"Carry On Wayward Son" (opens in separate window)

the twitter/x files reveal an existential threat

friday, december 8th, 2023

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October and the subsequent reporting on the Twitter Files by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and a handful of others beginning in early December is one of the most important news stories of our time. The Twitter Files story encompasses, and to a large extent connects, every major political scandal of the Trump-Biden era. Put simply, the Twitter Files reveal an unholy alliance between Big Tech and the deep state designed to throttle free speech and maintain an official narrative through censorship and propaganda. This should not just disturb us, it should also prod us to action in defense of the First Amendment, free and fair elections, and indeed our country.

After Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter, he fired a slew of useless or insubordinate employees, instituted new content moderation policies, and tried to reform a woke corporate culture that bordered (and still borders) on parody. In the process, Musk coordinated with Taibbi and Weiss on the publication of a series of stories based on internal Twitter documents related to an array of major political events going back years: the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, Twitter’s secret policy of shadow banning, President Trump’s suspension from Twitter after the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot, the co-opting of Twitter by the FBI to suppress “election disinformation” ahead of the 2020 election, Twitter’s involvement in a Pentagon overseas psy-op campaign, its silencing of dissent from the official Covid narrative, its complicity in the Russiagate hoax, and its gradual capitulation to the direct involvement of the U.S. intelligence community—with the FBI as a go-between—in content moderation.

As Taibbi has written, the Twitter Files “show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government—from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”

The Twitter Files contain multitudes, but for the sake of brevity let us consider just three installments and their related implications: the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the suspension of Trump, and the deputization of Twitter by the FBI. Together, these stories reveal not just a social media company willing to do the bidding of an out-of-control federal bureaucracy, but a federal bureaucracy openly hostile to the First Amendment.

Hunter Biden’s Laptop

On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published its first major exposé based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which had been dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 and never picked up. It was the first of several stories detailing Biden family corruption and revealing the close involvement of Joe Biden in his son’s foreign business ventures in the years during and after Biden’s vice presidency. Hunter, although doing no real work, was making tens of millions of dollars from foreign companies in places like Ukraine and China. The Post’s bombshell reporting shined a bright light on what was happening.

According to the emails on the laptop, Hunter introduced then-Vice President Biden to a top executive at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that was paying Hunter (who had no credentials or experience in the energy business) up to $50,000 a month to sit on its board. Soon after this meeting, Vice President Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor investigating the company. In an earlier email, a top Burisma executive asked Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” to benefit the company. The Post’s ensuing stories revealed more of the same: a shocking level of corruption and influence-peddling by Hunter Biden, whose emails suggest his father was closely connected to his overseas business ventures. Indeed, those ventures appear to consist entirely of Hunter providing access to Joe Biden.

Twitter did everything in its power to suppress the Biden story. It removed links to the Post’s reporting, appended warnings that they might be “unsafe,” and prevented users from sharing them via direct message—a restriction previously reserved for child pornography and other extreme cases. In an extraordinary step, Twitter also locked the Post’s account and the accounts of anyone who shared links to its reporting, including White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. These actions were justified under the pretext that the stories violated Twitter’s hacked-materials policy, even though there was no evidence, then or now, that anything on the laptop was hacked.

Twitter executives at the highest levels were directly involved in these decisions. Former head of Legal, Policy, and Trust Vijaya Gadde, the company’s chief censor, played a key role, as did former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth. Oddly, all this seems to have been done without the knowledge of Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey. And it was done despite internal pushback from other departments.

“I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe,” wrote a Twitter communications executive in an email to Gadde and Roth. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” asked former VP of Global Communications Brandon Borman. His question was answered by Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker—a former top lawyer for the FBI and the most powerful member of a growing cadre of former FBI employees working at Twitter -- who said that “caution is warranted” and that some facts “indicate the materials may have been hacked.”

But there were no such facts, as Baker and other top Twitter executives knew at the time. The laptop was exactly what the Post said it was, and every fact the Post reported was accurate. Other major media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post would begrudgingly admit as much 18 months later, after Joe Biden was ensconced in the White House.

If there were no hacked materials in the Post’s reporting, why did Twitter immediately react as if there were? Because long before the Post published its first laptop story, there had been an organized effort by the intelligence community to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden. The laptop, after all, had been in federal custody since the previous December, when the FBI seized it from the computer repair shop. So the FBI knew very well that it contained evidence of straightforward criminal activity (such as illicit drug use) as well as of corruption and influence-peddling.

The evening before the Post ran its first story on the laptop, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent ten documents to Roth at Twitter through a special one-way communications channel the FBI had established with the company. For months, the FBI and other federal intelligence agencies had been priming Roth to dismiss news reports about Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election as “hack-and-leak” operations by state actors. They had done the same thing with Facebook, whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted as much to Joe Rogan in an August 2022 podcast. As Michael Shellenberger reported in the seventh installment of the Twitter Files, the FBI repeatedly asked Roth and others at Twitter about foreign influence operations on the platform and were repeatedly told there were none of any significance. The FBI also routinely pressured Twitter to hand over data outside the normal search warrant process, which Twitter at first resisted.

