Dearest Americans especially those of you who have discovered Dennis Prager over the years.
I met Dennis when he was advertising things conservative in public at the Minnesota State Fair in about the 2000s roughly when John Kerry, that champion creep from Massachusetts who won dishonesty to his politics selling lies about his time in and around the Korean War. Kerry’s lies about his times in Korea were profound enough to make him a big man Dem.
I’m too old to remember his corrupt details of his corruption in Korea, but I do remember, unlike Minnesota of those days, his state of Massachusetts was and had been thoroughly corrupt for a decade or three and so lifted Kerry as a Dem.
I had been to the USSR on two occasions before I met conservative Dennis Prager at those Minnesota State Fairs.
He was Jewish speaking conservative at the State Fair as I was passing by that 20 or so years ago. I had been teaching Russian and “Senior Social Studies” over a period of twelve years until the time I was fired by assistant superintendent of Minneapolis School, Harry Vakos. (He didn’t like folks teaching Russian.) I was wonderfully fluent in the language back then.
When in high school in the 1950s, I was certain our U.S. would wind up with a war with the fascist communist nation, the USSR. When reaching college I was determined to learn Russian….(one of the best decisions I ever made!) for I was certain there would be a major war with the USSR when it was Stalin like. (Thank God, It Didn’t Happen, directly!)
This Dennis Prager spoke conservatively….that first visit…. Profoundly! I had never heard a GOPer with such power and Truth about our USA political matters.
I was beginning my hobby gardening landscape business. I loved landscaping almost as much as I loved speaking Russian. It turned out Mr. Prager had learned Russian also….and had been there. I was planning to review the Horticultural areas of the state fair when I happened to stop out of the blue to see what the guy was preaching.
I was a voting Republican. The only Presidential Dem figure I had ever voted for was John Kennedy. I had never heard a preacher speak conservative matters in public in my life. Dennis Prager was, is, a gift with his speaking…persuasive, powerful, truthful, and conservative…almost like a preacher. I returned again and again each day for a couple of years at the Minnesota State Fair just to listen to PRAGER IN PERSON, and Prager ever since at the RADIO.
I joined the Minnesota Prager Discussion Group in some time AD2000 when I began my writings on this page.
THANK YOU, DENNIS. GOD BLESS YOU FOR THE GIFTS YOU HAVE BEEN GIVING US AMERICANS OPPORTUNITIES TO THINK IN THE GREAT AMERICAN WAY!
I taught Russian and Social Studies for high schoolers for ten years here in Minneapolis. WE HAD A GOOD TIME IN SCHOOL THEN!
GOD BLESS YOU, DENNIS. YOU ARE BLESSING AMERICA TO KNOW WHAT BLESSINGS ARE.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR NAME AND BEING ALL OF THESE YEARS. FROM GLENN HERBERT RAY!
I’ve written at some length about the suicide of academic history (which I’m going to expand and turn into a longer journal article eventually), but for now take in the latest grim statistics from the latest issue of the Middle West Review, where editor-in-chief John Lauck fills in some of the numbers in “The Ongoing History Crisis“:
Around the Midwest, the news from history departments is grim, even at larger institutions. Iowa State University’s history department has been told by the ISU administration that its faculty needs to shrink from 20 to 8. The ISU doctoral program in rural history, a key contributor to Midwestern studies, is also being shuttered. The University of Iowa’s full time history faculty has declined from 26 to 16 in about ten years. University of Missouri: 30 down to 21 (over the past decade); University of Kansas: 35 down to 24 (since 2017); The Ohio State University (system): 79 down to 62 (since 2008); University of Minnesota: 46 down to 40 (in ten years); University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: 46 down to 36 (since 2012); University ofIllinois Chicago: 32 down to 20 (from 2005–2020). Smaller universities are also seeing the loss of history faculty: Emporia State University: 7 down to 4 (over a decade); University of North Dakota: 10 down to 5 (in five years); Grand Valley State University: 31 down to 27 (in ten years); University of South Dakota: 10 down to 7 (in five years); South Dakota State University: 7 down to 4 (in five years); University of Nebraska-Omaha: 15 down to 11 (in ten years); St. Cloud State University: 10 down to 6 (in 6 years); St. Olaf College: 12 down to 7 (in ten years); Central Michigan University: 22 down to 15 (in seven years); Miami University of Ohio: 29 down to 22 (since 2015); Ohio University: 31 down to 25 (since 2017); University of Cincinnati: 30 down to 21 (in ten years); Kent State University: 15 down to 12 (since 2008); University of Missouri-Kansas City: 17 down to 8 (in 6 years); Minnesota State University, Mankato: 11 down to 9 (since 2010); University of Missouri-St. Louis: 14 down to 8 (since 2016); Truman State University: 15 down to 4 (since 2013); Indiana State University: 16 down to 13 (since 2015); Marquette University: 21 down to 16 (since 2017); University of Toledo: 12 down to 5 (in a decade). The cuts extend beyond faculty. Central Michigan University lost the Michigan Historical Review, a journal it oversaw for decades. Truman State lost Truman State University Press, which closed in 2021. Emporia State lost its Center for Great Plains Studies. The journal Studies in Midwestern History at Grand Valley State fizzled out. Long-running collaborative history conferences such as the Missouri Valley History Conference and the Mid-America Conference on History have also been terminated.
