I'd Vote Kamala If She Kept That Same Energy For AIPAC...,

Guardian  |  A prominent member of the progressive “Squad” in Congress, Cori Bush, has lost her Democratic primary in St Louis after pro-Israel pressure groups spent millions of dollars to unseat her over criticisms of Israel’s war in Gaza.

St Louis prosecutor Wesley Bell defeated Missouri’s first Black female member of Congress with about 51% of the vote. Bush took about 46%.

Bell’s win marks a second major victory for the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) after it played a leading role in unseating New York congressman Jamaal Bowman, another progressive Democrat who criticised the scale of Palestinian civilians deaths in Gaza, in a June primary.

Aipac pumped $8.5m into the race in Missouri’s first congressional district to support Bell through its campaign funding arm, the United Democracy Project (UDP), after Bush angered some pro-Israel groups as one of the first members of Congress to call for a ceasefire after the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel.

Much of the UDP’s money comes from billionaires who fund hardline pro-Israel causes and Republicans in other races, including some who have given to Donald Trump’s campaign.

Bush condemned Hamas for the killing of 1,139 people, mostly Israelis, and for abducting hundreds of others in October. But she also infuriated some Jewish and pro-Israel groups by describing Israel’s subsequent attack on Gaza and large scale killing of civilians as “collective punishment against Palestinians” and a war crime.

During the campaign, the UDP flooded St Louis with advertising hostile to Bush – although, as in other congressional races targeted by pro-Israel groups, it rarely mentioned the war in Gaza that has claimed nearly 40,000 Palestinian lives, mostly civilians, or her call for a ceasefire.

Instead, the campaign focused on Bush’s voting record in Congress, particularly her failure to support Joe Biden’s trillion-dollar infrastructure bill in 2021 and her support for the “defund the police” campaign. Bush struggled to get her message across that the UDP is misrepresenting both situations.

The UDP accounted for more than half of all the money spent on the race outside the campaigns themselves.

Bell has denied being recruited by pro-Israel groups to run against Bush, but suspicion lingered after he abandoned a challenge for the US Senate and entered the congressional race not long after Jewish organisations in St Louis began to seek a candidate to take on Bush after accusing her of “intentionally fuelling antisemitism”.

Bell is expected to win what is one of the safest Democratic congressional seats in November’s general election.

Oh My....,

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theindependent  |  A far-right candidate for Missouri’s Secretary of State posted an ad filmed on the iconic Speaker’s balcony in the US House of Representatives, where campaign and political activities are banned.

Valentina Gomez posted the video on Tuesday afternoon, which was filmed on the iconic balcony looking over Washington, DC connected to Speaker Mike Johnson’s office in the US House of Representatives.

“I am at the Speaker’s Balcony, and they don’t like me here, and neither in Jefferson City. But I don’t give a f***,” Gomez said in the video. “I speak the truth, catch pedophiles, and I will be Missouri’s 41st Secretary of State.”

However, there are a few exceptions to this rule. For example, a representative’s scheduler may coordinate with a campaign scheduler. A representative’s press secretary may also “answer occasional questions on political matters.”

The Independent has contacted Johnson for comment.

When reached for comment, Gomez told The Independent she wants critics to “stop the hypocrisy” and re-affirmed her support for Donald Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance.

“For all of those crying about a 15 second video. Be upset about the 20 million illegals the Biden-Harris Administration allowed into the United States that are raping and killing American women, or the billions sent to Ukraine’s useless war where brave men and women in uniform are being killed, or the J6’rs that are being persecuted and prosecuted, or the grandmas jailed for praying outside of an abortion clinic,” Gomez wrote.

There is no evidence to support the claim that 20 million undocumented immigrants have committed violent crimes. Peer-reviewed studies also indicate that undocumented immigrants are less likely than people born in America to commit violent, drug and property crimes.

In addition, Gomez’s claim that “grandmas” were “jailed” for “praying outside of an abortion clinic” appears to be a reference to the arrest of 75-year-old Paulette Harlow, who was convicted of federal civil rights offenses after she participated in a blockade of an abortion clinic. Her case has been widely misrepresented online, the Associated Press reports, with many falsely claiming she was arrested for praying. 

This isn’t the first time Gomez has come under fire for a campaign video.

Last month, Gomez posted a video calling Juneteenth, the national holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the US following the Civil War, the “most rachet” of holidays.

“Reparations from slavery and Black victimization is about to be shoved down our throats for the most ratchet holiday in America,” she said.

 

 

 

Fake It Till You Make It Incompetents Need To Return The Oxygen They Stole In Memphis...,

tri-statedefender  |   Sharing their experiences with crime reduction, The Black Mayors’ Coalition on Crime wrapped up a two-day conference at the Hyatt Centric Beale Street Memphis on Thursday, March 28.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young hosted Black leaders from 18 U.S. cities during the meeting that began Wednesday, March 27. 

“People want the short-term solution. They want to figure out how we are going to stop crime today. And then, we want to figure out how to stop crime in the future. In order to do that, there has to be an intense dialogue,” said Young.

In addition to Washington D.C., they came from several states with large African-American populations, like Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina and California. 

