Tag: democrats

These Senators Want the Federal Government To Verify Your Age Online

Despite their many disagreements, Republicans and Democrats have developed a common affinity for social media regulation, largely relying on the disputed assumption that platforms like Instagram and TikTok severely degrade children’s mental health. The latest regulatory proposal in Congress is the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, sponsored by a bipartisan group of four senators: Sens. Brian Schatz (D–Hawaii), Tom Cotton (R–Ark.), Chris Murphy (D–Conn.), and Katie Britt (R–Ala.).

The bill features several flawed policies, drawing from recent state and federal social media proposals. It would require social media platforms to verify the age of every would-be user. Platforms could allow the unverified to view content, but not to interact with it or with other users. After providing age verification to register an account, underage teens would need proof of parental consent. Those under 13 years old would be completely barred from registering accounts.

The bill does propose one novel—and potentially dangerous—innovation. It would establish a “pilot program” for a federally run verification system. This system would ascertain social media users’ age and, for teen users, confirm parental consent.

Age verification mandates, which invariably entail intrusive data gathering, threaten user data privacy and security. They also violate the individual’s right to speak freely and anonymously online. Although the bill’s authors sought to mitigate the risks their implementation would pose to users, they largely failed. Such risks are inextricable from the process of age verification itself. The bill proposes a legal safe harbor for social media platforms that choose to use the pilot program. To avoid even the appearance of noncompliance, many platforms will do just that.

The proposed pilot program would require would-be social media users to submit documentation to the Department of Commerce in order to verify their age. In return, the pilot program would provide a “credential” to be submitted to social media platforms. Users would verify parental consent by the same process. To administer the program, the government would necessarily obtain and store troves of personal data on American social media users—to prove regulatory compliance, if nothing else.

To protect user privacy, the bill directs Commerce to “keep no records of the social media platforms where users have verified their identity.” It would also forbid the agency from sharing user data with platforms or law enforcement without user consent, a court order, or a program-specific fraud or oversight investigation.

Nonetheless, the bill would require users to register personal information with state authorities simply to speak online. Government agencies, under a legal pretext, could retrieve from social media platforms the records necessary to identify user accounts. Democrats have long been skeptical of the federal government’s data abuses, but both parties—including newly skeptical Republicans—ought to understand these risks.

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Dem Megadonor Funding Trump Rape Lawsuit Visited Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Pedophile Island’

A Democratic megadonor who is helping bankroll a rape and defamation lawsuit against former president Donald Trump visited the private Caribbean island of Jeffrey Epstein years after Epstein registered as a sex offender for soliciting underage girls.

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman visited Epstein’s compound in the Virgin Islands in 2014, known as “Pedophile Island” because he allegedly housed young girls there. Hoffman may have also stayed overnight at Epstein’s New York City residence in December 2014, according to the Wall Street Journal. Those visits came years after it was publicly revealed that Epstein pleaded guilty on charges that he solicited sex from underage girls. Hoffman has been funding former journalist E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against Trump since 2020.

“It gnaws at me that, by lending my association, I helped his reputation, and thus delayed justice for his survivors,” Hoffman told the Journal. It’s not the first time Hoffman has come under fire for meeting Epstein. He apologized after Epstein’s death in 2019 after revelations that he hosted Epstein at a dinner in 2015. Hoffman did not disclose his earlier encounters with the registered sex offender.

Hoffman is one of the Democratic party’s largest donors. He contributed $1.5 million in 2020 to a super PAC supporting President Joe Biden and has given tens of millions more to other Democratic groups. He has also funded several controversial political operations on behalf of the Democratic party. In 2017, he funded a tech firm that created fake online personas to pressure conservatives not to vote in the Alabama special election. He has funded ACRONYM, the group behind a network of partisan news sites that are disguised to look like legitimate local news organizations.

He donated $2 million to Integrity First for America, a legal advocacy group that gave $620,000 to a legal defense fund for Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm behind the infamous Steele dossier, which falsely accused the Trump campaign of colluding with Russia.