Most of the veteran historians who have been cut or downsized are not finding jobs at other institutions because there are none, as newly-minted historians know very well. Between 2019 and 2020 1,799 historians earned their PhDs and only 175 of them are now employed as full-time faculty members. In recent years the number of job listings in history has dropped to the lowest number since the American Historical Association started keeping records.
Why is this happening? Lauck dares to hint at the reasons:
Despite all the bad news from the academic world of history, the public support for studying history, it seems, is still strong. Many Americans want their children to know history and to use it to inform and energize civic life. They do not want history twisted for ideological ends, but instead tapped as a source of knowledge and a method of thinking through evidence and reaching balanced conclusions. This public support should be leveraged to stop the collapse of the profession of history and to rebuild it as a vibrant field. [Emphasis added.]
You can expect Lauck to be hounded and cancelled in three, two. . .
Compassion is not compassion when it is manipulated to fulfill a corporate socialist agenda of turning America’s cities into high-tech pens for human livestock and depopulating rural areas.
Compassion is one of the greatest of human virtues. But effective compassion comes with an obligation to do more than what merely feels and sounds good. Public policies motivated by compassion must also consider the full complexity of the challenge—the unintended consequences and the reality of human nature—and strike a balance between what is desired and what is possible. Often the most beneficial expressions of compassion appear harsh and punitive, yet in offering more lasting and comprehensive solutions, do more to alleviate human suffering.
Without taking a balanced and holistic approach to compassion, special interests hijack public policy and reap perpetual profits working on problems that never go away. For them, ineffective compassion is good business. But it leaves behind a wasteland.
If envy and resentment are the currency of the Left—driving, as it does, their attacks on privilege and their demands for equity—then compassion is the gold that backs their currency. Emotional appeals to voters and politicians demanding displays of compassion are the means by which the Left claims the moral high ground. And in those appeals, and the misguided policies that result, entire industries are created—industries populated by individuals whose careers depend on perpetuating the fraud.
In many cases, the consequences of unbalanced compassion are obvious, as anyone can see if they visit the coastal cities of California. It was compassion that motivated state legislators to decriminalize hard drug addiction, now dubbed “substance use disorder.” Compassion was the moral justification to empty California’s prisons and downgrade property and drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.
Compassion compelled politicians and judges to rewrite laws that kept mentally ill people safely off the streets.
Compassion was the bludgeon that beat down objections to the disastrous “housing first” rule, which denies funding for drug treatment or job training until free housing—with no conditions for entry—are provided to homeless people. And “compassion” pressured local and state authorities to forego inexpensive shelters in favor of more “equitable” apartment complexes, brand new and located in expensive neighborhoods, at a cost of over $500,000 per unit.
None of this is compassionate, of course. The result of these failed policies are hundreds of thousands of homeless Americans, prey for criminals, desperate for drugs, many of them psychotic, waiting for free housing that costs so much that nothing like an adequate number gets built. They wait, untreated, unaccountable, and dying on the streets. The cities they’ve overrun are often financially ruined, as billions are squandered on compassion-driven policies that merely make the problems of crime and homelessness worse. Entire neighborhoods have become unsanitary and unsafe.
Destroying Rural Landscapes and Livelihoods
Misguided compassion isn’t limited to a few blue cities, however. It has also been weaponized to destroy rural America. Again, California provides a cautionary example. Through manipulative appeals to compassion for wildlife and trees, politicians have been pressured into regulating California’s annual timber harvest down to less than one-quarter of what it was as recently as the 1990s. At the same time, and for similar compassionate reasons, Californians have become extremely adept at extinguishing wildfires, while making it nearly impossible to do controlled burns, mechanical thinning of undergrowth, or graze livestock in the forests—all things known to minimize the likelihood of wildfires.