In July 2020, Chan arranged for Twitter executives to get top secret security clearances so the FBI could share intelligence about possible threats to the upcoming presidential election. The next month, Chan sent Roth information about a Russian hacking group called APT28. Roth later said that when the Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop broke, “It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leak campaign alarm bells.” Even though there was never any evidence that anything on the laptop was hacked, Roth reacted to it just as the FBI had conditioned him to do, using the company’s hacked-materials policy to suppress the story as soon as it appeared, just as the agency suggested it would, less than a month before the election.

Suspending the President

The erosion of Twitter’s content moderation standards would continue after the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, reaching its apogee on January 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol riot. That is when Twitter made the extraordinary decision to suspend President Trump, even though he had not violated any Twitter policies. As the Twitter Files show, the suspension came amid ongoing interactions with federal agencies—interactions that were increasing in frequency in the months leading up to the 2020 election, during which Roth was meeting weekly with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. As the election neared, Twitter’s unevenly applied, rules-based content moderation policies would steadily deteriorate.

Content moderation on Twitter had always been an unstable mix of automatic enforcement of rules and subjective interventions by top executives, most of whom used Twitter’s censorship tools to diminish the reach of Trump and others on the right through shadow banning and other means. But that was changing. As Taibbi wrote in the third installment of the Twitter Files: “As the election approached, senior executives—perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed—increasingly struggled with rules, and began to speak of ‘vios’ [violations] as pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway.”

After January 6, Twitter jettisoned even the appearance of a rules-based moderation policy, suspending Trump for a pair of tweets that top executives falsely claimed were violations of Twitter’s terms of service. The first, sent early in the morning on January 8, stated: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” The second, sent about an hour later, simply stated that Trump would not be attending Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20.

That same day, key Twitter staffers correctly determined that Trump’s tweets did not constitute incitement of violence or violate any other Twitter policies. But pressure kept building from people like Gadde, who wanted to know whether the tweets amounted to “coded incitement to further violence.” Some suggested that Trump’s first tweet might have violated the company’s policy on the glorification of violence. Internal discussions then took an even more bizarre turn. Members of Twitter’s “scaled enforcement team” reportedly viewed Trump “as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed.”

Later on the afternoon of January 8, Twitter announced Trump’s permanent suspension “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”—a nonsense phrase that corresponded to no written Twitter policy. The suspension of a sitting head of state was unprecedented. Twitter had never taken such a step, even with heads of state in Nigeria and Ethiopia who actually had incited violence. Internal deliberations unveiled by the Twitter Files show that Trump’s suspension was partly justified based on the “overall context and narrative” of Trump’s words and actions—as one executive put it—“over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.”

That is, it was not anything Trump said or did; it was that Twitter’s censors wanted to blame the President for everything that happened on January 6 and remove him from the platform. To do that, they were willing to shift the entire intellectual framework of content moderation from the enforcement of objective rules to the consideration of “context and narrative,” thereby allowing executives to engage in what amounts to viewpoint discrimination.

Private companies, of course, for the most part have the right to engage in viewpoint discrimination -- something the government is prohibited from doing by the First Amendment. The problem is that when Twitter suspended Trump, it was operating less like a private company than like an extension of the federal government.

***

Among the most shocking revelations of the Twitter Files is the extent to which federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies came to view Twitter as a tool for censorship and narrative control. In part six of the Twitter Files, Taibbi chronicles the “constant and pervasive” contact between the FBI and Twitter after January 2020, “as if [Twitter] were a subsidiary.” In particular, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security wanted Twitter to censor tweets and lock accounts it believed were engaged in “election misinformation,” and would regularly send the company content it had pre-flagged for moderation, essentially dragooning Twitter into what would otherwise be illegal government censorship. Taibbi calls it a “master-canine” relationship. When requests for censorship came in from the feds, Twitter obediently complied -- even when the tweets in question were clearly jokes or posted on accounts with few followers.

Some Twitter executives were unsure what to make of this relationship. Policy Director Nick Pickles at one point asked how he should refer to the company’s cooperation with federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, suggesting it be described in terms of “partnerships.” Time and again, federal agencies stressed the need for close collaboration with their “private sector partners,” using the alleged interference by Russia in the 2016 election as the pretext for a massive government surveillance and censorship regime operating from inside Twitter.

Requests for content moderation, which increasingly resembled demands, came not only from the FBI and DHS, but also from a tangled web of other federal agencies, contractors, and government-affiliated think tanks such as the Election Integrity Project at Stanford University. As Taibbi writes, the lines between government and its “partners” in this effort were “so blurred as to be meaningless.”

The Deputization of Twitter

After the 2016 election, both Twitter and Facebook faced pressure from Democrats and their media allies to root out Russian “election meddling” under the thoroughly debunked theory that a Moscow-based social media influence operation was responsible for Trump’s election victory. In reality, Russia’s supposed meddling amounted to a minuscule ad buy on Facebook and a handful of Twitter bots. But the truth was not acceptable to Democrats, the media, or the anti-Trump federal bureaucracy.