“We have a lot of violence around convenience stores and gas stations,” Mayor Tishaura Jones told Action News 5 after the conference. “So how can we hold those business owners accountable and also bring down crime? (We’re also finding that ) some of the things that we’re already doing, we’re finding that other mayors are doing as well.”

Strategies were front and center in the discussion. They included Operation GOOD in Jackson, Miss. and Operation Scarlett in Charlotte, N.C. According to proponents, both have paid dividends in their respective communities.

Operation GOOD is a nonprofit with ambitious goals to curb recidivism, reduce violence and tackling blight, for example. Operation Scarlett is an ongoing anti-luxury car theft operation that was expanded to 11 states and 152 law enforcement agencies. So far, 132 vehicles have been retrieved.

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris and Memphis Police Department Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis also appeared at the event.

Russ Wiggington, president of the National Civil Rights Museum, moderated the conversation. 

The Council on Criminal Justice, a think tank devoted to criminal justice policy, began the conference with a keynote presentation.

To allow attendants to speak freely, no media were invited to the event. However, Young has suggested future meetings could be open to the public and virtual. It’s a sentiment matched by Mayor Chokwe Lumumba Jr. of Jackson, Miss.

“We’re ensuring amongst ourselves that this will not be the last engagement, but that we will continue to lean in,” Lumumba said at a post-conference press event.

Latest Crime Stats

Although crime rates in Memphis has dropped recently, they are still above pre-pandemic levels.

Overall, the Memphis-Shelby County Crime Commission statistics reflect a 6.4% drop in fourth quarter of 2023, over 2022’s final period. This includes murder, burglary, robbery, theft, weapons and drug charges. Property crimes fell 10.1% too.

However, violent crime in Memphis bucked the trend. In addition to 398 homicides in 2023 – breaking the 2021 record – the major violent crime rate rose 7.4% in Memphis. Shelby County saw inflated numbers too, with a 6.3% jump over 2022.

To date, there have been over 80 homicides in 2024. Memphis has the highest number of all the cities represented during he meetings. Most have seen a decrease.

The Black Mayors Coalition on Crime is the latest in a series of conversations Young has recently held to address crime early in his first term.

Evil Feminization of the West Won't Stop Short Of An Inquisition Level Bloodbath...,

racket  |  Hopkins reached out to me after listening in disgust to the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court hearing Monday. Standing was a big issue: our government said plaintiffs like Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Aaron Kheriaty lacked definite proof that the government was responsible for suppressing their speech. No such issue exists in CJ’s case, as you can see.

Hopkins also wanted Americans who might be up in arms about the specter of legalized censorship in their own country to see that the phenomenon has also spread to virtually every Western democracy, often in more extreme forms than we’ve seen so far in the United States.

CJ’s unique insight involves his ludicrous German case, which as you’ll read in the Q&A below has taken bizarre turns since we last checked and will now go to trial yet again. As an expat following the American situation from afar, he’s seen how the authoritarian tide is rising in similar or worse ways all around the globe. 

Hopkins is facing the business end of the German version, among the worst. As detailed last June, he was charged with “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.” The crime? Using a barely detectible Swastika in the cover image of his book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. Far from “furthering the aims” of Nazism, he was criticizing them by comparing Nazi methods and laws to those of modern health authorities. The offending image:

Hopkins went to trial in January and delivered an impassioned plea to the court. “Every journalist that has covered my case, everyone in this courtroom, understands what this prosecution is actually about,” he said. “It has nothing to do with punishing people who actually disseminate pro-Nazi propaganda. It is about punishing dissent, and making an example of dissidents in order to intimidate others into silence.”

Though the judge was clearly not a fan of Hopkins — a courtroom account by Aya Velázquez, which I recommend reading, described how the judge said CJ’s statements were “ideological drivel,” just “not punishable by law” — he won on the law.

After acquittal, he was made aware that technically the case wasn’t over, because thanks to a quirk of German jurisprudence, the prosecutor had a week to file an appeal. Hopkins was unconcerned. “I doubt he will [re-file]. He made a total fool of himself in front of a large audience yesterday,” he wrote. “I can’t imagine that he will want to do that again.”

Bzzt! Wrong. The prosecutor re-filed charges. The prosecutorial theory in the Hopkins case was based on a bizarre interpretation of hate crime, essentially asserting that if you have to think about an image to realize it’s satire, it can’t be allowed. If that idea spreads, it would make comedy or even sharp commentary impossible. This is why his indictment, and the similar investigation of Roger Waters, are really serious moments. Not to be heavy-handed, but eliminating the loophole for satire or mockery is exactly what Waters meant by “Another Brick in the Wall.” Before you know it, it’ll be toohigh to see over.

 

Too Many Feminized Oligarchs In The 4th Reich

unherd  |  The US Supreme Court has been hearing arguments today on what could be one of the most consequential rulings related to free speech in decades. The case, Murthy v. Missouri, revolves around efforts by US Government agencies, including the CDC and the FBI, to influence the narrative around major events, such as Covid-19, by leaning on social media platforms to censor posts, topics and accounts.

The case — brought by two states, Missouri and Louisiana, as well as five individuals against the federal government — was in part animated by Elon Musk’s decision to publish the Twitter Files, a trove of emails, text and other company correspondence which showed the extent to which Government agencies ranging from the CDC to the CIA were in contact with managers at social media platforms over issues such as claims about the vaccine and the effectiveness of lockdowns.