Here again the consequences of unmoored, compassion-driven policy are devastating. California’s forests are tinderboxes, with trees that are on average at least five times as dense as they’ve been for millennia, along with overgrown underbrush that small, natural fires used to keep in check. When superfires rage through these forests they leave behind a level of destruction with no precedent in history. Naturally, the impulse for those who helped cause it is to blame climate change. But the real culprit is misguided compassion that leads to policy decisions that have precisely the opposite effect of what was intended.
Compassion ran amok is also at work in California’s rivers. The reason native salmon remain endangered has little to do with dams and reservoirs blocking their passage to spawning grounds. Every year, nine fish hatcheries operated by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, along with a few more operated by federal agencies, harvest salmon eggs and hatch millions of salmon fry. Once they get big enough, the young salmon are released into the rivers where striped bass, a voracious nonnative species, eat them. But for some reason, these officials believe striped bass also require compassion.
This is misguided compassion at its worst. It is a no-win scenario. Instead of declaring open season on striped bass, whereby anglers would quickly reduce their population to levels no longer constituting a genocidal threat to salmon, or accepting the demise of the salmon, wildlife biologists in California are exploring ways to redesign and micromanage riparian environments to facilitate salmon and bass living together. Altering aquatic vegetation, and carefully timing stream and river volume and temperature, are ways the biologists are attempting this compassionate ecological compromise. Unsurprisingly, it isn’t working. But it has created a lot of jobs.
In the meantime, despite decades of failure, the compassionate strategy requires more water to run through California’s rivers during storms. Of the water that remains in reservoir storage, releases are timed around concerns like increased river flow and lower river temperature rather than the water needs of Californians. One may wonder how this affects California’s farmers. That’s a good question. Farms are systematically eliminated as millions of acres of irrigated farmland come out of production to “save” the salmon.
Inviting Lawless Anarchy—Nowhere is Exempt
The worst compassionate overreach of all can be found in the story of what’s happening in California’s far north, where cartels have taken over most of the drug industry. A recent interview on California Insider with investigative reporter Jorge Ventura, “How Cartels Successfully Take Over Northern California,” offered a troubling peek into what’s happening in the state’s far north. It should come as no surprise that international drug cartels, with billion-dollar budgets and armies of hired killers, can overwhelm the resources of rural police and sheriff departments. But it is nonetheless surprising to see it happening in one of the most pristine corners of America.
In the name of compassion, the international border with Mexico has been thrown wide open, making it easy for cartels to import workers—dubbed “trimmigrants” because they’re put to work trimming marijuana buds. Mexican, Chinese, and Laotian gangs have set up operations in California’s northernmost counties. The Laotian story offers yet another twist on out-of-control compassion, because their leaders have cleverly purchased land on which to grow marijuana. Illegal cultivation on private land was compassionately recategorized a misdemeanor in California, whereas growing illegally on public land (such as in national forests) remains a felony.
Laotian gangs have brought with them thousands of workers and have illegally subdivided private parcels to house them. They have engaged in multiple title transfers to make it difficult to track down the property owners and enforce zoning regulations and code violations. These tactics, again, overwhelm the resources of a rural county’s code enforcement department, which may only employ one or two people. And when one county attempted to stop the gangs from illegally transporting water to irrigate their marijuana plants, the Laotians alleged the water was for their community, accused the county of racism, and with the help of a high-priced San Francisco-based attorney, got the charges dismissed.
In California’s far north, compassionate environmentalists deny water to law-abiding farmers while drug gangs steal it. These gangs include people of color, so compassion demands forbearance. Compassion for wildlife and trees prevents ranching or logging, depopulating the region of its productive ranchers and loggers. Compassion even drives out legal marijuana farmers. Yet illicit operations thrive. A recent comment by the inimitable character Beth on the series “Yellowstone” says it all: “They want the land. That’s all you have to understand.”
The environmentalist movement has also been taken over by special interests who want the land. Once the cartels have driven out the productive residents of California’s far north, environmentalists will then deal with the cartels. Policies this cynical are practically treasonous. But what else explains the failure of state and federal authorities to end this anarchy?
Compassionate policies are meaningless or harmful if they aren’t validated by results and accountability. There are compassionate solutions to homelessness, just as there are compassionate solutions to wildlife management. But they require hard choices, and they require compassion for everyone. There are the homeless, but also there are all those people who live and work among the homeless whose taxes pay for homeless programs. There are the animals and fishes, but also there are loggers and ranchers and farmers, and millions of people who rely on them.
Compassion is not compassion when it is manipulated to fulfill a corporate socialist agenda of turning America’s cities into high-tech pens for human livestock and depopulating rural areas. Every law, and every expenditure, promoted in the name of “compassion” must first be evaluated in this context. There are humane solutions to housing challenges and realistic solutions to environmental challenges. Finding them is hard and selling them to voters is even harder. But that is what true compassion requires.