In 2017, Twitter came under tremendous pressure to “keep producing material” on Russian interference, and in response it created a Russia Task Force to hunt for accounts tied to Moscow’s Internet Research Agency. The task force did not find much. Out of some 2,700 accounts reviewed, only two came back as significant, and one of those was Russia Today, a state-backed news outlet. But in the face of bad press and threats from Democrats in Congress, Twitter executives decided to go along with the official narrative and pretend they had a Russia problem. To placate Washington and avoid costly new regulations, they pledged to “work with [members of Congress] on their desire to legislate.” When someone in Congress leaked the list of the 2,700 accounts Twitter’s task force had reviewed, the media exploded with stories suggesting that Twitter was swarming with Russian bots—and Twitter continued to go along.

After that, as described by Taibbi, “This cycle—threatened legislation wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to [content] moderation asks—[came to] be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement.”

Late in 2017, Twitter quietly adopted a new policy. In public, it would say that all content moderation took place “at [Twitter’s] sole discretion.” But its internal guidance would stipulate censorship of anything “identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” Thus Twitter increasingly allowed the intelligence community, the State Department, and a dizzying array of federal and state agencies to submit content moderation requests through the FBI, which Chan suggested could function as “the belly button of the [U.S. government].” These requests would grow and intensify during the Covid pandemic and in the run-up to the 2020 election.

By 2020, there was a torrent of demands for censorship, sometimes with no explanation—just an Excel spreadsheet with a list of accounts to be banned. These demands poured in from FBI offices all over the country, overwhelming Twitter staff. Eventually the government would pay Twitter $3.4 million in compensation. It was a pittance considering the work Twitter did at the government’s behest, but the payment illustrated a stark reality: Twitter, a leading gatekeeper of the digital public square and arguably the most powerful social media platform in the world, had become a subcontractor for the U.S. intelligence community.

***

The Twitter Files have revealed or confirmed three important truths about social media and the deep state.

First, the entire concept of “content moderation” is a euphemism for censorship by social media companies that falsely claim to be neutral and unbiased. To the extent they exercise a virtual monopoly on public discourse in the digital era, we should stop thinking of them as private companies that can “do whatever they want,” as libertarians are fond of saying. The companies’ content moderation policies are at best a flimsy justification for banning or blocking whatever their executives do not like. At worst, they provide cover for a policy of pervasive government censorship.

Second, Twitter was taking marching orders from a deep state security apparatus that was created to fight terrorists, not to censor or manipulate public discourse. To the extent that the deep state is using social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to subvert the First Amendment and run information psy-ops on the American public, these companies have become malevolent government actors. As a policy matter, the hands-off, laissez-faire regulatory approach we have taken to them should come to an immediate end.

Third, the administrative state has metastasized into a destructive deep state that threatens to bring about the collapse of America’s constitutional system within our lifetimes. Emblematic of the threat is the fact that “the intelligence community” has proven itself incapable of not interfering in American elections. The FBI in particular has directly meddled in the last two presidential elections to a degree that should call into question its continued existence. Indeed, the FBI’s post-9/11 transformation from a law enforcement agency to a counter-terrorism and intelligence-gathering agency with seemingly limitless remit has been a disaster for civil liberties and the First Amendment. We need either to impose radical reforms or scrap it entirely and start over.

The late great political scientist Angelo Codevilla argued that our response to 9/11 was completely wrong. Instead of erecting a sprawling security and surveillance apparatus to detect and disrupt potential terrorist plots, we should have issued an ultimatum to the regimes that were harboring Al Qaeda: you make war on these terrorists and bring them to justice or we will make war on you. The reason not to do what we did, Codevilla argued, is that a security and surveillance apparatus powerful and pervasive enough to do what we wanted it to do was incompatible with a free society. It might defeat the terrorists, but it would eventually be turned on the American people.

The Twitter Files leave little doubt that Codevilla’s prediction has come to pass. The question we face now is whether the American people and their elected representatives will fight back. The fate of the republic rests on the answer.

A Day In The Life.

Sleeping-in until 8a(!) on Friday, I went thru my finger stick to check my BSL (Blood Sugar Level) and recorded it on my Diabetes 2 chart, made coffee, took two 50mg Tramadol and a 300mg Gabapentin for the morning pains, fired-up the Win-7 Pentium HP desktop to let 32 million lines of code load, had a couple smokes in the cold, but warming garage, and checked the day's to-do list.

It was a heavily-clouded, nippy 33° morning, so I fired-up the furnace to take the chill off, and scanned the news and weather sites. I missed most of the "Chris Stigall Show LIVE" from 6-9. and then switched over to the "Chris Plante Show LIVE" until 12, picked-up the mail in the CHCA Community Mailbox (hate that damned thing), and left for Rite Aid Pharmacy to p/u some waiting Rxs, and then refuel the HEMI V8 Jeep, with Ethanol Free 90oct Premium (21.5gals [25gal tank] @ $92.50) at Royal Farms, on the way home.

You're getting old, when you get the same sensation from a rocking chair, that you once got from a roller coaster.

I made an account, ordered some great items from the gourmet online Mackenzie LTD Store. The rain came just after 12noon, and we definitely needed it; at least it wasn't snow. Yet. Even with all the sleep I got last night thru this morning, I was tired after lunch, and grabbed a short 2hr snooze on the LR couch. No, I didn't watch the “The Great Red State vs. Blue State” debate in Alpharetta, GA, hosted by Fox News’ Sean Hannity, whom I loathe and despise. I read the 'reviews' and watched a couple of YT clips, and I didn't miss anything.

