Biden Administration Launches Task Force on Chinese Censorship, Drawing Criticism for Hypocrisy in Domestic Free Speech Policies

The Biden-Harris administration on has revealed it was setting up an action group to “monitor and address the effects” of any censorship or intimidation of Americans by China.

Signed by President Joe Biden, the memorandum addressed heads of executive departments and agencies, while the task force is to be led by the assistant to the president for National Security Affairs and the director of the National Economic Council.

This move comes after the administration spent the past four years doubling and tripling down on policies encouraging unprecedented censorship at home and being sued and investigated for colluding (through pressure via third parties) with social platforms and other tech companies to do its (unconstitutional) bidding.

Hypocrisy this may be, but that might be the least of the problems with this sudden spur of activity by an administration that is weeks away from exiting, stage left.

If we choose to forget that many of the censorship and surveillance mechanisms that permeated the soon-to-be former administration’s activities were regularly mentioned by critics as “inspired” by those used by China’s authorities, the question remains: why establish an entirely new “task force” and why now?

The departments and agencies that will be represented at assistant secretary or above level include the departments of state, defense, treasury, commerce, agriculture, education, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the FBI, the director of National Intelligence, etc. – plus, “other agencies and offices as the President may, from time to time, designate.”

Opponents of the Chinese authorities and their notorious brand of censorship welcome the move and believe it should be endorsed by the incoming Trump administration, but also – somehow – expanded to China itself.

Keep reading

Obama Just Accused Republicans of What Democrats Are Doing, and It’s Nothing Less Than Ominous

No one seems sure who first said it, maybe Joseph Goebbels, but in any case, it’s a tried-and-tested Alinskyite tactic: accuse your enemy of what you’re doing. Barack Obama is a practiced expert at this, and he gave a master class in it on Thursday at his Obama Foundation’s Orwellian-named Democracy Forum. 

With some notable and revealing difficulty in getting the words out, Obama accused the Republicans of doing everything that the Democrats have been doing for the past few years: rigging elections, weaponizing the justice system, and trying to ensure that they would remain in power on an indefinite basis. Whatever can be said of Barack Obama, the man certainly has a lot of chutzpah.

Using the fake and faintly southern-tinged accent that he often adopts when speaking about issues involving domestic politics, Obama said: “There are going to be times” — tahms — potentially when one side tries to stack the deck and lock in —” And here, Obama looked at his right-hand teleprompter and then, as if seeking relief, at his left-hand teleprompter, but finding no help there, looked down and, after an interminable, eons-long pause, began to stutter. 

The sainted hero of the left managed finally to say: “A…” And another pause. Obama finally sputtered back, saying: “A, a, a…permanent…” Another pause. “…grip on power, either by actively suppressing votes or politicizing the armed forces or using the judiciary, the criminal justice system, to go after opponents.”

Keep reading

The Fake Compassion of the Left

Their masters did not love them and planned to replace them with other peoples. 
—Renaud Camus, Ørop

The verses of the medieval Persian poet Saadi Shirazi, Bani Adam, or “Children of Adam,” are sewn into a carpet with golden thread and prominently displayed at the UN headquarters in New York. A gift from the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2005 in a gesture of ineffable irony, the poem’s sentiment of unity and compassion between all human beings was meant to convey the ostensible spirit of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the concept of the Dialogue among Civilizations, and the quest for a borderless world. A loose translation of the verses reads:

Bani Adam
All of the sons of Adam are part of one single bodyThey are of the same essence.When time afflicts us with painIn one part of the bodyAll the other parts feel it too.If you fail to feel the pain of othersYou do not deserve the name of man.

The poem has been interpreted by delegates at the UN and apparatchiks in many governments to justify the acceptance of illegal migrants by the hundreds of thousands or millions, in addition to the legal importation of multitudes from Third World countries. The citizens of Europe and North America have been told repeatedly, directly or indirectly, that they must not refuse those afflicted “with pain.” If they fail to heed “the pain of others,” they are fascists, far-right, inhuman.

This interpretation has ignored the pain of those who have seen their own countries transformed by mass immigration, which has increased crime, social division, fear, and economic immiseration. Their pain, in seeing the ways and usages of their country disrespected and destroyed, does not register with those who profess such love for the “children of Adam.” 

These verses may also be challenged and adapted by conservative thinkers and politicians to defend their own citizens from the destructive and conquering effect of interlopers from abroad exploiting the resources — economic, educational, medical, and cultural — of the host nations.

In fact, the solicitude for others affected by the majority of UN delegates and state actors is plainly counterfeit, a deceptive expression of ulterior motives involving calculations of profit, surreptitious political agendas, the inflaming of ancestral hatreds, the pursuit of global hegemony, and other invidious purposes and programs such as those venerable canards climate change, pandemic preparedness, and open borders.