Multiple polls conclude that upwards of 70 percent of Americans think our elections are filled with fraud. But we’re learning it’s deeper and more organized than just a few thousand mules dropping fake ballots into election boxes.
The corruption involves both political parties. Big Tech manipulates search engine results, and takes down “dangerous” websites. With Elon Musk’s revelations, we now see that our own FBI is working actively with Twitter to censor conservatives and silence dissenting speech. It’s next to certain that Twitter wasn’t the only social media giant the FBI was giving orders to. And the mainstream media are all in on ridiculing, dismissing, or attacking people willing to speak out.
Anyone who floats the idea that the Republican red wave disappeared because of poor GOP tactics, or inadequate candidates, is either stupid or part of this conspiracy. In fact, it’s an excellent “RINO detector”!
Any “conservative” news organization that is not focusing 100 percent on the corruption that has been unearthed in Maricopa County is complicit.
The left and their RINO allies, along with who-knows-how-many other corporate and foreign actors, have set up the most complicated electoral fraud system in history. Every step of the voting process — from who is allowed to vote, how they vote, how the votes are tallied, to how the results are reported — is compromised. They are so far into their corruption that being exposed is not an option. They will do literally anything to avoid being caught.
A good place to start is with the voter rolls.
They are so rife with inaccuracies, full of outdated and blatantly false information, that no election can be considered safe. The data are completely unsecured and can be manipulated at will. And most efforts to clean up the rolls are either ignored or done so slowly or incompletely as to be useless.
One county in Arizona noted “42,000 changes to the election rolls within weeks of the election — most were illegal. 21,000 new voters added to the election rolls, within 29 days of the election — almost every one is illegal. 8,000 voters appear to live in a business — each one would be illegal. 1,951 people received ballots at one address, and then voted from a different address — every one is illegal. The Republican candidate — with an 11-point lead in the polls — lost by around 21,000 votes to a woman who was afraid to debate her!”
Absentee ballots are the currency of election fraud.
When you can manipulate the voting rolls, you can easily create “floating ballots” in states where absentee ballots are mailed out to every voter. Just change a digit in the ZIP code, and a corrupt postal worker can easily gather up those ballots when they return as undeliverable. All you have to do is line up a buddy at the Post Office and send incorrectly addressed ballots to his ZIP code.
Another method is to change or delete box numbers for apartment buildings or college campuses. Again, when they come back as undeliverable, they can be snapped up to be saved up for Election Day. If it looks as though your candidate is losing by 2,000 votes, just fill in 2,500, and voilà: victory!
The addresses in the voter rolls need only be changed for a single day so the ballots can go to the wrong addresses, and the data are changed back. “In a real-life example, this month, we found a county that changed 31,500 zip codes, yet the voter remained at the same address.”
There’s no way to know this is happening unless someone happens to download the manipulated data at the right time. An almost undetectable crime.
Another type of phantom voter is someone on the rolls who hasn’t voted in the last two or three elections. Send an absentee ballot for him at a wrong address, and vote for him. Heard cases where in-person voters are told on Election Day that they’ve already voted? Their absentee ballot was filled out by someone else first.
There’s a great video from 2020 with over a million views, focusing on Michigan vote-tabulating procedures, which are similar in most of the rest of the country. Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, MIT Ph.D., explains the issues affecting voting system accuracy and exposes a “Weighted Race Feature” in the actual user manual for “Global Election Systems” software that allows system operators to change votes by any percentage for any candidate.
This “feature” is present in almost all voting systems and is seen as early as 2001.
In one case, Ayyadurai’s team analyzed early voting and Election Day voting in four counties in the 2020 Michigan election. They concluded that in three major counties, Trump’s votes were decreased by at least 69,000, and Biden’s votes were increased by 69,000, using a computer algorithm within the voting machine software.
At the 21:00 mark, they explain how it happened. In Michigan, you can vote by selecting individual candidates or simply choose to vote for one political party or the other. Obviously, a precinct with a lot of Republican-party-line voters would also have a lot of Republicans chosen by the vote-in-each-contest voters. But somehow, 2020 data showed that the more Republican-leaning the precinct, the more votes were different from the one-party voters vs. the individual voters — always in favor of Biden! This demonstrates likely use of the weighted race feature, which was absent in a predominantly Democrat county.
Even more damning is that when the data are charted, the line is perfectly straight, and the slope of the line in each county is very similar to the others. This could not happen without a mathematical formula being applied to the actual number of votes.
So what can be done? Looking up individual entries on voter rolls, comparing them to local property records for non-existing addresses, and submitting changes to the local Boards of Elections would take hundreds of years.