After a big dinner, I watched the news, tuned into Discovery's new episode of "Gold Rush" and several of its spin-offs' series, until around 11:30p. Lights out.

I slept-in until 7:30a on Saturday, but woke with a lot of R/S lower back/hip/buttock/full leg pain. That sucked so early in the morning. I fired-up the furnace, took my 3 painkiller pills, made coffee, had a couple smokes in the garage and scanned the weather and news sites. Yes, the fog was *quite heavy*, in fact, I thought it was snowing as I looked out the 2nd floor or the condo, just before coming downstairs. Had to take a second look. Coffee was good, as usual. At 42°, it didn't *seem that cold* when I opened the garage door, to let fresh air inside, before firing-up the oscillating heater tower.

Scanning the weather sites, I found this:

*** DENSE FOG ADVISORY! ***
• WHAT: Visibility one quarter mile or less, in dense fog.
• WHERE: Portions of central Pennsylvania.
• WHEN: Until 10 AM EST this morning, Saturday, December 2.
• IMPACTS: Hazardous driving conditions due to low visibility.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS:
• If driving, slow down, use your low-beam headlights, and leave plenty of distance ahead of you. For dense fog safety information, visit weather.gov/safety/fog. [Dense Fog Warning! Climate Change! Global Warming! Kiss your asses goodbye. The demonKKKrats are still in charge, are going to destroy our country and way of life! Bend over and grab your ankles!]

If I'd have known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself.

Yes, this whole George Santos expulsion is a stupid, idiot GOP, bullshit move. Expelling that liar from the US House should have been done by the voters who elected him to that office. NOT by the full US House, since the guy was not charged or convicted. HUGE MISTAKE and it sets a very, very bad precedent that will come back to bite them in the ass! Good ol' Republicans, huh?

By 11a, the sun had cut thru the very heavy fog, and temps were in the mid-50s. Sherry called to wish me Happy B-Day, and I went back to working on my basement's "Prep Supply" inventory. By 5, I was tiring of that, came back to ground level and watched some news. After a light dinner, I watched Discovery's "Expedition Unknown" until their "Mystery at Blind Frog Ranch" came on, until 12 midnight. The rain started around 8, and continued all night. OK, time to pull the plug.

Sleeping-in until 8a on Sunday, it was still raining, a cool 42° and I upped the heat to 74°, made coffee, took my pain pills, and had some smokes in the garage with coffee. Nice. No races on -- all racing is finished, as of last weekend, for the year. IMSA starts-up in mid-January, with the "24 Hours of Daytona" Endurance Race, and the other racing venues follow in February. After breakfast, I just lounged around until 1p, got ready for the day and drove over to Rite Aid to get some waiting Rxs. A pretty bleak day outside, in the low 50s, I stayed-in and caught-up on paperwork, and watched some TV shows. I have F1-TV, and can watch all of this and the previous 5 years' recorded races, but miss the live F-1 Grand Prix races on Sunday.

Embrace the you that you wake-up to, every morning; not the one you went to bed with, last night.

After lunch, I did some more inventorying of food supplies in my basement's prep storage, until 5, had dinner and tuned into National Geographic's "Life Beyond Zero", which I hadn't seen in 12 years. I watched the first 10 seasons, then lost interest in 2010, and they're now in the 22nd season, so I began catching-up until 12midnight. Time for sleep.

Up at 7a on Monday, it was a dreary, 38° morning, but forecast to be partly sunny and nice. Probably not. I made coffee, had some smokes and turned into the "Chris Stigall Show LIVE" from 6-9. While scanning the weather and news sites, I noticed this: "Protester self-immolates outside Israeli consulate in Atlanta" -- I didn't know Israel had an *embassy* in Atlanta! -- she's still "alive", but that won't last. Go figure *WHY* those leftist, demonKKKrat, communist, Marxist, fascist wackos give-up their lives for a phony baloney "cause", which means nothing at all.

A week ago, a 501(c)3 National Charity sent me a large packet of expensive, slick request-for-money fundraising material, along with a pen, that is also a flashlight, a toaster and string trimmer -- okay, I'm kidding about the toaster and trimmer -- but WHO THE F NEEDS A PEN/FLASHLIGHT COMBO? Why the hell are people inventing useless crap that no one needs, and instead of putting my previous $100 donation into service for their needy clients, purchases a pen/flashlight item and prints slick marketing brochures etc, and spends postage to bother me thru the mail? Way too many so-called "charities" do. If they're not using at least 93% for charity program purposes, I don't donate anymore.

I left at 12:30p for Dallastown and points south, to p/u cleaned/pressed/starched Lee jeans and work shirts, do a couple of other stops, and be back by 2. Heavy traffic, construction chokepoints everywhere, and unending, needless delays. (((sigh))) I tried to listen to a new (for me) Talk Radio show -- The Rob Carson Show -- on a Baltimore station, WCBM, but it would NOT let me listen to anything, UNLESS I had a phone which would install apps. Shitty, virus-riddled crap apps. F•ck them! I had lunch, started a computer full-system back-up onto one of my "My Book®" External HDs, and hit the LR couch for a couple of hours.

