the public conversation freely and safely” (Twitter). Yet the conservatives who want the government to restrict moderation decisions take it for granted that social media companies have an ideological agenda — one that is hostile to people on the right.

If social media platforms pursued that agenda more explicitly and systematically, Oldham’s argument implies, the government might be obliged to respect their decisions. The more proactive and heavy-handed they were, the stronger their First Amendment claim would be.

Should the Supreme Court resolve the split between the 5th and 11th circuits by endorsing Oldham’s reasoning, platforms that want to escape Texas-style regulation might decide that broader and tighter content restrictions are the way to go. By trying to mandate a diversity of opinions, the government could achieve the opposite result.

 

Now even the Washington Post, eternal suck up to anything demoncrap, is fact checking SloJoe……….

Biden Earns ‘Bottomless Pinocchio’ from Washington Post Over Multiple Misleading and Debunked Claims

President Joe Biden earned a “bottomless Pinocchio” from the Washington Post on the eve of the midterm elections in a roundup highlighting multiple recent misleading and debunked claims.

The “bottomless Pinocchio” category for fact-checks from the Post was actually created under former President Donald Trump in an effort to push back on “false or misleading statements repeated so often that they became a form of propaganda,” Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler wrote.

According to the Post:

A statement would get added to the list if it had earned a Three or Four Pinocchios rating and been repeated at least 20 times. By the end of the Trump presidency, 56 claims made by Trump had qualified.

Now Biden has earned his own Bottomless Pinocchio.

A debunked claim Biden has repeated is that he’s traveled 17,000 miles with Xi Jinping. Despite Biden repeatedly pushing the claim, it has never been proven.

“There is no evidence Biden traveled that much with Xi, the president of China — and even if we added up the miles Biden flew to see Xi, it still did not total 17,000 miles,” Kessler noted.

The fact check roundup included plenty of other misleading statements, including claiming gas prices were over $5 dollars a gallon when he took office. Only days after making this comment in New York, however, Biden made a similar statement about bringing gas prices down, but said prices were $5 dollars a gallon in June, rather than when he took office.

Biden also recently celebrated the fact that seniors are getting an increase to their Social Security checks.

“On my watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are getting an increase in their Social Security checks,” he said in Florida.

The White House sent out a celebratory tweet about these increases too, seemingly crediting Biden for the act. The tweet was quickly deleted after Twitter provided “context” to the statement, explaining the bump is part of a program launched in the ’70s, and it is only in response to high inflation.

BLUF
The bottom line is that it looks like the free ride for some 3,700 Twitter employees is over. Dems like AOC, who’ve enjoyed having the power of the Big Tech censorship lords on their party’s side, are obviously super triggered because Musk intends to transform into Twitter to the even playing field of free speech that it should have always been.

Elon Musk to Pull a Trump-Level ‘You’re Fired!’ on HALF of Twitter’s Workforce.

Even for a guy like Elon Musk, $44 billion is quite a chunk of money to spend on anything, even for the most valuable and influential social media platform in the world.

As often happens in the business world, cost-cutting measures are typically deployed upon acquiring a new business. According to a bombshell Bloomberg report Wednesday night, it appears the first money-saving cuts could come Friday in the way of firing roughly half of Twitter’s entire workforce.

That would be about 3,700 jobs, according to the report. Musk is also set to require a majority of whichever workers are left standing to actually come to work at the office, as we did back in the good ol’ days, effectively ending the work-from-home situation that became the new normal over the course of the pandemic.

Musk, as of this writing, hasn’t commented on Bloomberg’s report, but one Twitter user perfectly summarized why such a massive round of layoffs is probably the logical move at this point. Too many useless managers, and not nearly enough workers.

Bloomberg:

Continue reading “”

Comment O’ The Day
“Looking at the news today, if Elon wants an idea of what else Twitter can do, setting up a Twitter Book Mart and selling books (including, or especially those dropped by amazon) would be a good and useful one. The actual physical distribution of books is straightforward; publicizing them is the hard part. And the one thing Twitter does really well is publicize.”

Amazon Fascists Ban Another Book That Leftists Hate.