Fractal computing to the rescue.
Now fraud-savvy groups are analyzing voter rolls and using “fractal computing” to compare them to other data — county property records that show the type of building at each address so a voter can’t register if his address is a vacant lot or a convenience store, post office databases that show who has moved out of state, or a deceased voter who is listed as alive, then votes, then goes back to being deceased the next day. What if a single house with one bathroom has 35 people listed as living there?
“One team in Wisconsin challenged almost 400,000 alleged phantoms. A Georgia team, in one county, 37,000.”
The one thing in common among the candidates victimized by this level of fraud is not that they are Republicans, but that they are MAGA conservatives. It’s clear that both parties use these tactics to favor Democrats and RINOs.
We need voter ID and permanent voter registration cards, publically viewable software, hand-marked paper ballots, and all data to be kept for public viewing.
If we expect the RINOs to actively work to end election fraud, we are just plain stupid. We must insist on new leadership for the RNC, support opposition to Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House, and hope that turtle McConnell is ousted as the Senate minority leader. And do everything we can to support Kari Lake in her lawsuit to overturn the Arizona gubernatorial election.
Jack Gleason is a conservative political writer. For other websites, to share inside information for important stories, article requests, or comments, contact him at jackgleason9@protonmail.com.
The First Amendment isn’t dying because state actors and a political party colluded with giant tech platforms and media outlets to censor speech and sabotage elections. All of that is just a byproduct of a corrosive trend. It’s clear to me that many Americans have stopped idealizing free expression. They don’t view it as a neutral value or societal good. Not even a platitude. They definitely don’t believe in counterspeech doctrine. Some people, in fact, are fine with compelling their fellow citizens to say things.
Technocrats, “journalists,” the president, and self-styled experts often view unfettered speech as a cancer that threatens “diversity” or “social justice” or “democracy” or “the environment” or “safety” or “unions” or dozens of other issues that are perched high above speech in the hierarchy of modern values. The First Amendment doesn’t work because guys in powdered wigs wrote down words — as Scalia once said, every “banana republic in the world has a bill of rights” — but because society embraces its underlying values, as they did due process or property rights. The spirit of the thing matters.
You don’t have to be a free-speech absolutist to believe that banning the president from tweeting on an allegedly neutral platform undermines the spirit of open discourse.
We are now often a society of self-censors, which, as Orwell noted, is as pernicious as any other variant. Sure, you can have your say, the leftist assures you. You just can’t have it on any platform or outlet with wide reach. Just look at the thermonuclear meltdown on the left over the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk — a man whose sin is professing to believe what any self-respecting liberal did a decade ago.
Orwell, though, was concerned that independent journalists and publishers would “keep certain topics out of print” not because they were “frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion.” The illiberal ideologues being churned out by j-schools these days aren’t nervous about consumer blowback. I suspect reporters and producers at ABC, CBS, and NBC are not refusing to cover the “Twitter Files” because they’re trying to hide the truth, but because they can’t comprehend why social media colluding with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the White House to quash stories in the preservation of “democracy” is newsworthy to begin with.
It is. In 2017, I wrote about Trump’s threats to revoke NBC’s broadcast license for spreading fake news. Of course, NBC News has no constitutional right to that license, but threatening your critics clearly conflicts with once-accepted principles of free discourse. The same goes for Trump’s executive order empowering the White House to collect complaints of “online censorship.” Oh, how distressed liberals were over this attack on free speech.
Yet, when, in July of 2021, Jen Psaki casually noted that the White House had been “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation,” there was not a peep from any of them. Biden Communications Director Kate Bedingfield later contended that social media companies “should be held accountable” for the opinions of commenters, singling out “conservative outlets who are creating irresponsible content.” Joe Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” by allowing people to have their say. This is before the DHS tried to set up a Ministry of Truth.
On what constitutional grounds did the executive branch — which has the power to punish companies — get involved in monitoring the opinions of citizens on private outlets? Not a single champion of “democracy” thought to ask. (Unlike many conservatives, I am a fan of Section 230, which allows sites to host third-party content without worrying about being sued. It restrains litigiousness and allows a chaotic internet to exist. If legislators in 1996 had understood the open nature of the project, we would not have this internet. Handing government bureaucrats more power to arbitrate fairness by removing these protections — as if the state has ever bolstered dissent — would be a tragic miscalculation.)