After getting back up around 6, it was almost dark, so I closed the condo, had a light pasta dinner, and ran CCleaner for the system and registry. My always reliable, trusty Opera v95 Browser began crashing after that, and I spent over 3hrs trying to "fix it". Uh-Oh! I even dl/'ld another copy to install, and it crashed, too. I've got a real mess on my hands, though I have 3 other browsers installed, Opera is my *main browser*. I'm screwed, for now.

I gave up after another hour (that's 5hrs on that mess), set-up the Google Chrome and Brave browsers to work in the meantime, with Pale Moon browser on standby, while I try to either figure the solution out, or more likely, get some help from the CCleaner Support Team. Usually, I can figure out a "workaround", but this time I'm stumped. Frustrated, I gave up at 1:30a, and went upstairs.

Up at 5:30a, I had lower back and hip/butt/leg pain, made French Dark Roast House Coffee, took the 3 painkillers, fired-up the furnace (32° outside) and checked the desktop. Sure enough, the Opera Browser didn't "fix" itself... LOL! Still crashing, I wrote a note to the CCleaner Support Team, and will check back later in the morning. Coffee and Marlboro®s are sooooooo good together. I lounged around until 12noon, drove over to the beer store on Memory Lane, and got 3 6-packs of the 6% "Beast" adult drink in cans, for later in the evening. I was back by 12:30p, and Sherry arrived at 1. We walked at the cavernous York Galleria, went thru Marshall's and Boscov's to see their Christmas offerings and decorations, split a warm soft pretzel w/ mustard, and went back to my place for a while to relax and talk, and have some pre-Holiday kisses and hugs.

Sherry left at 4:30 to get some errands done, and get home before it got dark; I had an early dinner, watched TV and forgot about my computer browser problems for a while, had a couple of adult beverages, and called it a night at 11:30p.

Up at 7:30a on Wednesday, to a cloudy, cold 32° morning, I went thru my usual morning routines -- heat, coffee, painkillers, smokes, desktop -- which last night's forecast had forecast snow squalls blowing thru the area. It's why it's called "the weather"; it's almost always wrong. Oooooops my bad. 8:50a and IT'S SNOWING (lightly) OUTSIDE! WOO-HOO! Snow squalls moved thru the area, giving me a thrill. (Aren't I easy to please?)

I tuned into the "CS Show" until 9; then switched over to the "CP Show" until 12noon. The lawn care company's blowing leaves away from foundations and gardens, and mowing/picking-up the cut grass and voluminous leaves; good job, guys. I left at 1:15p for the auto-car wash and Weis Market.

America and the entire world are both in the trash can, for allowing the massive hate-Jew, anti-Semitic demonstrations for the past 3-5 weeks. It's freaking outrageous that so-called "academia" is leading the hatred. You can bet that the subhuman filth from Antifa and BLM are involved in planning and supplying the "Hate-Jew protestors", with everything they need.

I ran into my love, Sherry, at Weis Market, in the produce dept! Got hugs and kisses, talked a few minutes and finished my light food shopping. Coming out, it was snowing right over Weis, and in several spots on the way home; snow shower cells moving thru the area, north to south. Back by 2:30, I unloaded, put stuff away, had a bite for lunch, and hit the LR couch. A short 1½hrs later, it was dark and all outside solar lights were on; time to close-up the condo, get the Jeep into the garage, and stay warm, as more Winter weather is on the way. Damn, another school shooter; this time at UNLV. And the three leftist, liberal harpy bitch, university presidents of UPenn, MIT and Harvard, couldn't answer a "yes" or "no" question about "Kill The Jews" hate speech.

After a light dinner, I started a 12hr fast for the Lipid Panel Blood Test -- among about 20 other tests -- at Wellspan's Stony Brook Lab, tomorrow morning, for next week's Endocrinology Dr's appt. It was another NBC (Nothing But Crap) night for TV, so I watched most news shows on NEWSMAX. No, I didn't watch the GOP Debate circlefest. I sort of watched Discovery's "Expedition Unknown" and spin-off "Expedition X", until past midnight, and called it a day.

Up at 6:30a on Thursday, I made coffee -- had to drink it black wo/ Rutter's Half & Half, because of the later morning Lipid Panel Blood Test, and others -- upped the furnace, opened the office-sunroom electric blinds and... IT WAS SNOWING! Ahhhh. beautiful snow! Thank you, Mother Nature. I still get as giddy as a 5yr old, when it snows. After a couple smokes in the crowded garage, I tuned into the news and weather on my desktop. It was all about the GOP Debate and no, I didn't watch it. My long-time good friend, ppc, sent me a link to the Rob Carson Show's Live Player, instead of going directly to WCBM's player APP page, and it finally worked. Desktops don't play apps; they use and play programs, only. Apps are specifically for mobile devices -- iPhones, iPads, Android Tablets and maybe some Laptops, but NOT PC desktops. But "somehow", the app she sent, WORKS on my PC desktop! Flipping amazing.

