Thursday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

Good morning Deplorables, less than three weeks until the shit hits the fan.

Big Tech Giants Aren’t Platforms, They’re Partisans Who Hate Freedom Of The Press

Via The Federalist

Big Tech, led by Facebook and Twitter, have officially declared war on the American people — and they’ve unequivocally proclaimed they are in fact publishers, not platforms.

Facebook, Twitter, and other tech giants have spent the last few years trying to convince Congress and the American people that they don’t wield as much power as they do and that they deserve to continue benefitting from a sweetheart deal in U.S. communications law. That facade stops today after Big Tech unconscionably censored a New York Post report that exposes lies straight out of the mouth of their preferred candidate Joe Biden. Big Tech, led by Facebook and Twitter, have officially interfered in the election — and they’ve unequivocally proclaimed they are publishers, not platforms.

For too long, tech giants have enjoyed cushy protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which affords immunity for websites that host third-party content, treating them as platforms rather than publishers. The core of Section 230 states:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

This distinction between platforms and publishers is important. For instance, a publisher, such as The Federalist, could face defamation lawsuits if it were to publish libelous information. In contrast, a platform, such as Facebook, could not be sued for one of its third-party users posting defamatory content since it ostensibly does not monitor what users post.

Facebook and Twitter, however, have taken a giant leap into blatantly partisan censorship — choosing what should and should not be visible to their users — proving definitively that they are not merely viewpoint-neutral platforms deserving of legal immunity. They function as editors and gatekeepers for what content users may and may not see.

Twitter and Facebook Censor News They Don’t Like
Both tech giants on Wednesday, just 20 days before the election, censored a story from the New York Post revealing that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden lied about lacking knowledge of his son Hunter’s Ukrainian business interests.

After repeatedly insisting he didn’t know about his son’s “oversees business dealings,” the New York Post obtained emails that demonstrate the opposite. The emails, which reportedly originated from a computer left at a Delaware repair shop, show not only that Joe Biden knew of his son’s business entanglement. They also reveal that Hunter introduced his father, then the vice president under Barack Obama, to Vadym Pozharskyi, a Burisma adviser, less than a year before Joe Biden lobbied for the firing of a prosecutor who had investigated the energy company.

The computer hard drive reportedly included other unpalatable content, such as “a raunchy, 12-minute video that appears to show Hunter, who’s admitted struggling with addiction problems, smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with an unidentified woman, as well as numerous other sexually explicit images.” None of this information is great for the Democratic presidential nominee.

Partisan tech giants couldn’t let this story get out, with Facebook announcing it would censor the article and Twitter banning it from its website, labeling the link as “potentially harmful.”

While the reporting might “harm” Biden’s election chances, it certainly doesn’t promote violence or hate or result in imminent lawless action — not even close. Nor should the article fall under the much-abused “Good Samaritan” clause of Section 230, a protection Republican Sens. Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Kelly Loeffler, and Kevin Cramer have worked to reign in through legislation. This so-called Good Samaritan provision protects platforms that restrict access to content deemed “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable” so long as they do so in “good faith.”

The New York Post’s reporting is none of these things. As far as Twitter and Facebook are concerned, the only problem with the article is that it negatively reflects on the “wrong” candidate.

Read the entire article HERE.

Antifa is real. It’s violent. And you need to plan for it

By Simon Black/Sovereign Man

American diplomat George Messersmith found himself in an awkward situation while attending a luncheon in Kiel, Germany in August of 1933.

As lunch came to a close, the attendees erupted into song with arms outstretched in the Nazi salute.

First they belted out Germany’s national anthem, followed by the anthem of the Stormtroopers– the paramilitary ”Brownshirts” who violently enforced Germany’s new social rules.

Messersmith was the US Consul-General overseeing America’s diplomatic ties with Germany, so he politely stood at attention. But he did not salute or sing along.

Germans were required by law to render the Nazi salute, especially during the anthem; Hitler had been awarded supreme executive authority only a few months before, and he made the mandatory salute law of the land.

Foreigners, however, were explicitly exempt from saluting or singing the anthem.

But that didn’t help Messersmith.

Even though he was legally excused from making the Nazi salute, angry Brownshirts menacingly glared at him for not participating in their rituals.