In 1918, Woodrow Wilson and his allies passed the Sedition Act, empowering the postmaster general to censor letters, pamphlets, and books over the threat of “false reports or false statements” — which all sounds quite familiar. The authoritarian mission creep soon led to arrests, including that of a socialist presidential candidate. But Wilson didn’t only fight the scourge of misinformation and fake news with laws and cops, he did it with the help of powerful newspaper owners and business interests. The blacklisting of actors and directors by big studios in the 1950s wasn’t compelled by law, it was voluntary.
Throughout history, authoritarians have claimed that liberty must be subdued because of some perilous historical moment. That moment is now every time Democrats don’t get their way. If these people have no problem with the state and corporations that control the public square working together to dictate appropriate speech, how long is it before the idea of curbing “dangerous” “disinformation” through legislation is normalized? Maybe this iteration of the Supreme Court will offer a temporary bulwark against attacks on liberalism, but at some point, if a majority of voters stop caring, it won’t matter who owns Twitter or who sits on the court. You can’t compel people to be free.
No, we’re not going to be Stalinist Russia. We’re probably going end up much like modern Europe, a less vibrant, less free, less dynamic place. Which is bad enough. Don’t worry, you’ll still get to say whatever you want. You just won’t be able to say it anywhere important.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country.
Fascism is a political ideology which, unfortunately, is mischaracterized by both media and academia. For example, Wikipedia describes fascism as, “A far right, authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, central autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.”
The definition is mostly correct, except for the first words, claiming fascism is a “far right” ideology. Hitler was considered a fascist but his party, contrary to the political science experts (disguised as journalists), was far left. The Nazi Party is the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party. Note the name “socialist,” an ideology of the left, not the right.
Another famous fascist, Benito Mussolini further clarified, “Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.”
That’s where America is now, corporate and government power merging into a totalitarian behemoth, crushing any and all dissent. Note that this isn’t nationalizing private corporations as in Venezuela and Cuba, but it’s the government still controlling corporations through coercion and collaboration.
Take for example the recent Twitter File revelations. The federal government took control of big tech and social media giants to control free speech and dissent. It was more than simply the Biden campaign pressuring Twitter. The FBI had weekly meetings with social media corporations to warn them of “Russian interference” or “hack and leak operations,” which they knew very well were nothing of the sort.
And despite denials, Biden administration officials may still be meeting with media executives. Who is on President Biden’s guest list during the many weeks he is at one of his Delaware vacation homes?
The result was social media suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which would have likely altered the 2020 presidential election outcome. Specifically, “16% of Biden voters would have voted differently if Hunter Biden laptop story was not suppressed by media, big tech.” In an election decided by about 50,000 votes in a few swing districts, this was obvious election interference. And it wasn’t only the FBI, but also the Department of Homeland Security.
Executives from Facebook and Twitter, including the recently fired head of Trust & Safety Vijaya Gadde, held regular meetings with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to discuss censorship on a wide range of topics, including the withdrawal from Afghanistan, coronavirus, and “racial justice,” according to leaked documents.
Further revelations from Twitter Files part two noted, “Teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.”
This is called “shadow banning”, a practice that Twitter executives, under oath before Congress, denied. Elon Musk, opening the windows at Twitter headquarters, discovered that the social media giant was “visibility filtering,” a euphemism for shadow banning.
Will any former Twitter executives be prosecuted for lying to Congress? Fat chance. The DOJ practices its own form of shadow banning, only prosecuting Trump supporters and opponents of the ruling class, emulating the “justice” systems of banana republics.
Rep Adam Schiff provided a recent illuminating example of government controlling a private organization by demanding censorship, in violation of the First Amendment. As tweeted by his colleague Rep Diana Harshbarger,
!!Breaking !! @AdamSchiff is circulating a letter urging @facebook to maintain their ban of President Trump’s account. The left is desperate for power and is willing to deploy CCP-style censorship tactics to silence any opposition. This is the real threat to democracy.
Government, through big tech and social media, is using banning, algorithms, or censorship to push its political world view while suppressing all dissent. This is one of many ways to rig an election, by controlling the campaigns and narratives by blocking or promoting information and news.
Elon Musk discovered and acknowledged, “US political candidates were blacklisted while running for office.” Anyone want to guess which political party these candidates belonged to? Did it extend internationally, as in Brazil? Musk believes that is “possible.” Government in bed with corporations.
Twitter is the only social media giant shining a light on the tech sector’s willing participation in government fascism. What about Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Instagram? Will any sunlight shine on their similar practices?
No way, unless Elon Musk or someone else who supports American liberty and the US Constitution purchases these companies. Most elected Republicans have no interest in this entire topic as they too benefit from this new American fascism. Any bets that Mitch McConnell, Liz Cheney, Kevin McCarthy, or their staff told social media giants who to “visibility filter”?