I watched the 3 university lesbo hag presidents of MIT, UPenn and Harvard lying, ducking and dodging answers to the US Congress, a dissembling the English language, unable to give a simple "YES" or "NO" answer, and sounding like the mentally-ill leftist filth they are. More of the groveling university bitches to laugh at. Much more of the BS, here.

OK, so my new daily line-up is: "Chris Stigall Show LIVE" from 6-9a; the "Chris Plante Show LIVE" 9-12noon; and finally the Rob Carson Show LIVE 12-3p. I'm on it, today!

I was going to give myself a new pair of Vionic Adler House Slippers, but everywhere, and I mean EVERYWHERE!, they're sold out of the 10½ Medium size -- every damned store/outlet is out of my size -- so I'll just have to wait until sometime in Jan-Feb, when they get restocked. No biggie. I'll just give myself a bag of Fentanyl for Christmas. Heh.

I did a load of laundry, after getting back from the lab's blood tests, and the results of 7-8 tests won't be in until this evening. A little more working on the basement's huge "Prep Inventory", took much of the afternoon, and so did helping a neighbor out. I also called-in my order for tomorrow morning's trip to the New Eastern Farmer's Market, here in East York. No chance for a nap today, so I had a light dinner, watched History's "American Pickers" and Motor Trend's "Iron Resurrection" until 11, and unplugged for the night. Tomorrow's another day.

Tomorrow starts a new week, here in the "Journal", Sherry and I've got some time reserved for ourselves together, I've got an Endocrinology Dr's appt on Wednesday, but the rest of the week is clear,as we head toward the end of year, and a new one starting. My, they're going by faster and faster, every year. Heh.

American Universities (Are) An Existential Threat.

America’s “institutions of higher learning” could not be of lower character. Nor could they be less effective in preparing young people for the real world. The examples are legion, ubiquitous.

A professor at Washington University in St. Louis recently praised pro-Palestinian protesters who vandalized a Jewish leader’s home on Thanksgiving morning, and described the smoke bombs and paint damage as “pretty cool.” Heather Hackman, consultant at a recent University of Oklahoma race workshop, says “making sure you’re not tardy” is simply part of “the racial narrative of white.” So, being on time is white supremacy. Furthermore, Hackman claims individualism, honesty, discipline, and rigor are other traits indicative of white privilege and/or supremacy. In other words, being competent and respectful isn’t cool. Integrity and character are racist. Ms. Hackman is on record telling educators that if they don’t plan on promoting social justice in the classroom, they shouldn’t go into teaching.
Some “educators” believe that there is no such thing as free will. Others believe that certain words are violence and therefore should be prevented or punished, but that violence to further causes in which they believe is free speech and therefore protected by the First Amendment.

Colleges across the land warn of “microaggressions” should students potentially be exposed to unfamiliar points of view—or any description of less than pleasant reality. And, should students be traumatized by the aforementioned instead of learning and growing, safe spaces abound on campuses, some replete with warm milk, cookies, and puppies for petting.

Universities universally teach/preach that virtually anything found in the U.S. -- or previously taught in schools -- is an example of colonialism or imperialism, including mathematics.

The nearest thing to a religion on campus today is the unwavering belief that there are more than two genders and that anyone can be any one—or more -- of these genders they wish to be at any time. And change them like the shoes they wear. “Trans” and “genderqueer” rule the day. The long-term affects of this mass psychosis will be devastating for society at large.
A number of university professors promote nihilism, the idea that life is meaningless. (“Nothing matters and what if it did?!”) More than one take this concept even farther, suggesting that the only way to save the Earth is through human extinction. That is a long way from “Be fruitful and multiply.” But college campuses—and professors—are a long way from God.

Ironically, there is little honest reflection or legitimate philosophizing taking place in schools today. If life is meaningless, why have we come up with so many terms for meaning? Why do we have the innate capacity to feel great joy, love, compassion….and sadness, hate, and callousness? Why would this be? It would not be necessary. Is there not, in fact, meaning in the very act of believing deeply that some things are meaningful? For example: are love, music, great writing, the look in your young child’s eyes as he or she is about to open a Christmas gift, a hole-in-one……or a cold beer and cool breeze on a hot summer’s day not “meaningful?”
Sadly, and ironically, modern day America is guilty of educational colonialism. The nation’s Big Academia is trying to export American colleges’ radical nihilism throughout the West…and anywhere else that will have it. This constitutes a real threat to the world.
It is nothing less than vandalism of the mind—and soul.

And that is meaningful, whether some wish to believe it or not.

© 12.02.2023 by Eric Utter, "American Thinker".

Donald Trump: Man in the Arena.

Sundance, that tireless intellectual warrior standing guard over at The Conservative Treehouse, occasionally jeers: “You ‘conservative pundits’ still don’t get it.  Trump isn’t our candidate.  He’s our murder weapon.  And the GOP is our victim.”

Recently, he returned to that refrain after highlighting an interview in which Mitt Romney announced his intention to vote for a Democrat unless Republican primary voters nominated Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, or Ron DeSantis for president.  Given that Romney tried to remove President Trump from office for Joe Biden’s quid-pro-quo crimes in Ukraine and elsewhere, his continued betrayal of grassroots voters is no surprise.  Still, considering how many ordinary Republicans held their collective nose to vote for John McCain in 2008 and then for Ol’ Pierre Delecto four years later, it would be nice to think Establishment Republicans could be convinced to show some reciprocal respect for their voters’ wishes.