The case could not be more significant for American society as far as freedom of speech is concerned. The reason is that at the heart of the case is what constitutes disinformation and what steps governments can take to combat it. In this case, many of the claims censored by social media companies at the behest of the Government turned out to be true. This includes widespread censorship of social media posts claiming that the Covid-19 vaccines carry health risks and that the lockdowns were not only ineffective but also damaging.

Republicans have alleged that the same dynamic was at play when social media giants censored the New York Post’s reporting on the now infamous Hunter Biden laptop story, arguing that deep state actors leant on the platform to block the coverage. Twitter executives involved in the decisions denied this, with one of them, Yoel Roth, saying “I believe Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016.”

The irony, of course, is that “the mistakes of 2016” refers to the widespread allegations that Trump colluded with the Russian government to sway that year’s election, including on Facebook. None of these claims have been proved true — and some, like the effect of “fake news” on the election, have been debunked.

Nevertheless, the “Russiagate” narrative — itself one of the most sweeping disinformation campaigns of recent years — took a firm hold in American public life, in large part thanks to claims of disinformation that lay at the heart of the campaign.

This speaks to the central challenge of the case: while the Government’s critics argue that disinformation is a cudgel to silence dissent, proponents argue that a core Government function is to police information, especially during times of emergency.

The MSM Is Accidentally On-Purpose Throwing In The Towel On Biden

kunstler  |   “Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall,” the report states.

      Gearing up? I’m sure. If gearing up means calling a lid on your life an hour after breakfast. And what do you suppose they mean by “a more traditional form of leadership.” Arranging serial overseas military humiliations? Selling favors to all comers from foreign lands? Inviting transsexuals to cavort on the White House lawn? Abolishing control of US borders? Running a $2-trillion annual deficit? Mandating unsafe and ineffective so-called “vaccine” shots on millions? Cancelling the First Amendment? Stealing elections? Conspiring to jail his political adversaries?

     We’re also informed in recent days by the Department of Justice that “Joe Biden” is not mentally competent to answer for anything in a court of law, should someone inquire into the signal irregularities emerging from the fugitive annals of his long career. Of course, “Joe Biden” running for reelection is one of the greatest gags ever put over on the American public. But more astounding yet is that half the country persists in pretending to believe it. They are egged on in every possible way by persons in high places of government fearful of going to prison if the Democratic Party loses its grip on the levers of power.

      Since “Joe Biden” is not actually calling the shots, one naturally wonders who is responsible for all the dubious achievements of the past three years. I guess we’ll find out when Mr. Trump wins that election in November, an outcome increasingly guaranteed unless “Joe Biden” (or, let’s face it, our Intel Community) takes the final decisive step of bumping off the Golden Golem of Greatness. What have they got left? AI-contrived photos of Mr. Trump having sex with a manatee in the intercoastal waterway off Mar-a-Lago?

      In New York City, the Woke lunatics did a victory dance after Judge Arthur Engoron, beaming his Joker smile, laid a $350-million fine on Mr. Trump for conducting a set of normal real estate transactions with a bank that profited from doing business with him. Many are still trying to figure out how that amounts to a crime of any sort. Don’t suppose that the check is in the mail, though. There is an appeals process that leads, you may be sure, to a dismissal of that inane judgment and the puerile hypotheticals that the case derived from. And, by and by, you also might expect a countersuit for malicious prosecution when all that smoke clears. New York Attorney General Letitia James, lacking impulse control, is for the moment enjoying the fulfillment of her campaign promise to “get Trump.” Waiting to see how much she enjoys losing her law license in the days to come.

     Every reaction provokes an equal and opposite reaction, Newton’s Third Law states. It manifested shortly after Judge Engoron’s end zone dance when a call went out over the Internet for America’s truckers to refuse loads inbound to New York City. We’ll have to stand by to see how that develops. No more bok choy, Texas beef, or Meyer Lemons for you, “progressive” denizens of the Five Boroughs! Embrace the suck! The genius part is that, unlike the 2022 Canadian truckers’ action in Ottawa, the American truckers will not be cluttering up New York’s streets with their rigs, license plates on view, leaving them vulnerable to such pranks as the shutdown of their bank accounts. All they’ll do is sit innocently at home back in Kentucky and Missouri, enjoying a break from the rigors of the highway. Is that a crime? Arguably no more than doing a normal real estate deal in good faith with a willing lender was a crime.

     The truckers have promised to include Washington DC next in their delivery boycott. The K-Street lobbying gang won’t be buying any influence for a while over platters of grilled branzino and Mariscos Molcajete. Maybe there will be a few Cliff Bars left in the Farragut Square 7-Eleven and they can do business in their cars. As for “Joe Biden,” his minders have probably laid in enough Ensure for a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory to get by for a few weeks — until the magic moment when, alas, he must needs be thrown under the bus of expediency to keep their game going.

Missouri Congressman Burleson Says "It's Angels"

futurism  |  Congressman Eric Burlison (R-MO) has waded into the discourse about UFOs — and in an outburst that probably says more about the state of US politics than unidentified objects in the sky, speculated that they might be "angels" sent by God himself.