Messersmith later wrote in his memoirs that he felt threatened, as if the Brownshirts were ready to attack him.

“I felt really quite fortunate that the incident took place within doors. . . For if it had been in a street gathering, or in an outdoor demonstration, no questions would have been asked as to who I was, and that I would have been mishandled is almost unquestionable.”

Messersmith was one of the few US officials who grasped just how dangerous the Nazis were in 1933. Others had to witness it first hand before they understood.

A similar event unfolded when a US radio host and his family found themselves amidst an impromptu Nazi parade in Berlin.

And in order to avoid Hailing Hitler, they turned their backs to the parade and gazed into a store window.

But several Brownshirts quickly surrounded the family and demanded to know why they did not salute.

The family explained that they were from the US and didn’t know the customs in Germany. But the Brownshirts didn’t care. The family was assaulted as police officers watched… and did nothing to stop the violence.

News of these sorts of incidents quickly made their way overseas, and foreigners read the about Americans traveling in Germany being savagely beaten or threatened for not engaging in Nazi rituals.

But more surprising is that many foreigners actually sided with the Nazis.

Even the daughter of the US Ambassador to Germany defended the Nazis and their Brownshirt enforcers.

She said that news reports of these assaults and beatings were “exaggerated by bitter, close-minded people” who ignored the “thrilling rebirth” Hitler had ushered in for Germany.

Of course, we know in retrospect that these early warning signs were not at all an exaggeration. They were a small preview for what would come next.

Today we are obviously in a different time dealing with totally different circumstances.

But it would be foolish to ignore the early warning signs and pretend as if what’s happening now is not a preview for what could come next.

This willful ignorance of the undercurrent coursing its way through the Western world will not save anyone from the destruction it brings.

For example, just this past Monday, “peaceful protesters” in Portland, Oregon celebrated Columbus Day with an “Indigenous People’s Day of Rage.”

They weren’t even pretending to be peaceful. They called it what it is: RAGE. That’s literally the name they gave to their own actions.

Hundreds of people dressed in all black, covered their faces, and armed themselves with shields and nightsticks. They marched their way through the city, smashed windows, and forced any witnesses to stop filming and delete photographs.

A man who filmed from his apartment’s terrace had lasers shined in his eyes and was doused in some sort of liquid.

The protesters tore down statues of Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. They smashed the windows of the Oregon Historical Society building, and unfurled a banner that said “stop honoring racist colonizer murderers.”

Police did not even attempt to intervene until the rioters had been on the streets for hours and had already caused havoc and destruction.

(Ironically, much of the mainstream media still refuses to acknowledge that this group ‘antifa’– the fascists who call themselves anti-fascists– even exists.)

It’s obvious that a small, fringe, ideological minority has started to take control.

Read the entire article HERE.

‘1619 Project’ founder loses her mind after valid criticism of her project by her colleague

Via The Post Millennial

When faced with building criticism of the “1619 Project,” coming from both within her own newspaper, the White House, and beyond, creator Nikole Hannah-Jones lost her mind.

The Washington Post has revealed that Hannah-Jones, the founder of the “1619 Project” became furious when faced with criticism from one of her colleagues over the revisionist project that attempts to link the founding of America to slavery, and suggests that the “true” founding in America was in 1619. Bret Stephens wrote about his dismay with the “1619 Project” in the paper of record that ran the essays in the first place, The New York Times.

Hannah Jones reportedly became furious when Stephen’s oped came out. “She sent vitriolic emails to both Kingsbury and Stephens ahead of publication. She also tweeted that efforts to discredit her work ‘put me in a long tradition of [Black women] who failed to know their places.’ She changed her Twitter bio to ‘slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress’— a reference to the trailblazing journalist Ida B. Wells, whom the Times slurred with those same words in 1894.”

The New York Times’ “1619 Project” emerged into a landscape of discourse that welcomed it uncritically. The leftist media pundits and advocates that took up the scholarly essays on slavery and civil rights were proponents of the project. The mistakes were only noted after the essays made their way through the intellectual and media community.

By the time the full scope of this revisionist history project hit the White House, it had already been lauded and praised to the point where it had received a Pulitzer Prize.