Keep reading

PROJECTION: Obama Suddenly Concerned About Rigged Elections and Weaponizing Government Against Opponents

Obama is suddenly very concerned about what the party in power can do to rig elections and weaponize the government against perceived political enemies. What curious timing.

While speaking at the ‘Democracy Forum’ the former president talked about the dangers of extremism and polarization. Isn’t it strange how this is all just becoming a concern for him now?

Obama knows his party just got wiped out but he still doesn’t seem to understand why.

The Washington Examiner reports:

Obama scorns ‘doom loop’ of political extremism after Democrats’ election defeat

Former President Barack Obama criticized the political “doom loop” created by politicians who portray their opponents as “enemies to be vanquished” just weeks after he warned voters about now President-elect Donald Trump while campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris.

During his keynote address Thursday about the importance of pluralism at the Obama Foundation’s third Democracy Forum in Chicago, the former president reiterated his criticism of media companies for “playing to the extremes” and politicians who adopt “a maximalist position on almost every issue.”…

“Since total victory is impossible in a country politically split down the middle, the result is a doom loop of government gridlock, even greater polarization, wilder rhetoric, and a deepening conviction among partisans that the other side is breaking the rules and has rigged the game to tip it in their favor,” Obama told the crowd Thursday…

To that end, Obama underscored that pluralism is “not about holding hands and singing Kumbaya” but “about recognizing that any democratic power comes from forging alliances and building coalitions and making room in those coalitions, not only for the woke but also for the waking.”

Keep reading

NYC Mayor Eric Adams staffer tasked with ‘bridging cultural divides’ rips down hostage posters, allegedly assaults witness

A staffer from the office of Mayor Eric Adams who has been tasked with helping to “bridge cultural divides” with events in the Big Apple was caught on video ripping down Israeli hostage posters in New York and allegedly assaulting a witness to her actions. 

Nallah Sutherland, 25, who is a staffer in the Mayor’s Office of Special Projects and Community Events, was caught on video this month as she was riping down the hostage posters, per the New York Post. The video was posted earlier this month by the account Stop Antisemitism, which asked viewers to identify the girl in the video. 

The individual with the camera asked Sutherland why she was tearing up the posters, to which she did not respond verbally, but hit his phone in an attempt to stop the man from recording. The man then accused her of assault in response. 

“That’s assault actually. You know that, right?” the man tells Sutherland. She simply smiled and walked away after his comment. Sutherland reportedly only got a slap on the wrist for the incident. She had to take a “multicultural training” course and got a disciplinary memo, a source told the outlet. 

The New York City government website states that Sutherland’s team in the Mayor’s Office of Special Projects and Community Events “organizes, plans, and executes public or private events and special projects that embraces and rejoices in the extraordinary cultural richness and range of our City” and has a mission to “bridge cultural divides, cultivate enduring connections or strategic partnerships, and support key City initiatives that help provide a source of strength, unity, and resilience to New Yorkers across all communities within the five boroughs and beyond.”

Keep reading

Fuel Minister Liz Kendall, who axed £300 payment to pensioners, lives in £4million Notting Hill home with her banker partner – and their heating bill is paid by YOU

The Cabinet Minister who axed pensioners’ winter fuel payments has her own £350-a-month energy bills paid by the taxpayer – while she lives in a £4 million London mansion.

Liz Kendall has been branded a hypocrite for removing the payment for ten million pensioners while bills at her second home are being met from the public purse. 

The Work and Pensions Secretary’s main base is a four-bedroom property in Notting Hill, West London, which she shares with her partner, an Old Etonian investment banker. But she is allowed to claim costs for the second property she rents in her Leicester West constituency.

The most recent documents held by the Commons show she claimed a total of £3,810 in energy costs between April 2023 and July this year, with the largest monthly bills totalling £352. 

Ms Kendall’s decision to axe the annual winter fuel payment of between £100 and £300 for all but the poorest pensioners will force 100,000 people into poverty by 2027 according to her own department’s forecasts.

Last night, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage told The Mail on Sunday: ‘The hypocrisy of the Labour Government knows no bounds. I will not be claiming a penny in expenses for my heating.’

And Tory MP David Simmonds said: ‘This revelation will be a kick in the teeth for the 10 million pensioners facing choosing between heating and eating this Christmas because of Labour and Liz Kendall’s political choice to cut the winter fuel payment.

‘While Liz Kendall is living a life of luxury the country is facing real life consequences of Labour’s ill-thought-out decisions. In four short months this Labour Government have made it clear they do not have the British people’s best interests at heart.’