Yes, you read that right. During a recent episode of That UFO Podcast this week, Burlison took the UFO conversation in a wild new direction.

"They may not fit exactly the Biblical narrative, but whenever I use the term 'angels,'" he said, "to me, it's synonymous with an extradimensional being."

"I think it's more likely that it would be something extradimensional than it would be within this dimension," Burlison argued. "And then, so what I'll say is that when you start talking about things in that nature, that they're extradimensional, well, in a lot of different scriptures, including the Bible, and others, that's really the way that you describe messengers of God or, you know, angels."

Strikingly, Burlison's musings come after he attended a classified briefing about UFOs this month, though he said after it that nothing he'd learned there had fundamentally shifted his worldview.

"There’s nothing that’s been said that’s changed my worldview," he told the Kansas City Star. "I believe the veracity of the claims of the people who testified in the public hearing. Now, that being said, I believe that what they believe they said is true."

Burlison isn't alone in musing about a connection between UFOs and religious texts.

"UFOs were in the Bible," representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) claimed in 2021. "Read Ezekiel, it talks about the wheel flying around. So I mean, they’ve been around since we’ve been around and somebody needs to come up with some answers."

Burlison has long called for oversight over reports alleging that the US government has conspired to keep spicy UFO findings from leaking to the public.

The subject has been fraught with drama. Last summer, an Air Force veteran and former member of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency named David Grusch came forward to allege that the government had secretly recovered alien spacecraft — and even dead "pilots" inside them — for decades as part of a top-secret UFO retrieval program.

 

Not Costco Too!!! Say It Isn't So....,

They have definitely been lying to us about inflation.

This is insane!

🔊 pic.twitter.com/F5QLjs1ZTD

— Declaration of Memes (@LibertyCappy) October 16, 2023

KCUR  |  You know how holiday stuff is expensive when you most want to buy it, but cheaper after the holidays?

The same dynamic will soon apply to what you pay for electricity on the Missouri side of the Kansas City area.

All of Evergy’s Missouri customers will see a steep price hike for the electricity they burn during the peak demand hours of late afternoon and early evening.

It’s called time-of-use pricing and Jim Busch, the director of industry analysis at the Missouri Public Service Commission, said it makes sense.

“When you look at the overall benefits to the consumers and the company and society as a whole,” he said, “it’s a better path to go down.”

Evergy's change to the time-sensitive model comes with particularly dramatic upticks.

Electricity costs more to generate at peak times, like summer evenings when everyone’s running their air conditioners. Companies have to fire up auxiliary generators to meet that demand.

That means burning natural gas. Cranking up those gas plants costs more to kick out the same power than coal, solar, wind and nuclear.

Time-of-use rates reflect that added cost. Customers pay something closer to the actual cost to produce power at a given time — and have an incentive to use less electricity when it costs the most to produce.

Power companies already send out bills based on time-of-use rates in much of the western U.S. Evergy has allowed customers in both Missouri and Kansas to voluntarily opt-in to variable price billing for years. And the method is catching on, Busch.

But there’s something different about the time-of-use billing schedule for Missouri that Evergy customers will see this fall.

Typically, the price of electricity varies only slightly over the course of the day. Rates may go up or down one or two cents per kilowatt hour.

Some Missouri Evergy customers, on the other hand, will see rates fluctuate dramatically. Under the default plan, customers will be charged 9 cents a kilowatt hour most of the time. But the rate vaults up to 38 cents between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. on summer evenings. That’s a 322% spike.

“That is a huge increase,” said Daniel Zimny-Schmitt at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “There’s no way around that.”

He said 38 cents a kilowatt hour, the top rate under Evergy’s default plan, would mark one of the most expensive residential electricity rates in the country outside of California.

The default plan —Evergy brands it “Standard Peak Saver" — is one of four options that Missouri Evergy customers can choose from by October. If you don’t do anything to your Evergy account, that’s the billing structure you’ll have.

Everything The Biden Administration Does Seems Designed To Give Americans The Finger

jonathanturley  |  We previously discussed the defunct Disinformation Governance Board and its controversial head Nina Jankowicz. After the outcry over the program, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas finally relented and disbanded the board while insisting that it was never about censoring opposing views. Jankowicz has sued over the portrayal of her views. Now, Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFPF) has exposed just how broad the scope of the censorship efforts were under the board in combatting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (MDM). This range of authority in what the agency called the “MDM space,” included targeting views on racial justice and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

New documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests show that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) argued that the agency could regulate speech related to “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine” as well as “irregular immigration.”

Those subjects stretch across much of the “space” used for political speech in the last few years.

Notably, within DHS, Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” The resulting censorship efforts included combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” I testified earlier on this effort.

So DHS asserted the authority to target viewpoints on racial justice, Ukraine, and other political subjects, including views based on fact but viewed as misleading in context.

What is also troubling is the continued effort to conceal these censorship activities. Homeland redacted much of this information on a now defunct board under FOIA Exemption 7(E), which protects “techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions, or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations.” That claim is itself chilling.

After the demise of the board, National Public Radio ran an interview entitled “How DHS’s disinformation board fell victim to misinformation.”