The battle for the freedom of speech is heating up this week, with Elon Musk chasing out the Twitter fascists and beginning to open up the platform for free discussion and dissent (amid howls of rage from the Left), but the other social media giants are showing no signs of retreating from their fascism. New English Review Press announced Sunday that a book it published back in 2017, The Islam in Islamic Terrorism: The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology by the renowned ex-Muslim scholar Ibn Warraq, has been pulled for sale from Amazon without explanation or the possibility of appeal.

It’s a strange move. I have the privilege and honor of having known Ibn Warraq for many years and calling him my friend. I’ve also read The Islam in Islamic Terrorism. Before I met him, his groundbreaking and courageous work Why I Am Not A Muslim was a powerful influence on me in the 1990s and had a great deal to do with my beginning to write about jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women myself. Ibn Warraq is a gentle soul, a careful scholar, a superb writer, and a profound and original thinker. The Islam in Islamic Terrorism is not some flame-throwing hate screed but a carefully documented exploration of the elements of Islam that jihad terrorists use in order to justify violence and make recruits among peaceful Muslims.

Amazon, however, is run by Leftists, and for Leftists, any criticism of Islam, including any hint that it may have some connection to Islamic terrorism, is “Islamophobic” and thus to be rejected out of hand without any discussion of the actual evidence. For years now, the notorious far-Left smear machine, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), has defamed opponents of jihad violence and Sharia oppression as “hate group leaders,” and Amazon has banned counter-jihad 501c3 charitable organizations from its Amazon Smile charity program on the basis of the SPLC’s “hate” listings.

Amazon has also shown a readiness to ban books that counter the Left’s nonsense. A few years back, the Leftist behemoth banned Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. It has also banned other books that jihadis and their allies would find offensive, such as Peter McLoughlin’s Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal, and Mohammed’s Koran by McLoughlin and British activist Tommy Robinson.

Leftists will say, as they always say to criticism of the social media giants, that Amazon is a private company that can do what it wants and that if patriots don’t like it, they can start their own bookstore. Remember bookstores? There used to be many in every American city. They all had different selections, based on the owners’ perspectives and interests. But now they are almost all gone. Amazon dominates the book market, and Barnes & Noble takes most of the rest. If Amazon decides that your book is not acceptable, then most people who are interested in books will never have the opportunity to see it at all.

In earlier, less polarized times, the U.S. government determined that several monopolies — Standard Oil, American Tobacco, AT&T — were not in the public interest and compelled them to break up. It would be a great boon for the freedom of speech if Big Tech were subjected to this treatment, but the U.S. government as it is currently constituted is more likely to act against Musk for protecting the freedom of speech on Twitter than against the other social media giants for suppressing that freedom. The American people would also benefit immensely from the breakup of Amazon and reconstitution of bookstores that reflect differing points of view with selections that reflect not just Amazon’s doctrinaire Leftist line, but other points of view as well.

The Islam in Islamic Terrorism can still be found here. But it’s clear that Amazon is intending to shut down debate on a highly controversial issue. Even if you don’t care for the works of Ibn Warraq (which would be odd, as it would mean you don’t care for lucid, elegant prose, compelling reasoning, and a broad command of the salient facts), make no mistake: anytime Amazon pulls a book for political reasons, we are all threatened. The precedent has been set by the only bookseller that really matters today that books that are offensive to the Leftist elites can be deep-sixed at will. This precedent is dangerous and corrosive to a free society. In this age of the Biden regime’s creeping authoritarianism, it’s ominous in the extreme.

Just more willful ignorance

BLUF
The stereotype of gun owners is a lie. The media calls us male-pale-and-stale, and who cares if old white men are disarmed anyway. In fact, gun owners now look like a cross section of the USA. Minority urban women are the fastest growing segment of new gun owners. I think Democrat politicians are afraid that more women and minorities will decide to become gun owners. These new gun owners might enter the culture of armed America and protect themselves.

That fear keeps Democrat politicians up at night.