Hoffman, who serves on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board, began funding the Trump lawsuit in 2020. He backed the lawsuit through one of his nonprofits, American Future Republic, court filings revealed.

Hoffman says he supports the lawsuit because of “Trump’s hostility towards women.”

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Democratic lawmakers caught on hot mic mocking parental rights as ‘garbage,’ ‘stupid’

Two Democratic lawmakers in Virginia were caught on hot mic last week mocking parental rights as “garbage,” “crap,” and “stupid,” according to two recordings posted on social media by the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC).

On the recordings, which were taken at a Friday meet-and-greet at Christopher Newport University, state Sen. Monty Mason and state Del. Shelly Simonds can be heard ripping Republicans over S.B. 1515, a bill that required pornography websites to verify a user’s age to be at least 18 before allowing access to its content.

They also slammed an amendment to the bill proposed by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin that would have required children to get permission from parents to set up social media accounts and use websites that collect user data, such as online shopping sites. The bill passed the state legislature, but Youngkin’s amendment was rejected.

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RFK Jr. Explains How Democratic Party Is Already “Rigging” 2024 Race

Alternative Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has accused the Democratic Party of “rigging” the primary system to ensure Joe Biden stands a better chance by refusing to hold debates and changing the first primary vote to South Carolina, where Biden is popular, rather than New Hampshire.

Speaking to Breitbart, RFK Jr. noted “The DNC, at this point, has taken the official position that there will be no debate, and I think that’s unfortunate… I think what the DNC did to New Hampshire is also unfortunate.”

“President Biden didn’t do well there [New Hampshire]; he came in fifth. So they took New Hampshire, and they kicked it out of first place. And now they’re gonna say — they’re saying that they’re going to completely remove the delegates from New Hampshire, and that, we should be at this point in history,” RFK Jr. continued.

He added that New Hampshire has always been the first state to vote in primaries because it is a “gold standard” of election integrity and “an exemplar for American democracy.”

“It’s very cheap to campaign in. And it has the largest independent block in the country. And people [don’t] make their minds up until they see the candidates again and again and again, and they shake the candidate’s hands five times before deciding who to vote for,” Kennedy Jr. continued.

“They vet these candidates for the whole country, they vet them like you would get vetted if you were running for a city council seat,” he counted, adding “You have to go in, and handshake people and nail salons and diners, and you get grilled. These candidates get grilled by an 80-year-old woman who reads The Economist and reads the Financial Times every day.”

“New Hampshire is the one place where you got to do retail politics, you cannot escape,” he further asserted.

“When you have so many Americans who are concerned about election integrity, we should be doing everything we can in our party to show that, you know, this is not rigged, rigged system. That it is actually democracy… and they’re [the DNC] doing kind of the opposite,” Kennedy Jr. added.

“There’s too many Americans who already think that the whole system is rigged against them. And this is confirmation of that. And I think that’s troubling,” he further emphasised.

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Video shows suspect accused of operating secret Chinese police stations mingling with Schumer, Adams

One of the two men accused by federal prosecutors of running a secret Chinese police station in New York City purportedly has been captured on video attending an event alongside two prominent Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and New York City Mayor Eric Adams. 

Video recorded on March 18 appears to show Lu Jianwang standing alongside Adams most recently at an event where Schumer also spoke. Lu was arrested last week and charged with conspiring to act as an agent of China’s government, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. 

In a statement, Adams’ office told Fox News that the mayor’s attendance at an event is either to show support for a local community or the city and does not signal any kind of endorsement. 

A spokesperson for Adams also said he does not know Lu. 

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Democrats Threaten Matt Taibbi With Jail Time Over Twitter Files Testimony

Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat, is the delegate from the Virgin Islands to the U.S. Congress. Last month, when independent writers Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, she described them as “so-called journalists” and sought to undermine their testimony about government pressure to restrict speech on Twitter.

She has now gone much further.