As the title suggests, NPR just repeated the view of Jankowicz despite the objections of many of us in the free speech community. Jankowicz insisted “we weren’t going to be doing anything related to policing speech. It was an internal coordinating mechanism to make sure that we were doing that work efficiently.” Yet, what were the criminal investigations, prosecutions, and enforcement efforts now being claimed as connected to this work?

Recently, a court found that the Biden Administration’s censorship efforts constituted “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” Those words by Chief U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty are part of a 155-page opinion granting a temporary injunction, requested by Louisiana and Missouri, to prevent White House officials from meeting with tech companies about social media censorship.

The State Goes To Great Lengths To Protect Itself - You Taxpaying MF'ers Are On Your Own

mises  |  In all the media and regime frenzy over the Janaury 6 riots and the Pentagon Leaker in recent months, it is interesting to examine the contrast between how the regime treats "crimes" against its own interests, and real crime committed against ordinary private citizens. 

Witness, for example, how the Biden administration and corporate media have treated the January 6 riot as if it were some kind of military coup, demanding that draconian sentences be handed down even to small-time vandals and trespassers. Regime paranoia has led the Justice Department to ask for a 30-year sentence for Enrique Tarrio, a man who was convicted of the non-crime of "seditious conspiracy" even though he wasn't even in Washington on January 6. In recent months, Jacob Chansley, the "QAnon Shaman," received a sentence of three-and-a-half years, even though prosecutors admit he did nothing violent. Riley Williams was given three years for simply trespassing in Nancy Pelosi's office. Members of the Capitol Police force have been lionized in the media as great protectors of "sacred" government buildings, and any threat to the property or persons of Washington politicians has been equated with an assault on "democracy." 

Yet, had these supposed insurrectionists inflicted these same actions against an ordinary private individual, there's a good chance the perpetrators would not even be arrested, let alone given years of prison time. Consider, for example, the mobs that ransack private businesses in American cities, stealing tens of thousands of dollars of merchandise while police and prosecutors consider it all to be low priority.  Violent crime and property crime surge in many areas of the United States, with violent crime rising 30 percent in New York City in 2022. Unsolved murders in the US are at a record high. Meanwhile, progressives and social democrats are looking for ways to reduce criminal penalties against violent criminals. Police departments often devote only tiny portions of their budgets to homicide investigations, and if your property is stolen, odds are good you can forget about ever seeing it again. 

The situation is quite different when it comes to protecting the state, its agents, and its property from any threat. During urban riots, such as those which occurred in Ferguson, Missouri and Minneapolis, Minnesota, the police went to great lengths to protect themselves and government property. If you were just a private shopkeeper or ordinary citizen, however, you were on your own. At the Uvalde School shooting in 2022, hundreds of law enforcement officers from all levels of government chose to protect themselves rather than the children who were being murdered inside. When Uvalde parents demanded the police act, the police attacked the parents. 

We find similar phenomena at the federal level. There are, of course, special federal laws against violence perpetrated against federal employees. Ordinary taxpayers receive no such consideration. Note how federal agencies move to arm themselves to the teeth while also seeking to disarm the private-sector. Federal agents will spare no expense finding someone who put his feet up on Nancy Pelosi's desk, but it's another matter entirely when we're talking about serious violent crime against regular people.  Federal agents, of course, allowed 9/11 to occur right under their noses, they refused to investigate known rapist Larry Nasser, and shrugged off reports about the man who would end up slaughtering children at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Contrast this with how long the federal government has been conniving to get revenge on Julian Assange for merely telling the truth about US war crimes.  

Naturally, law enforcement officers rarely face any sanctions for their failures to bother themselves with private property, life, or limb. The federal courts have made it clear that law enforcement officers are not obligated to actually protect the public. In other words, the taxpayers must always pay taxes to hold up their end of the imagined "social contract" or face fines and imprisonment. But the other side of that "contract," the state, has no legal obligation to make good on its end. This, of course, is not how real contracts work.

5th Circuit Lets Bidencorp Continue F*cking With Your Cognitive Infrastructure....,

dailycaller  |   A federal appeals court issued a temporary stay on a judge’s injunction barring federal officials from communicating with social media companies for the purposes of censoring protected speech on Friday.

Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty previously denied the Biden administration’s request for an emergency order pausing his injunction on July 10. In an order Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an administrative stay on the injunction “until further orders” of the court.

Doughty had previously issued a preliminary injunction barring the Biden administration from communicating with social media companies to censor protected speech on July 4.

The panel of judges who hear the case for arguments on the merits will later consider the administration’s motion for a longer stay, according to the order.

NOW: The 5th Circuit has agreed to temporarily pause an injunction that blocked a wide swath of the Biden admin from contacting social media companies; appeal will be expedited, panel of judges to be assigned later will decide whether to grant the longer-term stay DOJ wants pic.twitter.com/AmQcaeatPL

— Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) July 14, 2023

When Doughty denied the administration’s request for an emergency order Monday, he said the injunction only bars the administration from doing something they “no legal right to do—contacting social media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner, the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms. It also contains numerous exceptions.”

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and Louisiana Attorney General Jeffrey Landry slammed the administration’s attempt to stop the injunction as asking to “continue violating the First Amendment” in a July 10 court filing.