Professional Republicans’ sustained contempt for the electorate has been infuriating.  For this reason, there was a time when candidate Donald Trump was more “murder weapon” than presidential dynamo in my mind.  I loved what he had to say in the lead-up to the 2016 election, and I believed he was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale political pantomime.  However, confronted with the Establishment’s absurd attempt to saddle voters with another Bush or Clinton eight years ago, voting for Trump felt, first and foremost, like swinging a sledgehammer through a mold-laden Uniparty wall in dire need of being knocked down.

Since his victory over Hillary Clinton — an unindicted co-conspirator in the Russia collusion fraud against the American people — President Trump has proven himself far more capable and consequential than I ever imagined.  As evidence for how much the Deep State fears this one political outsider above all others, compromised prosecutors, judges, bureaucrats, and lawmakers have done nearly everything they can to deprive him of his property and liberty.  Still, the man stands with a vim and vigor that is inspiring.  Even while fighting one legal battle after the next in courtrooms across the country, he holds back-to-back campaign events and political rallies.  The contrast with Dementia Joe’s lethargic attempts to merely walk across a stage without falling down is stunning.

Watching Trump persevere, despite the forces arrayed against him, is like witnessing President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 Paris speech, entitled “Citizenship in a Republic,” come to life: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly.”  In the arena, President Trump is a sight to behold.

Just as astonishing, the U.S. government has plumbed to insidious depths to keep Trump from the presidency.  Obama’s FBI not only spied on his campaign but also framed him as a Russian spy.  While Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann attempted to cover up the government’s ongoing criminality, they spent two more years threatening the Trump administration with selective prosecutions and process crimes.  Congress impeached him for noticing Biden’s pay-to-play family corruption in Ukraine.  Those same turds impeached him again for giving a speech a mile from the Capitol concerning the 2020 election’s obvious fraud.  After killing four unarmed Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, authorities in D.C. pushed ridiculous propaganda defaming J6 protesters as “insurrectionists” attempting to overthrow the government.  The FBI and DOJ have spent the last three years hunting down Trump supporters, sanctioning election lawyers for daring to combat fraud, censoring and prosecuting pro-Trump meme-makers for exercising their free speech, and secretly listing anyone who denounces these tyrannical actions as a potential “domestic terrorist.”  As for the coming 2024 election, Joe Rogan says it best: the Uniparty’s only campaign strategy is to imprison Donald Trump.

The U.S. government’s unconstitutional and criminal behavior has been shockingly atrocious.  If nothing else, Donald Trump’s rise to power has revealed a level of entrenched D.C. corruption and rampant authoritarianism that most Americans never imagined possible.  It has been enough for General Mike Flynn — one of the first Trump administration officials to be targeted by the Deep State — to conclude that the United States is “now officially a communist third world banana republic.”

The U.S. Government does not believe in freedom.  It believes in propaganda, deception, and force.  It believes in mass surveillance and the criminalization of speech.  It believes in religious and ideological discrimination.  It believes in unfettered illegal immigration, widespread and unchecked violent crime, and the unconstitutional confiscation of citizens’ firearms.  It believes in putting Americans on secret lists in order to monitor their movements and influence their behaviors.  It believes in endless wars all over the world — including all-out gun battles on city streets right here at home.  What it will not countenance, however, is limited government, individual liberty, and long-term peace.

Every four years, two private corporations posing as political parties offer the American people a choice for president that almost always consists of two crooks who have long been on those corporations’ payrolls.  The State-controlled press calls this “democracy.”  It is no such thing.  It is an illusion of choice — or at least it was until the American people found a workaround and successfully put Donald Trump into the Oval Office.
Now we aren’t even allowed our traditional quadrennial illusions.  After the “never let a crisis go to waste” use of COVID to skirt state voting laws and usher in a new fraud-filled era of anonymous ballot dumps, elections look even less real than they did before.  Successful campaigns may depend entirely on an avalanche of mail-in ballots and an army of political operatives willing to collect them, fill them out, and return them to unsecured drop boxes sometime between the months before Election Day (ballot hunting season) and the weeks after that now irrelevant endpoint when undated, unverified ballots are still permitted to flow in and be counted.

In response to the American people’s Trump workaround, the Establishment Class simply constructed a workaround of its own that eliminates the need for any real voters.  If the Uniparty gets its way, elections will be nothing more than illusion and fraud mixed together until the pungent smell of horse manure is strong enough for the “authorities” to claim victory.

However, the feeling among Trump’s supporters is neither apathy nor dread.  If D.C.’s Establishment Class assumed that its constant bombardment of injustice and harassment would wear voters down until they begged for mercy by agreeing to vote for another Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, or Hillary Clinton, that plan has backfired.  Instead, the Uniparty mass produces one feeling among the public: sheer rage.

It has been said that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher — another warrior worthy of Roosevelt’s gladiatorial arena — carried around a poem written by Charles Mackay, the nineteenth century Scottish writer perhaps best known for his book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.  In that poem, Mackay asks:

You have no enemies, you say?
Alas! my friend, the boast is poor;
He who has mingled in the fray
Of duty, that the brave endure,

Must have made foes!  If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done.
You’ve hit no traitor on the hip,
You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip,

You’ve never turned the wrong to right,
You’ve been a coward in the fight.