Plaskett recently sent a letter to Taibbi accusing him of perjury and suggesting that he could face up to five years in jail. The letter was obtained by Lee Fang, a writer who works with Taibbi and publishes on Substack. In it, Plaskett notes that providing false testimony to Congress “is punishable by up to five years imprisonment.”

The congresswoman’s basis for accusing Taibbi of perjury is a handful of errors that he made during the publication of the Twitter Files. These mistakes caught the attention of MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan, who skewered Taibbi in an interview and suggested the entire Twitter Files project rested upon a house of cards.

It is true that Taibbi made some errors: In one of his tweets about the web of organizations engaged in identifying so-called misinformation on Twitter, he confused CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—an organ of the federal government—with CIS, the Center for Internet Security—a nonprofit. Hasan has never sufficiently explained why this mistake would render the Twitter Files obsolete; in fact, both organizations participated in the Election Integrity Partnership, a Stanford University project that sought to monitor the election-related discourse on social media. Taibbi pointed out this fact in a tweet admitting to the mistake.

Regardless, it is obviously not the case that Taibbi committed perjury. Plaskett’s letter describes the CISA/CIS mistake as an “intentional” one; this is simply false. Taibbi did not willfully mischaracterize the two organizations; when he rewrote “CIS” as “CISA,” he honestly thought the tweet in question had referred to the government agency rather than the nonprofit.

Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), described Plaskett’s letter as shocking.

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NH Dems Defend Graphic Sex Content, Attack ‘Dangerous’ Parents in House Debate

Parents do not have the right to know their middle school children have access to graphic novels that depict children engaged in sex acts and include links to gay dating apps, nor are they allowed to know teachers are urging kindergartners to draw themselves naked.

That was the case New Hampshire Democrats made as they opposed GOP legislation expanding parents’ rights over their kids’ public school experience.

The battle over the Parents’ Bill of Rights took center stage Tuesday with a packed Representatives Hall for the House Education Committee hearing on SB 272. The Senate passed the bill along party lines last month.

A similar House bill sponsored by House Speaker Sherman Packard, HB 10, died in the closely split legislature this year. Packard said the Senate version needs to pass to give parents the final say over their children’s education.

“Parents are responsible for the upbringing of their own children. We support the parents’ right to know what is happening to their child in school. These are our children, not the state’s or the school district’s,” Packard said.

Emotions ran high during several hours of testimony, as Democrats and left-leaning media outlets have characterized the bill as targeting LGBT students.

The bill is designed to address situations like the one in the Manchester school system in which a mother requested information after hearing rumors her child was identifying as a different gender at school. The Manchester district’s policy is to keep that information secret from parents. The mother was forced to sue, and Hillsborough Superior Court Judge Amy Messer upheld the district’s policy directing teachers and staff not to fully and accurately inform parents about their children’s behavior.

Democrats have responded by arguing parents are simply too dangerous to be given the same information about their children that teachers, students, and school staff have.

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Democrats join Patriotic Millionaires group to call for 90% tax on income above $100 million

Agroup of Democratic lawmakers and the Patriotic Millionaires, an organization of high-income and high net worth individuals favoring higher taxes on the wealthy, are calling on Congress to pass a 90% income tax on incomes above $100 million as fears of a recession are growing. 

Abigail Disney, a documentary filmmaker who is the granddaughter of Roy Disney, cofounder of The Walt Disney Company, joined the lawmakers to call for higher taxes on “extremely high income.”

“My grandfather paid a 90% marginal tax rate on his income, and he amassed plenty of wealth in the process,” she said at a news conference on Tuesday. “That means rates of up to 90% on incomes over $100 million.”

The Patriotic Millionaires are also advocating taxing “all income over $1 million the same regardless of how it is generated, including capital gains income and inheritance income,” according to a press release about the organization’s latest tax proposal. 

California Democratic Rep. Jimmy Gomez said his tax reform proposal, which Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders is sponsoring in the Senate, would raise estate tax or “death tax” rates. The Republicans implemented a phase-out of the estate tax.

“Our bill will help narrow the wealth gap and raise much needed revenue for investment in the benefits that help working families and our constituents who aren’t in line to inherit a fortune,” he said.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Progressive Caucus, is a cosponsor of the Gomez legislation.