 

 

Fighting The Government-Led Internet Information War Through The Courts

tablet  |  One year ago, I joined the states of Missouri and Louisiana and several other co-plaintiffs to file a suit in federal court challenging what journalist Michael Shellenberger has called the censorship-industrial complex. While much of the press cooperated with the state’s censorship efforts and has ignored our court battle, we expect that it will ultimately go to the Supreme Court, setting up Missouri v. Biden to be the most important free speech case of our generation—and arguably, of the past 50 years.

Prior government censorship cases typically involved a state actor unconstitutionally meddling with one publisher, one author, one or two books, a single article. But as we intend to prove in court, the federal government has censored hundreds of thousands of Americans, violating the law on tens of millions of occasions in the last several years. This unprecedented breach was made possible by the wholly novel reach and breadth of the new digital social media landscape.

My co-plaintiffs, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and I were censored for content related to COVID and public health policy that the government disfavored. Documents we have reviewed on discovery demonstrate that government censorship was far more wide-ranging than previously known, from election integrity and the Hunter Biden laptop story to gender ideology, abortion, monetary policy, the U.S. banking system, the war in Ukraine, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and more. There is hardly a topic of recent public discussion and debate that the U.S. government has not targeted for censorship.

Jacob Seigel, Matt Taibbi, and other investigative reporters have begun to document the anatomy of the censorship leviathan, a tightly interconnected network of federal agencies and private entities receiving public funding—where much of the censorship grunt work is outsourced. The “industrial” in censorship-industrial complex should be understood literally: censorship is now a highly developed industry, complete with career-training institutions in higher education (like Stanford’s Internet Observatory or the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public), full-time job opportunities in industry and government (from the Virality Project and the Election Integrity Partnership to any number of federal agencies engaged in censorship), and insider jargon and euphemisms (like disinformation, misinformation, and “malinformation” which must be debunked and “prebunked”) to render the distasteful work of censorship more palatable to industry insiders.

Our lawyers were in court last week arguing for a preliminary injunction to halt the activities of the censorship machine while our case is tried. I will spare you a full account of the government’s endless procedural wrangling, obfuscation, attempts to hide, delays, and diversionary tactics in this case—futile efforts to dodge even the most legally straightforward aspects of discovery, such as our request to depose former Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki. So far, the government has been caught hiding discovery materials, which the judge chastised them about before ruling against their motion to dismiss, reminding the government that the limited discovery so far would widen once the case went to trial.

The government’s lawyers were not able to block the deposition of Anthony Fauci, however, who had to answer some pointed questions about his COVID policies for the first time under the threat of the penalty of perjury. Dr. Fauci seemed to suffer from a strange syndrome of “sudden-onset amnesia” during his deposition, as I have described elsewhere.

Thank GAWD Brandon An'em Protecting Our "Cognitive Infrastructure"

tablet  |  My fellow citizens, meet the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency—better known as CISA—a government acronym with the same word in it twice in case you wondered about its mission. This agency was created in the waning days of the Obama administration, supposedly to protect our digital infrastructure against cyberattacks from computer viruses and nefarious foreign actors. But less than one year into their existence, CISA decided that their remit also should include protecting our “cognitive infrastructure” from various threats.

“Cognitive infrastructure” is the actual phrase used by current CISA head Jen Easterly, who formerly worked at Tailored Access Operations, a top secret cyber warfare unit at the National Security Agency. It refers to the thoughts inside your head, which is precisely what the government’s counter-disinformation apparatus, headed by people like Easterly, are attempting to control. Naturally, these thoughts need to be protected from bad ideas, such as any ideas that the people at CISA or their government partners do not like.

In early 2017, citing the threat from foreign disinformation, the Department of Homeland Security unilaterally declared federal control over the country’s election infrastructure, which had previously been administered at the local level. Not long after that, CISA, which is a subagency of the DHS, established its own authority over the cognitive infrastructure by becoming the central hub coordinating the government’s information control activities. This pattern was repeated in several other government agencies around the same time (there are currently a dozen federal agencies named among the defendants in our suit).

So, what exactly has the government been doing to protect our cognitive infrastructure? Perhaps the best way to wrap your head around the actual operations of the new American censorship leviathan is to consider the vivid analogy offered by our brilliant attorney, John Sauer, in the introduction of our brief for the injunction. This is worth quoting at length:

Suppose that the Trump White House, backed by Republicans controlling both Houses of Congress, publicly demanded that all libraries in the United States burn books criticizing the President, and the President made statements implying that the libraries would face ruinous legal consequences if they did not comply, while senior White House officials privately badgered the libraries for detailed lists and reports of such books that they had burned and the libraries, after months of such pressure, complied with those demands and burned the books.

Suppose that, after four years of pressure from senior congressional staffers in secret meetings threatening the libraries with adverse legislation if they did not cooperate, the FBI started sending all libraries in the United States detailed lists of the books the FBI wanted to burn, requesting that the libraries report back to the FBI by identifying the books that they burned, and the libraries complied by burning about half of those books.

