Biden Administration Prepares Way For Banks To Refuse Service To Democrats’ Enemies

Amongst the record-breaking number of executive actions taken by President Joe Biden was one related to a little-known, frightening Obama-era program called Operation Choke Point. The program, dubbed so under former Attorney General Eric Holder, uses the power of the federal government to target legal yet leftist-disfavored businesses. These include gun sellers, pawnshops, and short-term money lenders.

The Trump administration did its best to end this blatantly unconstitutional program that sought to discriminate against legal industries. In 2017, the Justice Department declared the program “formally over.” At the end of Trump’s term, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency established the Fair Access rule to solidify its culmination.

But on Jan. 28, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency under President Biden announced it would pause the Trump-era rule intended to prevent another Operation Choke Point from happening again.

Keep reading

Democrats’ SAFE TECH Act Could ‘Destroy Most of the Open Web’

A newly-proposed change to Section 230 would introduce legal liability for online platforms and forums for third-party speech. It is being suggested as a way of combating alleged racial and social online injustices. According to critics, however, the bill is ill-conceived and has the potential to transform large parts of the internet for the worse and empower powerful players against smaller competitors.

Section 230 has become a hot topic in the US in recent years. Under this law, which “defined how the Internet works”, platforms adopting a hands-off approach to content moderation cannot be held reliable for harmful or illegal third-party content hosted by them. The protections under the law do not extend to sites which filter users’ submissions and curate content featured on the page. As the Washington Post recounts, the Section was created in the wake of two lawsuits in the 1990s – against Prodigy Services and against CompuServe – coming to similar conclusions.

The provision has come under criticism from both Democratic and Republican legislators, albeit for different reasons. The goal of Republicans, including former president Trump, was to address selective political censorship which has been repeatedly alleged against Silicon Valley online platforms. For example, in December last year, Trump attempted to use his veto power over a proposed defence bill as leverage against the Congress to outright repeal Section 230. 

On the other hand, critics of the law among the Democrats have been blaming social media platforms for being reluctant or slow to remove content deemed as harmful, from hostile communication perceived as harassment to the spread of unreliable information. 

Keep reading

Legacy media protects Democrats by omission

We were told, if Joe Biden was elected president everything would get “back to normal.” But the media is doing exactly the same thing to the American people, but now it’s through the looking glass.

Instead of promoting hoaxes, single-sourced stories that end up being false, approaching White House press briefings as combat, while seeding the daily news with tales of how awful and miserable everything is, in protecting the Biden administration, the media is now doing the opposite. The goal is the same, however: manipulating and conning the American people with misinformation. 

Now we are subjected to the media lying by omission. They shush when the Biden administration tells them to shush. They approach White House press briefings as though they’re seeing high school chums for the first time in 10 years. The most noticeable things missing are the fake stories meant to harm the ability of the president to govern.

Keep reading

California Congresswoman Wants a Truth Commission—Like a Good Little Leftist Authoritarian

Jacobs compared what happened at the Capitol on January 6 to genocides in Rwanda and Burma and said believes white supremacy is a huge problem. For groups with this explicit ideology, there are 124 in the entire country tracked by the SPLC. Being that it is the SPLC, this is likely an overestimate and indicates a few thousand closely followed members. There are also no explicit links between that ideology and the rioters at the Capitol, other than in the Democrats’ heads. President Trump expanded his minority vote in 2020, so the link to “Trumpism” is also pretty off base.

By contrast, the Anti-Defamation League tracked over 2,100 crimes related to anti-Semitism in the United States last year, the highest since they began tracking in 1979. The Anti-Semite of the Year for 2019, Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee with Jacobs. The president from her party is snubbing Israel. The entire party has an anti-Semitism problem. Maybe she ought to clean her own house first.

But Jacobs is as determined as Stelter to remove far-right-wing media from the airwaves. Jacobs praised him for stating that the “Big Lie,” a genuinely offensive term to explain the perception some had of voter fraud, was fed by it. I would encourage her to read the recent expose in Time, not because it excuses what happened. Instead, it explains why so many Americans felt something was wrong with the election. Even the author said President Trump was correct, in a way, because there was “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes.”

Keep reading

COVID-19 relief bill embraced by Democrats will cause billions of dollars in cuts to critical programs such as Medicare

Under the Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, bills that add to the national debt cause automatic cuts to programs such as Medicare.

Federal aid programs for farmers, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, Medicare, the Social Services Block Grant Program, and more would be subject to devastating cuts. 

Social Security and low-income programs such as food stamps would be exempt from cuts.

To prevent budget cuts, Democrats need to get 60 votes in the Senate, which would require the support of 10 Republicans. 

However, Democrats are planning to use a process known as budget reconciliation, which would allow them to pass the COVID-19 relief bill without 60 votes in the Senate. 

“The cuts would be huge,” said Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told NBC. “It’s a critical issue, which, at some point, is going to have to be dealt with.”

Keep reading