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CNN Blasted for Claiming Americans Got ‘$100-A-Month Raise’ Over Slightly Lower Gas Prices
CNN faced intense backlash online Friday after publishing a report that suggested Americans should view a slight dip in gas prices as a “$100-a-month raise” or a “$100-a-month tax cut.”
The national average price of gasoline was $2.38 per gallon when President Joe Biden assumed office, according to the Energy Information Administration, and increased to $3.53 per gallon by the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, The Daily Wire reported. Prices surpassed $5.00 per gallon in early June before subsiding to $3.92 per gallon as of Friday, according to AAA.
CNN Business senior writer Chris Isidore lauded the decline in gas prices without mentioning that costs remain highly elevated from the level seen less than two years ago.
“Next time you stop at a gas station, think of it as a $100-a-month tax cut. Or a maybe $100-a-month raise,” Isidore wrote. “The steady drop in gas prices over the last few months has turned into an unexpected form of economic stimulus, coming at a time when the Federal Reserve is trying to cool the economy and battle rising prices with higher interest rates.”
New Research Reveals Tiktok, Instagram And Meta Can Monitor Keystrokes, Seize Passwords And Credit Card Information
Recent research has revealed that social media platforms Tiktok, Instagram, and Meta, can pry on users’ personal information when it is entered into the in-app browser.
Felix Krause, a software engineer, and security researcher looked into the coding built into Tiktok, the Chinese-produced app’s infrastructure, which led to his shocking revelation.
Users who click on links on Tiktok are led to a native in-app browser produced by Tiktok, and not default browsers like Safari or Google Chrome.
The JavaScript code in Tiktok’s in-app browser can allow the company to monitor every keystroke. This means the social media company could access every action taken on the screen, even passwords or credit card information.
Krause explained that while Tiktok allegedly does not have the feature enabled at this moment, the infrastructure is in place. “Installing a keylogger is obviously a huge thing… according to TikTok it’s disabled at the moment. The problem is they do have the infrastructure and the systems in place to be able to track all these keystrokes… that on its own is a huge problem.”
Fairfax County Schools Knew of Counselor’s Multiple Pedo Arrests, Failed to Act for 2 Years, Records Show
Fairfax County Public Schools were notified by police that middle school counselor Darren Thornton had been arrested not once, but twice on crimes of pedophilia and still failed to fire the convicted sex offender, granting him access to children for nearly two years after his initial arrest. In a public statement made this week, the left-wing school district pled ignorance of Thornton’s criminal history, but law enforcement has confirmed that school officials were notified of his arrests when they happened.
As National File reported yesterday, Darren Thornton, a now-former counselor at Fairfax County’s Glasgow Middle School, was arrested shortly after he was hired in November of 2020 and charged with soliciting a child for sex. Thornton was convicted of the felony pedophilia charge in March of this year and forced to register as a sex offender. He was also handed a 5-year suspended prison sentence.
Shortly after his conviction, Thornton was arrested once more, on June 13th, in a pervert round-up that was widely reported by local media.
According to the Chesterfield County Police Department, which arrested Thornton both in 2020 and 2022, Fairfax County Public Schools were promptly notified of both of his arrests, the first of which took place just weeks after he was hired by the school district.
Additionally, public records pertaining to Thornton back up the police’s assertion and prove that Fairfax County was indeed notified of his pedophilia and criminality, yet apparently failed to act.
Paul Pelosi-Linked Business Has Millions in PPP Loans Forgiven
The Paycheck Protection Program created to help small businesses survive the pandemic by doling out loans to help them retain employees has been a bonanza for companies linked to the rich and famous, according to new reports.
The website ProPublica has amassed a searchable database of the loans, which media outlets have been exploring to find out how many rich recipients will never have to pay back a dime.
The trick is to know the corporate names of businesses in which the rich and famous either operate or have a share in.
Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has an 8.1 percent share in a company called EDI Associates, according to the U.K. Daily Mail.
The restaurant company received loans of more than $1.7 million from the federal government, which won’t have to be repaid, the Daily Mail reported.
The University of Massachusetts Lowell Bans Students From Sending or Viewing “offensive” Material Online
Most of the internet is apparently off-limits for students at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
The school’s Acceptable Use Policy, which governs the use of computing and networking resources, prohibits students from intentionally transmitting, communicating or accessing “offensive” material. Every month, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression highlights a university policy that hinders students’ free expression. Since most online content could be called offensive by someone, the policy has earned the dubious honor of FIRE’s August Speech Code of the Month.