Keep reading

MSNBC Blasted For Article Sympathizing With Laken Riley’s Murderer: ‘These People Are Sick’

MSNBC is facing significant backlash yet again after publishing a sympathetic opinion piece on Jose Ibarra, the illegal immigrant who brutally murdered 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley in February.

The title of the article originally was “Laken Riley’s killer never stood a chance,” before the outlet edited the headline to “The guilt of Laken Riley’s killer was never in doubt.”

In a few excerpts of the article, MSNBC columnist Danny Cevallos wrote many troubling lines that stood out, in addition to his original title.

“Saving the judge from a pointless jury trial might have been Ibarra’s best chance at life with the possibility of parole… in Ibarra’s case, the judge cut him no breaks — jury or no jury.”

Or maybe his line that reads: “Sometimes defense counsel just gets handed a truly awful, unwinnable case.”

Soon after, journalist Kyle Becker posted on X, highlighting the distasteful and morally bankrupt opinion piece.

“MSNBC got *CAUGHT* trying to defend Laken Riley’s illegal alien murderer. Now, it has backtracked and changed its headline. Too late. We see you, MSNBC. We know this is who you are,” posted Becker on X.

The MSNBC article was released after a judge sentenced Ibarra to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Keep reading

Why do we only support mob-rule when our mob wins?

The internet and the streets are awash with US Democrat voters moaning about the tyranny they fear will be imposed upon them by Republican voters. As recently highlighted by Larken Rose, their hypocrisy has reached the level of absurdity. If they don’t like mob-rule, why do they keep voting for it?

“Representative democracy” is not democracy. Demokratia is power exercised directly by the people, not a tiny gaggle of oligarch serving toadies who claim to represent the people. “Representative democracy” is just another term for oligarchy.

In a real democracy the legislature, the executive and the judiciary are exclusively formed from or controlled by a random, rotating sortition of the people. The people design legislation, the people enact legislation and, most importantly, the people judge the practical application of statute and precedent law in courts formed and led by randomly selected juries.

In a democracy, the jury is sovereign with the united and annexed power to annul any and all legislation or ruling wherever statute or precedent law is found wanting in a jury-led trials. The legislature, the executive and the judiciary are wholly subservient to the people through trial by jury.

The jury’s only concern is justice. It makes no difference to a democratic jury what the legislature seeks, what the executive deems necessary or what instructions the judiciary tries to assert. Wherever and whenever a human being breaks the written law, but the jury finds them not guilty of any injustice, then the failure lies with the law, as it is written, not with the innocent accused. In such circumstances, any democratic jury can overrule extant statute and precedent in the interest of justice—annulment.

Despite the existence of Common Law jurisdictions, which technically allow juries to annul, on neither side of the Atlantic does anyone live in a democracy. Democracy is not the model of government we allow to persist. Whether we call it a constitutional monarchy, a supranational political union or constitutional federal republic, democracy is exercised nowhere.

Democracy is governance by trial by jury and we don’t need any form of government to establish a democracy. Any other political system, no matter how vociferously its proponents demand we call it a democracy, is not democracy.

Instead of democracy, which demands that we each take full responsibility for every aspect of our society and serve justice, we prefer representative democracy—oligarchy. We take responsibility for nothing and are the willing slaves of oligarchs who we passively allow to rule us unjustly under the guise of government.

Every four of five years we participate in anointment ceremonies we call national elections. We reaffirm our slavery to the will of the oligarchs because we wrongly imagine, by choosing a different oligarch aligned mob, we are exercising some sort of sociopolitical choice. Assuming the election isn’t rigged—and they clearly are from time to time—the full scope of our so-called political choice is to determine which oligarch faction will rule us unjustly for the next few years.

While oligarch gangs vie for supremacy, they all agree on the policy trajectory they want to force us down. In our “representative democracies” we will all submit to Sustainable Development-based global governance—Technocracy; programmable digital currency, in one form or another, is inevitable; digital ID will be enforced somehow, whether we want it or not; the bio-security state and polycrisis state of exception are permanently fixed; construction of the digital gulag will be completed, either by deception or force; the new monetary system, that will be foisted upon us, will accelerate the transfer of wealth—of all kinds—from us to the oligarchs and terrorism, genocide, democide, war, propaganda and deception will remain the oligarch’s favoured tools to instill fear in us as they continue to rule us using the strategy of tension.

We can’t vote harder with any rational expectation of changing any of this. We have been comprehensively deceived and it is about time we recognised it.

None of us have the right to force anyone else to do anything. The only exception is our duty to ensure justice prevails when one among us causes harm or loss to others. While others live in peace and practice justice, our right to control others simply does not exist.