New Gun Owners are Invisible to the News Media and Democrat Politicians

More people own guns today than ever before. That growth is a continuation of a long term trend that goes back several decades. In addition to that gradual increase, we’ve also seen an extraordinary growth in new gun buyers in the last two years. We had to rewrite who owns guns and why they own them. Today, about four-out-of-ten families have a firearm in their home. Despite the astounding changes in gun ownership, the way some politicians talk about guns and gun owners is out of date. New gun owners are subjected to a crash course in being misperceived and misrepresented by politicians and by the mainstream news media alike.

What is real and what is fantasy?

Sitting President, Joe Biden, echoed old myths about gun owners at a fundraising event in June. He said,

“More people get killed with their own gun in their home trying to stop a burglar than, in fact, any other cause.. Think about that. Because it’s hard to do. It’s a hard thing to do.”

Mayor John Fetterman, the Democrat candidate for the US Senate from Pennsylvania, also felt the need to comment on guns and gun ownership. He said,

“I have seen with my own eyes at the scenes in my community what a military grade round does to the human body.” He said that rifles, particularly modern rifles, should be outlawed.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul said,

“This whole concept that a good guy with a gun will stop the bad guys with a gun, it doesn’t hold up. And the data bears this out, so that theory is over.”

Those statements don’t fit what we know. We know a lot about new gun owners because we talked with them. Gun stores asked new gun owners why they wanted a gun so the gun shop employee could direct the customer to the appropriate products. The industry trade group representing firearms manufacturers and distributors collected those answers. The stereotypical gun owner used to be an old white man who bought a gun to go hunting. Several years ago, personal safety replaced hunting as the major reason new gun owners buy a firearm. Today, gun owners are from every demographic group; male and female, rich and poor, urban and rural. Gun owners represent every ethnic and racial group. About one-out-of-four African-American adults own a firearm. It seems strange that the mainstream media and politicians have deliberately ignored that change.

Continue reading “”

Free Bird.

Everything about Elon Musk insults the coddled, low-testosterone consensus that has been ruining America this last decade through the promulgation of its dependency agenda.

“The Bird is Freed!”

That’s what Elon Musk tweeted upon the consummation of his bid to buy Twitter. ’Twas a consummation devoutly to be wished. Why? For one thing, as Musk later tweeted, henceforth comedy once again will now be “legal on Twitter.”

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter for more money than you or I can really contemplate ($44 billion) lit the punditocracy ablaze. On the Left there was, as St. Matthew (13:42) put it in another context, abundant “fletus et stridor dentium,” “wailing and gnashing of teeth.” On the Right, there were cheers and not a little “Schadenfreude,” which is German for “serves you right, knucklehead.” The Right also went in for some creative trolling.

The dominant narrative, on the Left anyway, is that Musk’s acquisition of Twitter represents a conservative takeover of the social media giant. Twitter had been a brash and scrappy upstart, you see, and now it has been “colonized” by the rich and powerful. . . .

That’s the idea, anyway. You can practically hear the Nabobs of the Narrative holding their breath while they wait to see if the public buys it.

Their public will, of course. But how about the rest of us?

The New York Times gave fastidious expression to this canard in a story headlined “Twitter, Once a Threat to Titans, Now Belongs to One.” A “threat to titans,” eh? What do you suppose that means? The Times explains in its subhead. “A decade ago, the social media platform was a tool for rebels and those challenging authority. But over time, the powerful learned how to use it for their own goals.”

In order to appreciate how funny this is, you can start with CNN’s story about the pile of money paid to the executives that Musk, in his first order of business, fired on Thursday. It is a large pile. According to CNN, Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s former CEO, Ned Segal (former CFO), and Vijaya Gadde (former Chief Legal Officer) will walk away with nearly $200 million. (I pause so that you, along with many others, can savor the word “former.”)

Gadde, by the way, was not only paid many millions of dollars a year but was also instrumental in engineering the expulsion of Donald Trump, then the president of the United States, from the platform.

The idea that Twitter was a challenge to the establishment before the advent of Musk is almost as wrong as the idea that Musk is conservative and that he aims to transform Twitter into a a bastion of Trumpesque MAGA (or, to quote Joe Biden’s focus group, “ultra-MAGA”) sentiment.

Continue reading “”