The Supreme Court has explicitly held, time and time again, that speech cannot be restricted by the government merely because it offends others. In Texas v. Johnson (1989), the Court held that burning the American flag was protected speech, explaining: “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”
In spite of such clear precedent, colleges and universities routinely ban offensive speech in campus speech codes, especially in IT policies. Whether a person is burning a flag at a protest or advocating for (or against) flag burning on Twitter, a ban on “offensive” speech calls for impermissible viewpoint discrimination.
UMass Lowell couldn’t possibly take action every time someone views or retweets something subjectively offensive over university wifi — every single student, and probably every professor, would be on trial. But a policy like this makes it all too easy for the university to crack down on select, disfavored speech.
New York Times hires the reporter who brought Steele dossier to BuzzFeed to cover ‘right-wing media’
The New York Times announced on August 18 that Ken Bensinger is joining its politics desk and will report on right-wing media for the section’s so-called “democracy team.” Bensinger previously worked for BuzzFeed, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
David Halbfinger, the Times’ politics editor, suggested in the announcement that Bensinger is well prepared to report on right-wing media. His recent work on the Oath Keepers (an anti-statist militia group, some of whose members were present at the January 6, 2021, Capitol protests) and on the Gov. Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping case in Michigan were cited as evidence of the reporter’s understanding of “the rising threat of armed militant groups,” which Halbfinger intimated is relevant to the reporter’s new beat.
In the announcement, Halbfinger omitted any mention of Bensinger’s most impactful work.
Bensinger was the individual responsible for bringing the Steele dossier to BuzzFeed, which the organization released on January 10, 2017.
The New Thought Police: How the Illiberal Left Use Critical Theory to Usher in Authoritarianism
When Dave Chappelle’s sold-out comedy show was recently canceled by First Avenue theater, we saw some strange rhetoric from the online mob that orchestrated the cancellation. The petition by these 128 activists stated that Chappelle has “a record of being dangerous to trans people” and his “actions uphold a violent heteronormative culture.”
This curious newspeak is borrowed from the language of Critical Theory, a supposed scholarly field that has matured over the past decade. While you may be familiar with Critical Race Theory, another main category is Queer Theory. This is where the First Avenue activists got their inspiration and rationalization for their actions.
Critical Theory, rooted in postmodernism, has produced a radical political sect that can be called the Illiberal Left. Highly visible on some college campuses (famously at Evergreen College in 2017), they seek to stamp out speech that counters their idea of absolute truth. They are modern-day thought police with the power of social media.
A profound examination of Critical Theory is found in the book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody. It dismantles the flimsy assumptions of Theory and separates the noble idea of social justice from the quasi-religious zealotry of Social Justice.
Wokeness is a more familiar term alluding to the new speech police and victimization movement. To resist this ideology, it helps to understand the Critical Theory underpinnings which explicitly reject reason and science to push the idea that truth comes from identity or “lived experience.”
Indeed, the Illiberal Left denies classic liberal tenets such as individuality and universal truth developed by Enlightenment thought. Ironically, our modern systems of reason and science stemming from Enlightenment rationalism give them the equal rights enshrined in law which permit their vociferousness.
Resurfaced Documentary Uncovers Accusations of Child Abuse Against Former Mormon President Gordon B. Hinckley
The documentary The True Story of Mormon President Gordon B. Hinckley and its accusations against Mormon Church leadership has not been seen by the public in almost 30 years — until now.
In late May, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office announced an investigation into “ritualized child sexual abuse” in 3 different Utah counties. Following that announcement, The Last American Vagabond (TLAV) produced a series of 5 articles focused on the sheriff’s investigation, as well as claims of child sexual abuse in Utah at large, and within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).
In our 5th report we investigated the history of claims of child abuse within the Mormon Church. From the Pace Memo to Paperdolls, accusations of various church members and officials participating in and/or covering up organized sexual abuse of children are not hard to find in LDS history.
On the heels of our reporting on these historical accusations, The Associated Press dropped a bombshell of an investigation which is causing headaches for the LDS. Their reporting shows that church leadership used their “help line” to cover up reports of pedophilia.
The AP obtained almost 12,000 pages of previously sealed records from a child sex abuse lawsuit against the Mormon Church in West Virginia. These documents and testimony from victims make it clear that the so-called help line can “easily be misused by church leaders to divert abuse accusations away from law enforcement and instead to church attorneys who may bury the problem, leaving victims in harm’s way.”
The war on some drugs…
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