Suppose that a federal national security agency teamed up with private research institutions, backed by enormous resources and federal funding, to establish a mass-surveillance and mass-censorship program that uses sophisticated techniques to review hundreds of millions of American citizens’ electronic communications in real time, and works closely with tech platforms to covertly censor millions of them.

The first two hypotheticals are directly analogous to the facts of this case. The third, meanwhile, is not a hypothetical at all; it is a description of the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project.

The censorship activities of the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, which it terms “information warfare,” have turned the FBI, in the words of whistleblower Steve Friend, into an “intelligence agency with law enforcement powers.” But there is no “information warfare” exception to the constitutional right of free speech. Which other federal agencies are involved in censorship? Besides the ones you might suspect—the DOJ, NIH, CDC, Surgeon General, and the State Department—our case has also uncovered censorship activities by the Department of the Treasury (don’t criticize the feds’ monetary policies), and yes, my friends, even the Census Bureau (don’t ask).

In prior precedent-setting cases on censorship, the Supreme Court clarified that the right of free speech guaranteed by the Constitution exists not just for the person speaking but for the listener as well: We all have the right to hear both sides of debated issues to make informed judgments. Thus all Americans have been harmed by the government’s censorship leviathan, not just those who happen to post opinions or share information on social media.

The judge presiding over the case, Terry Dougherty, asked on Friday in court if anyone had read George Orwell’s 1984 and whether they remembered the Ministry of Truth. “It’s relevant here,” he added. It is indeed time to slay the government’s Ministry of Truth. I hope that our efforts in Missouri v. Biden prove to be a crucial first step in this project to restore our constitutional rights.

 

Federal Judge Puts His Size 13 Triple E Brogans Deep In Brandons Shit Stained Behind....,

ZH  |  On Tuesday, the Fourth of July, a federal judge in Louisiana kicked the Biden administration's censorship complex in the teeth - ruling that federal officials (with limited exception) can no longer communicate or collude with big tech companies to censor "protected speech."

 The order prohibits Biden officials from "collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working with" key academic groups behind various censorship campaigns, including the Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition of researchers led by the Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public.

This is a huge win for free speech - and comes on the heels of Twitter Files revelations of government influence and control over various hot button narratives they wished to steer. And of all people who deserve to take a victory lap - journalist Matt Taibbi and Louisiana AG Andrew Baily have opined on the ruling.

First, Taibbi drops his thoughts via Racket News...

Here’s how federal judge Terry Doughty yesterday described the digital censorship controversy at which pundits a half-year now have repeatedly rolled eyes, dismissed, and mocked as a nothingburger: “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

Doughty then ordered a sweeping halt to the censorship schemes outlined in both the extant Missouri v. Biden lawsuit and in the Twitter Files. Critics who’ve been snickering about this issue might want to read this 155-page ruling now, and ask themselves if the current Supreme Court would or would not agree with Doughty. Still think this is a nothingburger?

With this ruling in the Missouri v. Biden censorship case, Doughty went out of his way on the Fourth of July, to issue a stern rebuke at a conga line of government officials, many of them characters in the Twitter Files. Racket readers will recognize names like Elvis Chan and Laura Dehmlow (of the FBI), Jen Easterly and Brian Scully (of the Department of Homeland Security), Laura Rosenberger (Special Assistant to the President, and one of the creators of Hamilton 68) and Daniel Kimmage (of the Global Engagement Center), who were all just ordered to get the hell off the First Amendment’s lawn. Paraphrasing, Doughty enjoined them from:

• meeting with social-media companies for the purpose of pressuring or inducing in any manner the removal or suppression of protected free speech;

• flagging posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding to social-media companies urging the same;

• collaborating with the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, the Stanford Internet Observatory, or any “like project” or group for the same purpose;

• threatening or coercing social-media companies to remove protected free speech.

The New York Times, which instantly wrung its hands and stressed the ruling could “curtail efforts to fight disinformation,” grumblingly handed blame to the Twitter Files, without naming them of course, and mislabeling it as a partisan enterprise:

Elon Musk has echoed Republican arguments, releasing internal company documents to chosen journalists suggesting what they claimed was collusion between company and government officials. Though that remains far from proven, some of the documents Mr. Musk disclosed ended up in the lawsuit’s arguments.

The investigation led by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Missouri’s Andrew Bailey, produced documents showing overt government requests to censor people like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a White House official expressing frustration to Facebook that they weren’t “removing bad information from search,” and emails in which a Facebook official pleads with the White House to understand that they’re already “reducing the virality” of “often-true content” that might promote vaccine hesitancy, among many other things. The Attorneys General likewise scored depositions with people like Dr. Anthony Fauci, and confronted him with documents showing Facebook sending his office updates about how “we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove.”

White House official asks Twitter “if we can get moving” on having posts by RFK, Jr. removed, “ASAP”

Was this illegal? Unconsititional? Did it show a pattern of mighty tech companies like Facebook and Twitter acting like they were reporting to federal officials like Fauci on content moderation? I knew what I thought it looked like, but what judges or a jury might say, who knew?

 

 

What The NYTimes Wrote About A Judge Protecting First Amendment Rights

startribune  | A federal judge in Louisiana on Tuesday restricted the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms about broad swaths of content online, a ruling that could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives about the coronavirus pandemic and other issues.