It is not only Twitter and Facebook, but other big media organizations that have merged with the government, at least the Democrats and Republican establishment. Think of the leaks from the FBI, CIA, and DOJ to favored reporters at the New York Times or Washington Post, all to advance a favored narrative.
This would include the myriad bogus stories about candidate or President Trump as a Russian asset. How many leaks came from the Mueller Special Counsel team, a government entity, colluding with big media to shape public perception and the news narrative? Or from past and present government employees, all receiving either a government salary or pension, given an open forum on cable news shows to gaslight the public that the Hunter Biden laptop story was “classic Russian disinformation” when these former intelligence directors and agencies knew otherwise. Again, the merger of government and corporate power.
What meetings and influence have the CDC and NIH had on the COVID narrative, banning and shaming anyone who dared to question COVID dogma of vaccines being “safe and effective,” or that vaccines prevent infection and transmission, or that masks and distancing were effective, and that young healthy individuals dropping dead in record numbers is all “disinformation”?
Did Doctors Fauci and Walensky or their underlings, also meet with Twitter censors? Or did the FBI and DHS handle this for them? What role did Dr Fauci’s daughter play in any of this as she conveniently worked at Twitter? Just as the FBI’s general counsel and Spygate attorney James Baker conveniently moved to Twitter, obstructing the recent Twitter releases, shielding the FBI from scrutiny. The swamp indeed runs deep.
We may soon find out about COVID collusion as Elon Musk just tweeted, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”, suggesting another Twitter release focusing on COVID narrative manipulation.
Lastly there are other corporations bowing to the government agenda. Investment entities such as BlackRock, are pushing ESG and “stakeholder capitalism,” pet projects of Democrats and some Republicans. How many corporations are pushing the ruling establishment’s doctrine on climate change, guns, or LGBT? How many banks have cancelled the accounts of those who do not share the political beliefs of the ruling class? Are those corporations being pressured by the government to promote these political positions, even if detrimental to their business interests?
It’s clear that the US government, both on the federal and state level, worked with social and traditional media to censor and suppress free speech, push favored agenda, punish political opponents, and influence elections, all in violation of the First Amendment.
This is fascism, the merger of government and corporate power. Twitter is only the tip of the iceberg. Will those in charge probe other media and corporate collusion? Doubtful as they have no interest in exposing their own malfeasance.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump are the two lone voices shining a light on the growing American fascism. Will anything change beyond Twitter becoming more of a fair and honest platform? Will Republicans push for more transparency, or do they enjoy the censorship as much as Democrats?
Is their hope for America, freedom of speech, and fair elections? Or are we turning into the United States of Fascist America?
When they take control of the House, Republicans have said that they will investigate Joe Biden.
Democrats will not sit still for this and are already preparing to attack any investigations and any Republicans who are involved.
Republicans have made no secret of the fact that in the new Congress, they are planning to use their oversight powers to launch investigations of the Biden clan’s finances, the fiasco at the southern border, and the politicization DOJ/FBI – among other things.
They likely believe that their Democrat colleagues will sit still for this the same way that the Republicans did when they were attacked and demonized over the past six years.
And usual, they’d be wrong.
The Democrats have no intention of sitting quietly while the truth about the Bidens and their ties to China comes out. They intend to not only fight back, but to fire the first shots. As Admiral David Farragut said during the Civil War: “The best defense is a well-directed fire from your own guns.” They see this as a war and intend to fight to win. The Republicans have not yet learned this lesson.
Being early on the attack is nothing new for the Democrats. In 2008, a group of leftist/progressive activist political reporters, bloggers, academics, magazine authors, and policy types led by Ezra Klein formed a group called “Journolist.” Among other things, they reportedly coordinated talking points used in the media to unify the leftist messages attacking conservatives.
In it they explained how Klein’s group worked to kill any articles linking Barack Obama to racist sermons by Jeremiah Wright when the Obama family attended his church. Their chief tactic was to call anyone supporting the stories racists. Journolist members then denied being partisan propagandists, but outside the Fox News coverage, the Obama/Wright stories ceased in the mainstream press. Coincidentally, Democrats calling political opponents racists for any reason at all is a tactic that continues to this day.
More recently, the Biden administration tried to set up an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” that they called the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB). Leaked reports say that as early as September 2021, DHS Secretary Mayorkas had begun work on the DGB.
At first, Secretary Mayorkas said that the DGB would concentrate on disinformation from foreign adversaries and drug cartels. Later he said that the board would focus on international criminal organizations and human traffickers. But leaked documents indicated that from the beginning the DGB was designed to monitor (and intimidate?) the domestic free speech of American citizens on politically controversial subjects such as:
Election security and validity;
Efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines;
The usefulness of mask mandates;
The origins of the COVID-19 virus.