Now that the dust has settled, and the intelligentsia isn’t falling all over themselves to say nice things about the project with so many major historical errors, critics are calling for the revocation of the Prize. Glen Loury, as well as additional scholars, came out against the project due to its factual errors.

They wrote: “Prominent historians, most of them deeply sympathetic to the Project’s goal of bringing the African American experience more fully into our understanding of the American past, nevertheless felt obliged to point out, in public statements beginning in September 2019, the Project’s serious factual errors, specious generalizations, and forced interpretations. Hannah-Jones did not refute these criticisms or answer them in a respectful or meaningful way. Instead, she dismissed them.”

Read the entire article HERE.

Look Out: The Woke Education Mob is Coming After “Racist” Gifted Programs

Via The New American

The “social justice” brigade in education isn’t just making American children hate their country and themselves; it’s making our nation dumber.

A recent article published at NBC News encapsulates the anti-learning mentality at the heart of the Left’s education agenda.

The piece is titled “America’s gifted education programs have a race problem. Can it be fixed?” and features a description claiming that “White children and those from wealthy families are more likely to be identified as ‘gifted’ — despite decades of effort to make these programs more equal.”

The author, Danielle Dreilinger, who has a track record of writing about pet left-wing issues such as feminist history, diversity, and gentrification, makes the case that gifted education is problematic because such programs overrepresent white students:

Nearly 60 percent of students in gifted education are white, according to the most recent federal data, compared to 50 percent of public school enrollment overall. Black students, in contrast, made up 9 percent of students in gifted education, although they were 15 percent of the overall student population.

Many factors contribute to this disparity. Gifted education has racism in its roots: Lewis Terman, the psychologist who in the 1910s popularized the concept of “IQ” that became the foundation of gifted testing, was a eugenicist. And admissions for gifted programs tend to favor children with wealthy, educated parents, who are more likely to be white.

Dreilinger then goes on to argue in favor of policies that balance the proportion of white-to-minority students in gifted programs. She also believes tests to determine whether students are gifted should be updated to not exclusively measure “gifted” indicators that allegedly favor whites.

“For instance: Using achievement tests, which better measure a child’s schooling and home resources than their potential,” Dreilinger suggests. “Measuring disadvantaged kids against a national norm instead of against other kids like them. Testing too young — a 4-year-old can have a bad day, and the results don’t necessarily hold over time.”

Dreilinger prepared her article in collaboration with the Hechinger Report, a “nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.”

Like most on the political spectrum who bemoan the lack of equality or proportionality in the representation of whatever sphere of life they’re looking at, Dreilinger and her associates at the Hechinger Report see “institutionalized” or “systemic” racism where none exists. There is nothing in the law today that sends minorities to the back of the bus and whites to the front. There are no school policies saying “give white students first priority” for entry into gifted programs.

Read the entire article HERE.

Senate To Be Replaced With Room Full Of Monkeys Throwing Feces

Via The Babylon Bee (Satire)

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In an emergency, overnight referendum, the American people voted on Thursday to replace the United States Senate with a room full of monkeys throwing feces. The measure passed with 57% of the vote. 22% of voters thought the Senate should be replaced by barking seals, while 17% voted that the replacement should be the pit of venomous snakes from Indiana Jones. 3.97% voted that Senate members be replaced by screaming goats. “About 100 people” voted for the current Senators to keep their jobs, with this tiny voting bloc centered in Washington, D.C.

Highland Ape Rescue out of West Virginia will be teaming up with Cornwell Primate farms to supply hundreds of monkeys and apes to the Senate. The animals will be fed a nutritious mixture of foods that produce easily throwable feces. Protective glass will be put up around the Senate for camera crews to safely film, but anyone being interviewed by the new senators will have to sit in the middle of the poo-flinging octagon, coming under a heavy barrage of projectile excrement.

“It will be a huge improvement from how things were before,” said ape trainer, Marlena Henwick. “No more 10-12 hour hearings. With these monkeys, all the fecal projectiles will have been flung in under 30 minutes. One and done.”

The recently replaced senators will be placed on display at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. for families to observe and zoologists to study.

Check out all of the Bee’s takes on politics and society HERE.

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