Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Congress, in a Five-Hour Hearing, Demands Tech CEOs Censor the Internet Even More Aggressively

Over the course of five-plus hours on Thursday, a House Committee along with two subcommittees badgered three tech CEOs, repeatedly demanding that they censor more political content from their platforms and vowing legislative retaliation if they fail to comply. The hearing — convened by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Chair Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of its Subcommittees, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) — was one of the most stunning displays of the growing authoritarian effort in Congress to commandeer the control which these companies wield over political discourse for their own political interests and purposes.

As I noted when I reported last month on the scheduling of this hearing, this was “the third time in less than five months that the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms.” The bulk of Thursday’s lengthy hearing consisted of one Democratic member after the next complaining that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have failed in their duties to censor political voices and ideological content that these elected officials regard as adversarial or harmful, accompanied by threats that legislative punishment (including possible revocation of Section 230 immunity) is imminent in order to force compliance (Section 230 is the provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that shields internet companies from liability for content posted by their users).

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BIDEN SPOKESPERSON JEN PSAKI WORKED FOR ISRAELI SPY FIRM

President Joe Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki worked for an Israeli firm accused of involvement in surveillance of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation.

Psaki’s public financial disclosures show that she earned at least $5,000 as a “crisis communications consultant” for AnyVision.

The disclosure forms for executive branch officials can be requested from the White House. Psaki’s disclosure obtained by The Electronic Intifada is included below this article.

The exact date of the work is not specified, but it occurred between the time Psaki left the Obama administration in 2017 and her new role in the Biden White House.

Psaki has operated a communications firm called Evergreen Consulting since a month after President Barack Obama left office.

This covers the period when AnyVision faced a public relations crisis over its alleged complicity in Israel’s abuses of Palestinian rights.

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Tennessee Considers Bill to Stop Businesses from Discriminating Against Patrons Without Masks or Vaccinations

A group of legislators in Tennessee have introduced a bill which would bar businesses from discrimination against individuals who choose not to wear a mask or get a Covid vaccination.

The Medical Non-Discrimination Business and Consumer Act (SB 0320 / HB 0794) would give the freedom of medical choice to individuals who make the personal decision to not wear a mask in public or get a potentially harmful and experimental mRNA-altering covid shot.

According to the bill’s summary, wearing a mask or getting any kind of medical treatment should be treated like any other characteristic pertaining to discrimination against an equal access to public life, such as race, sex, or religious belief.

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USA Today Fires ‘Race And Inclusion Editor’ After Falsely Blaming Boulder Shooting To White Supremacy

USA TODAY Sports’ race and inclusion editor Hemal Jhaveri announced Friday she was fired after falsely saying an “angry white man” was responsible for Monday’s mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado.

“[I]t’s always an angry white man. Always,” Jhaveri said Monday evening before police revealed the shooter was 21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, a migrant from Syria.

Jhaveri said in a Medium post on Friday that her tweet was a “dashed off over-generalization” after pictures of the shooter being arrested surfaced online. 

“It was a careless error of judgment, sent at a heated time, that doesn’t represent my commitment to racial equality,” Jhaveri said. “I regret sending it. I apologized and deleted the tweet.”

Despite deleting the tweet and apologizing, Jhaveri said USA TODAY relieved her of her position as a race and inclusion editor by Tuesday evening. She suggested she was fired because she issued tweets “publicly naming whiteness as a defining problem.”

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Yet Again, The Democrats Fall Back On Their Racist ‘Soft Bigotry Of Low Expectations’

After “Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed the Republican-backed ‘Election Integrity Act of 2021,’ or SB 202, into law,” Democrats collapsed into a furious spiral of outrage.

Elizabeth Warren described SB 202 as a “despicable voter suppression bill,” which will “take Georgia back to Jim Crow.” MSNBC’s Joy Reid claimed that the “Georgia Jim Crow law” would suppress Democratic votes, while DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison argued that the “GOP is hellbent on ushering in Jim Crow 2.0.”

Firstly, it’s important to recognize that the Election Integrity Act of 2021 is not like Jim Crow. In fact, it’s nothing like Jim Crow, the laws imposed by Democrats in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which mandated the complete racial segregation of Southern states.

Beyond the undeniable historical fact that arguing that this bill is the “new Jim Crow” is an overwrought and intellectually offensive act of partisan hyperbole, it’s even more important to understand the foundation of  bigotry on which the Democrats’ routine presumption of racism is built.

The most impactful change at the center of Georgia’s Election Integrity Act is that the state will now require that voters provide valid identification — in the form of a driver’s license or other state-recognized documentation — before they are able to cast their mail-in-ballot. Given that we require identification for a wide array of activities — such as driving a car, boarding a plane, or purchasing a firearm — the notion that identification is also required to vote is as reasonable an expectation as is possible.

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