It seems to me that no U.S. presidential candidate has ever had more skin in the game than Donald Trump.  As the unaccountable Deep State’s true enemy, he deserves all Americans’ support.  Or, as I like to say: MAGA like YOLO ‘cause FJB.

© 12.03.2023 by J.B. Shurk, "American Thinker".

Marxist Ideology and The Push To Ban Militia Weapons In The USA.

Under the ideology of cultural Marxism and the framework of Marxist “Woke” ideologies, power must be taken from a majority population. Firearms, as noted by the Marxist and Chinese mass murderer Mao, are a form of political power. Mao wrote:

Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

What Mao meant was only the Communist Party should be allowed to have guns. For a Marxist revolution to succeed, the people must be disarmed. The left in the United States has long pushed for the disarmament of the population. Recently, the left has primarily pushed for the banning of those arms that are commonly available and most suitable for militia use. These are modern semi-automatic rifles with standard capacity magazines of 30 rounds. These types of rifles are admirably suited to the defense of homes and neighborhoods, in part because they are understood to be extremely effective and, as such, have great deterrent value.

The American founding fathers understood the political power of firearms as well. They had just won a war with the superpower of the age, England. The English king had repeatedly attempted to disarm first the colonists and then the revolutionaries. The founders wished to make sure no future American government would be able to disarm the American people. Thus, they included the guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms in the Bill of Rights. The founders understood the right to keep and bear arms included defense against all threats from animals, criminals, other nations, and domestic tyrants.

Many infringements on the right to keep and bear arms have been tolerated by the people of the United States as long as the infringements were applied to disfavored minorities.

During the existence of the United States, the vast majority of people could easily purchase a rifle, shotgun, or pistol, with little difficulty in all states. Disfavored minorities, particularly black people, had a difficult time purchasing handguns in many places. Disfavored minorities were seldom prohibited from buying rifles and shotguns. Most of those infringements were in states dominated by the Democratic party. Even in states that were most hostile to the Second Amendment, rifles and shotguns were easy to get. The greatest push was to ban handguns because handguns were commonly used in crime. Rifles and shotguns are rarely used in crime. Many political commentators made the claim restricting handguns did not affect the Second Amendment because there was easy access to rifles and shotguns.

As Americans perceived the growth of the political bureaucracy and the disfavor with which the Constitution was held by the political class, resistance to disarmament grew. The push to ban handguns failed. As a way to revive the failing fortunes of those pushing for population disarmament, Josh Sugermann advocated for a ban on “Assault Weapons” in 1988. From Reason.com:

Josh Sugarmann, founder and executive director of the Violence Policy Center, laid out this strategy of misdirection and obfuscation in a
1988 report on “Assault Weapons and Accessories in America.” Sugarmann observed that “the weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”

He added that because “few people can envision a practical use for these guns,” the public should be more inclined to support a ban on “assault weapons” than a ban on handguns. While handguns are by far the most common kind of firearm used to commit crimes, they are also the most popular choice for self-defense. Proscribing “assault weapons” therefore sounds more reasonable.

Sugarmann’s predictions fell flat. The market for semi-automatic rifles grew and grew. The more the left attempted to ban them, the more popular they became. Much of the popularity came from a growing resistance to the “Deep State” as the people became dissatisfied with the disconnect between what politicians did and what they said. The Second Amendment gained vocal and organized supporters. A ten-year failed federal “Assault Weapon” ban was not renewed. A super majority of states reformed their gun laws, removing more and more infringements. The Supreme Court affirmed the Second Amendment meant what it said. At present, over half of the United States do not require a permit to carry a loaded handgun, openly or concealed.

A minority of historically repressive states with hard-left governments are resisting this trend. They include California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. Vermont, Colorado, and Washington State are recent additions. They are working to ban the most effective militia weapons commonly available in the United States. Weapons which are seldom used in crime. Their laughable “reason” is semi-automatic rifles with standard capacity magazines are used in the rare mass murder when, in fact, pistols are used more commonly in mass murder. Judge Benitez, in his classic opinion on the California ban on “Assault Weapons,” says it very well:

Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment. Good for both home and battle, the AR-15 is the kind of versatile gun that lies at the intersection of the kinds of firearms protected under District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) and United States v Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939).

Leftist politicians in a few states insist on banning the most effective militia weapons. Activists openly state they do not trust the people with “military” weapons. The shade of Chairman Mao would approve.

© 10.19.2023 by Dean Weingarten, "AmmoLand".

Electric Sheep.

Electric Sheep is a distributed computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a screensaver. Get some!

OR... you can go to this...

Electric Sheep, is a collaborative abstract artwork founded by Scott Draves. It's run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on almost anything. When these computers "sleep", the Electric Sheep comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience. The Electric Sheep are a free and open source service. The Gold Sheep are an HD premium version. Learn more and sign up. You can design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool. The result is a collective "android dream", blending man and machine with code to create an artificial lifeform. Learn more about it.

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