The order, which could have significant First Amendment implications, is a major development in a fierce legal fight over the boundaries and limits of speech online.

It was a victory for Republicans who have often accused social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube of disproportionately taking down right-leaning content, sometimes in collaboration with government. Democrats say the platforms have failed to adequately police misinformation and hateful speech, leading to dangerous outcomes, including violence.

In the ruling, Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana said that parts of the government, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the FBI, could not talk to social media companies for "the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression or reduction of content containing protected free speech."

In granting a preliminary injunction, Doughty said that the agencies could not flag specific posts to the social media platforms or request reports about their efforts to take down content. The ruling said that the government could still notify the platforms about posts detailing crimes, national security threats or foreign attempts to influence elections.

"If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history," the judge said. "The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition."

Courts are increasingly being forced to weigh in on such issues — with the potential to upend decades of legal norms that have governed speech online.

The Republican attorneys general of Texas and Florida are defending first-of-their-kind state laws that bar internet platforms from taking down certain political content, and legal experts believe those cases may eventually reach the Supreme Court. The high court this year declined to limit a law that allows the platforms to escape legal liability for content that users post to the sites.

The ruling Tuesday, in a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, is likely to be appealed by the Biden administration, but its impact could force government officials, including law enforcement agencies, to refrain from notifying the platforms of troublesome content.

Government officials have argued they do not have the authority to order posts or entire accounts removed, but federal agencies and the tech giants have long worked together to take action against illegal or harmful material, especially in cases involving child sexual abuse, human trafficking and other criminal activity. That has also included regular meetings to share information on the Islamic State and other terrorist groups.

The White House said the Justice Department was reviewing the ruling and evaluating its next steps."Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present," the White House said in a statement.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, declined to comment. Twitter did not have a comment, and Google did not respond to a request for comment.

Jeff Landry, the Louisiana attorney general, said in a statement that the judge's order was "historic." Missouri's attorney general, Andrew Bailey, hailed the ruling as a "huge win in the fight to defend our most fundamental freedoms." Both officials are Republican.

Does Anyone Remember Hearing About UFO's Shutting Down Nukes?

military  |  Three aging Air Force veterans came to Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to again tell their strange and extraordinary stories. A fourth veteran was piped into the National Press Club conference by video feed from the Ozark Mountains in Missouri.

Each veteran's story is different, but all share one central claim: In the 1960s, UFOs tampered with nuclear weapons managed by the Air Force, both terrifying and mystifying the airmen who experienced the encounters. Some remained silent for decades, they say.

And none has captured the attention of Washington, even as reports of Navy encounters with unknown flying objects have splashed across national headlines and pushed UFOs back into the political mainstream for the first time in decades.

"I waited 40 years before I opened my mouth, and that's a long time," said David Schindele, a retired captain who served as a nuclear missile launch control officer at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. "I had this terrible secret on my mind for all that time, and I felt such great relief to finally admit to my friends and close relatives what I experienced in the Air Force."

Other accounts, such as the story told by veteran Robert Salas of a glowing red-orange craft hovering at the gate of a Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile silo in Montana, have been told for decades and folded into the growing universe of UFO lore. Salas was part of a similar press conference in the same downtown press club in 2010.

 

Through the years, the government remained indifferent at best to decades-old reports of saucer craft toying with the world's most powerful weapons during the Cold War. The Air Force funded a university study commonly known as the Condon Report in the 1960s, which found no evidence to support the claims -- and recommended against further studies.

But it is a different Capitol for Salas and his fellow true-believer veterans in 2021. The UFOs they claim appeared in the 1960s have been eclipsed by the more recent accounts of Navy witnesses and fighter jet footage of what the Pentagon now calls unexplained aerial phenomenon, or UAP.

Salas has spent years gathering other Air Force veterans who have signed witness affidavits describing their own alleged encounters decades ago. He claims the evidence shows UFOs appeared at various times and took 20 Minuteman ICBMs off-line at sites in the central U.S. over an eight-day period.

"Never had we seen a situation like this," Schindele explained.

Schindele said he and his commander visited a missile launch site near Minot in September 1966, and eight airmen there told him that 10 missiles at silos in the vicinity all went down with guidance and control malfunctions when an 80- to 100-foot wide flying object with bright flashing lights had hovered over the site.

Salas, who was a first lieutenant stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, in 1967, said he was on duty as a deputy missile combat crew commander deep in the underground nuclear missile control room. The site's flight security controller called from above ground and was panicked and shouting, Salas claims.

"He said there was a large glowing, pulsating red oval-shaped object hovering over the front gate," according to Salas' affidavit. As he woke his commander, he claims alarms went off showing nearly all 10 missiles shown in the control room had been disabled.

Robert Jacobs, who attended the UFO press conference via video link from Missouri, said he was a first lieutenant in the Air Force and stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, in 1964 when he was asked to set up a telescope video camera to capture an Atlas rocket test.

He claims the video showed a disc-shaped craft flew up to the dummy warhead as it traveled about 8,000 mph over the Pacific Ocean, circled it and shot it with several beams of light.

"It went around the top of the warhead, fired a beam of light down on the top of the warhead," Jacobs said Tuesday. After circling, it "then flew out the frame the same way it had come in."