The oligarchs have convinced us we can elect their representative puppets to exercise authority, not just over ourselves, but over everyone else. The resultant governments claim they rule by consent, but it isn’t informed consent and therefore no consent at all. If it were, we would all realise that we cannot devolve to government authoritarian rule that none of us can exert in the first place. We cannot bestow upon government that which we do not possess.

The consent of the governed and the social contract are propagandist’s myths. We have never given our informed consent to be ruled and no one has even seen, let alone signed, any contract whereby they agreed to be ruled. The oligarchs deem that we have consented to their mythical authority and have agreed to their invisible social contract simply by virtue of the fact we were born or live in the jurisdictions they illegitimately claim for themselves.

The oligarch owned legacy media hammers home the illusion of the requisite choice in the run up to every anointment ceremony. They promote the fiction that it is our duty to impose the rule of our preferred mob on the people we don’t agree with.

Our only duty is to live in peace by safeguarding justice. The notion that we can do this by absolving ourselves of all responsibility and handing over all decision making power to a handful of corrupt, self-serving robber-baron sycophants is ludicrous. That, in any event, none of us has any right to do so only emphasises the insanity.

Having realised they have just lost the representative democracy game, what is most remarkable about the Democrat’s angst is their envisaged solution. They are determined to regain representative political power, despite recognising that losing power means they have to accept the diktats of what they consider a tyranny.

Keep reading

Beer Lobby Wants Restrictions and Higher Taxes on Intoxicating Hemp Products

A trade group representing the American brewing industry released proposals on how Congress should regulate its competitors. Unsurprisingly, they recommend a heavy hand.

The Beer Institute is a trade organization that “represents the beer industry before Congress, state legislatures and public forums across the country…as the recognized and authoritative source of information on aspects of the industry.” Last week, it released a list of “guiding principles” calling for restrictions on intoxicating CBD products.

“The Beer Institute supports efforts underway by lawmakers to close an unintended federal loophole that is enabling the proliferation of unregulated intoxicating hemp products across the country, including those containing synthetically derived THC,” the statement said. “Intoxicating hemp and cannabis products are fundamentally different than beer and the taxation of them by government entities should reflect these stark differences just as governments at all levels in the United States have consistently reaffirmed the different tax treatment between beer, wine and hard liquor.”

While marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, Congress inserted a provision into the 2018 farm bill legalizing hemp by defining it as part of the cannabis plant containing “not more than 0.3 percent” delta-9 THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. Soon thereafter, chemists began to manufacture intoxicating products with CBD derived from hemp that contained delta-8, a milder form of THC not mentioned in the farm bill.

The industry for intoxicating hemp-derived products exploded, and state laws have struggled to catch up. “State regulations governing hemp products vary widely and are unevenly enforced, creating a patchwork of rules that can change dramatically from one state to the next,” according to a policy brief by Geoffrey Lawrence and Michelle Minton of the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine. There are currently no federal laws that specifically address these products, including their legality—they are simply assumed to be legal based on the phrasing of the farm bill, and Congress has struggled to pass an updated version for more than a year.

In its guidelines, the Beer Institute takes no position on marijuana’s legality, merely allowing that “the legalization of consumable cannabis products is for American voters, state legislatures and Congress to decide.” But if and when Congress does get around to addressing intoxicating hemp products, the group recommends it pull no punches.

“If legalized, the Beer Institute supports the establishment of a federal excise tax rate on intoxicating hemp and cannabis, with the tax rate set higher than the highest rate for any beverage alcohol product,” the guidelines stipulate. “Regulators at the federal, state, and local levels should prohibit co-location of the sale of alcohol beverages in the same retail venues as intoxicating hemp and cannabis products, if legalized, and further, to avoid consumer confusion, intoxicating hemp and cannabis products, if legalized, should only be sold in dispensaries.”

Keep reading

Harris’ campaign blew $2.6M on private jets in final weeks of campaign

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign shelled out $2.6 million on private jet travel in the final, dying gasps of her presidential run — bringing her failed campaign’s total tally on the environmentally unfriendly mode of transportation to a staggering $12 million, records show.

As Harris’ team desperately shuttled across the nation to host rallies and coax voter turnout between Oct. 1 and Oct. 17, her campaign ponied up nearly $2.2 million to the south Florida-based company Private Jet Services Group, along with $430,000 to Arlington, Va.-based charter flight broker Advanced Aviation Team, according to Federal Election Commission data.

The reliance on private jets, which can be up to 14 times more polluting than commercial flights, flies in the face of her 2019 doom-saying that global warming is an “existential threat” to humanity, as well as calls on the campaign trail for Americans to reduce their carbon emissions to stop global warming. 

Keep reading