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Misleadership in the Bronx: AOC, the Fraud Squad, Military Recruiters and U.S. Imperialism

On Monday March 20th 2023, U.S. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Adriano Espaillat co-hosted a “Student Services Fair” at Renaissance High School for Musical Theater and the Arts in the Bronx. As the official flier indicates, there was a large military presence . Alarmed that the two U.S. politicians, especially one who is a self-described “democratic socialist” and affiliate of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), were hosting this career fair, the Bronx Anti-War Coalition organized a counter-recruitment protest.

‘The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World Today’

The official flier for the event listed seven representatives that would headline the fair. Six of them represented branches of the military. Protestors observed dozens of uniformed military personnel walk into the fair through the main entrance, while AOC snuck in and out through back doors. She refused to address her constituents’ questions and instead sent a U.S. Marine colonel outside to address us. The military officer bragged about his time training Saudi troops and the countries he and his government have invaded.

The “duck test” is a form of abductive reasoning, usually expressed as “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck.” The test implies that a person can identify an unknown subject by observing that subject’s habitual characteristics. It is used to counter abstruse arguments that something is not what it appears to be. This same reasoning can be applied here to deduce that this “student services fair” was in fact a military recruitment fair. Yet somehow, AOC continues to deny that the military played a major role at this event.

Dr. Martin Luther King was crystal clear on this question in 1967 , exactly a year before the U.S government assassinated him: “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.” AOC herself has been on record speaking out against predatory military recruitment tactics targeting our youth. Why then did she decide to host a fair giving these predators access to disenfranchised high school students? The Bronx Anti-War Coalition understands that anytime and anywhere we see military enlistment officers or representatives of the U.S. service academies near our youth, we must confront them and chase them out of our communities.

After her security detail briskly whisked her through a backdoor clear of our protest, she decided to respond to us via instagram . Like other U.S. politicians who practice duplicity, she has a true gift for evasion. She smeared and lied about us in a nine minutes and thirty second video while doubling down on why she has a “responsibility” to inform Bronx youth about U.S. military enlistment “opportunities.” Did it not occur to AOC and her inner-circle to denounce the genocidaires in her monologue? Too busy victimizing herself, at no point did the Congresswoman address the reasons we were outside protesting: 1) to defend the multinational, working-class youth being used as cannon fodder to fight imperialist wars, 2) to stand for the Black, Indigenous and Latinx soldiers murdered on U.S. military bases, such as Abdul Latifu, Vanessa Guillén, Elder Fernandes, and Ana Fernanda Basaldua Ruiz, among hundreds of others, and 3) to give voice to the millions of victims in the Global South targeted and murdered by U.S. sanctions, drone attacks and unprovoked invasions.

This article explores why the anti-war movement has a responsibility to continue to confront AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, Bernie Sanders and any faux leftist professional politician and sheepdog who go along with the bipartisan pro-imperialist and pro-war status quo.

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Democrats call for Garland to drop charges against Assange

A group of Democrats sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday urging him to drop the charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over his publishing of classified materials.

Assange faces 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.

The Democrats pressing Garland on the issue are led by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Mich. and also include Reps. Jamaal Bowman (N.Y.), Cori Bush (Mo.), Greg Casar (Texas), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.).

They wrote that Assange’s charges “pose a grave and unprecedented threat” to journalism practices and the First Amendment.

“Press freedom, civil liberty, and human rights groups have been emphatic that the charges against Mr. Assange pose a grave and unprecedented threat to everyday, constitutionally protected journalistic activity, and that a conviction would represent a landmark setback for the First Amendment,” they wrote in the letter.

The group pointed to a joint statement issued by major news organizations from around the world, including The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde and Der Spiegel, that called on the United States to drop the charges against Assange.

At the time, the media outlets said Assange’s leaks exposed “corruption, diplomatic scandals and spy affairs on an international scale.” 

“This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press,” the outlets said.

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