It’s likely that anything disadvantageous to the Democrats – would have been called “Disinformation” by the DGB. (First cousin to the KGB?)
Fortunately for Americans, the DGB was dropped due to massive pushback, but there are still issues. Sen. Josh Hawley complained that Mayorkas had lied to him about the DGB not meeting, when its steering committee had met on a weekly basis. Then, since Mayorkas repeatedly said the DGB would only be concerned with foreign entities – did he lie under oath to Congress when it also targeted Americans? And if so, will the Biden DOJ do anything about it?
The real tipping point for new censorship of conservatives came in 2022 when Republicans won the House of Representatives in the midterms. This made it necessary for the Democrats to take control the narrative so they could defend the Biden administration’s globalist agenda. Their plans were to implement information and perception warfare activities – with American voters as the targets and the media as their allies.
A November news report said that the Democrats had set up what they call a “Congressional Integrity Project” – basically a war room to turn the facts surrounding Biden’s corruption into simple political narratives. This as they feel that with a compliant press they can win a battle of perceptions more easily than they can a battle of facts. One thing they will do is call anything printed by the Republicans as coming from the typical Trump playbook of personal attacks (and racism). This, of course, comes from people who for the last six years have specialized in nothing else but personal attacks on Trump and any non-Democrats – calling them traitors, extremists, and racists.
Another article the Politico (D?), said that the “Congressional Integrity Project” was simply: “Investigating the investigators: Dem strategists to launch counterpunch to House GOP.” They said that it was a multi-million-dollar hub to counter any attacks shedding light on the Bidens, the Dem leadership, and the communist Chinese. They said: “investigate the investigators, expose their political motivations and the monied special interests supporting their work, and hold them accountable for ignoring the urgent priorities of all Americans in order to smear Joe Biden and do the political bidding of Trump and MAGA Republicans.” Translation – forget the truth and focus on how we present our fake talking points + Orange Man Bad. (A multi-million-dollar hub – they always seem to be extremely well funded.)
Along these lines, Biden’s White house recently dismissed the Hunter laptop stories as – Old News. Old News, while at the same time Democrats continue to go back centuries to find dirt on anyone, including Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson – if it serves their modern socialist propaganda purposes.
The Russians he said, had learned that in an information era they could count on deceiving only those who wanted to be deceived. Fortunately for them, he continued, these gullible individuals are extremely numerous. An addition to this would be – and you can count on the American press to keep them gullible and accepting of the socialist messaging.
There are two considerations here. First, much of this came out before Elon Musk released the Twitter emails that exposed the collusion between social media, the DNC, the Biden campaign, and possibly government agencies. But it sure fits the way they have always done business. Second, the empire is already striking back. The mainstream press is already working with/for the Democrats trying to downplay the Laptop from Hell scandal. Additionally, Wikipedia is reportedly considering removing entries on the collusion Twitter Files Elon Musk has released from their site. One reason they gave was that they were nothing new and had been ignored by the media.
Ignored by the media. There you have the Liberal media’s playbook and their most dangerous tool. First, they ignore an inconvenient story – then they say it never happened because they didn’t report it. And if you argue the point they (and all their friends) will call you extremists and racists.
As they say in advertising, if you’re explaining you’re losing. Democrats attack. The Republicans snivel and defend and never attack. That’s why no one pays any attention to their arguments. This must change if things have any chance of getting better.
Watching the influx of illegal aliens crossing our southern border daily, a reasonable man might conclude that we are living out the fevered dreams of a dystopian novel. The United States has lost a basic aspect of sovereignty. Control over its borders is a relic of the past.
In theory, the president of the United States is legally obligated to see that the laws are faithfully executed. In practice, however, President Biden and his administration would prefer not to.
They carry on the legacy of the Obama administration, but this time around it is so much worse. In retrospect, by contrast with Biden DHS Alejandro Mayorkas, Obama DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson looks like a decent public servant.
The capacity for outrage has limits before exhaustion sets in. Perhaps that is what they’re counting on. That and the averted eyes of the mainstream media.
How bad is it? It’s so bad that the New York Times now reports under the byline of three reporters “Mass Migrant Crossing Floods Texas Border Facilities” (“The arrival of up to 1,000 migrants, the latest big group to have crossed the border, was one of the largest single crossings in recent years in West Texas, which has seen a surge in migration”).
By contrast with the MSM, FOX News has intensely reported the story on a daily basis, mostly through the work of reporter Bill Melugin. Melugin’s Twitter feed is here. He has posted the almost unbelievable updates via Twitter (below).
MN Prager Discussion Group 