Walmart yanks “All Lives Matter” merchandise from its website

“Walmart is no longer selling ‘All Lives Matter’ clothing on its website after coming under fire for the merchandise, which references the Black Lives Matter movement and mantra.

The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer has removed those items sold by its third-party Marketplace vendors ‘indefinitely’ after some associates and customers raised concerns. ‘We fundamentally believe all lives do matter and every individual deserves respect,’ the company said in a written statement.

‘However, as we listened, we came to understand that the way some, but not all, people are using the phrase ‘All Lives Matter’ in the current environment intentionally minimized the focus on the painful reality of racial inequity.'”

SOURCE 

California’s Governor Forbids Christians From Singing in Church Houses

Golden State Christians have been ordered by California's governor to stop singing in church. This is a direct assault on the First Amendment, as I warned folks about in my new book, "Culture Jihad: How to Stop the Left From Killing a Nation."

"Californians are still free to attend their house of worship. But they’re forbidden from singing or chanting," read the lead paragraph in a story published by the Sacramento Bee.

The new guidance for places of worship was issued on July 1.

"Discontinue singing (in rehearsals, services, etc.), chanting, and other practices and performances where there is increased likelihood for transmission from contaminated exhaled droplets. Consider practicing these activities through alternative methods (such as internet streaming) that ensure individual congregation members perform these activities separately in their own homes," the 14-page order reads.

The previous guidelines only encouraged churches to "strongly consider" ending corporate worship, the Sacramento Bee reported.

The governor's office did not indicate how he intends to enforce the law. Can you imagine the optics of National Guard troops storming into California church houses and arresting choir members for singing, "A Mighty Fortress is Our God"?

Dr. Paul Chappell, the pastor of Lancaster Baptist Church, a mega-church north of Los Angeles, told The Todd Starnes Show that his congregation plans on singing even louder.

"First the state told us when to worship. Now they are telling us "how" to worship," he said. "We have been patient, and safe (even wearing masks). Our church will sing to the Lord Sunday. The heavens declare His glory and so will we."

It really is the only proper pastoral response to such an unconstitutional edict.

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Israel Orders Evangelical GOD TV Off Air

“Israel’s media watchdog said Sunday that it had withdrawn the broadcast licence from US-based evangelical network GOD TV, accusing it of seeking to target Jews with Christian content.

International Christian network’s GOD TV launched its Shelanu (Hebrew for ‘ours’) channel at the end of April on Israeli cable provider Hot, describing it as catering to Christians.

But the channel provoked an immediate outcry in Israel, with then-communications minister David Amsalem accusing it of being a ‘missionary channel’ seeking to convert Jews to Christianity.

… Israel enjoys vigorous support from evangelical movements in the United States but keeps a lid on missionary work in the Holy Land. While Israeli law only expressly forbids the giving of money or gifts to encourage conversions to another religion, missionary activities in general are closely monitored by the authorities and are offensive to many Israelis.”

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Finland's air force drops swastika emblem after century in use

Until recently the country’s Air Force Command emblem depicted a pair of wings around a swastika, a symbol which pre-dates its associations with Nazism.

The change was first observed by Teivo Teivainen, a politics professor at the University of Helsinki, who argued its negative associations made the swastika's ongoing use politically fraught.

Professor Teivainen, who has written widely on the issue, said using the swastika could cause difficulties for the Nato country, particularly if worn on the uniforms of deployed personnel.

“I have not found many reasonable arguments to support its military usefulness,” Mr Teivainen wrote on Twitter on Thursday.

The symbol’s association with Finland’s air force dates to its founding in 1918, when Swedish count Eric von Rosen donated a plane painted with swastikas to the newly independent country.

The German Nazi Party adopted the swastika as its logo in 1920.

Finland removed the swastika from its aircraft following a postwar armistice with the Soviet Union, but until recently the symbol remained on Air Force Command emblems and some flags and decorations.

A spokesman for Finland’s air force told the BBC, "as unit emblems are worn on uniform, it was considered impractical and unnecessary to continue using the old unit emblem, which had caused misunderstandings from time to time."

The current emblem of the air force is a circle of wings around a golden eagle, another symbol used by the force since 1945.

Professor Teivainen has coined a phrase in Finnish to explain how the use of a swastika could be problematic despite its innocent origin. Roughly translated, "visuaalinen natsahtavuusaste" means "how much something exhibits visual cues that are associated with Nazis".

“This is not a question about manipulating historical records by removing controversial symbols such as the swastika from museums or history books,” he wrote in 2016.

“This is about the way the Republic of Finland wants to present its armed forces today.

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Sky News cuts off ex-Met Police chief after he says officers have 'given up' trying to stop young black men carrying weapons and accuses BLM of aiming to destabilise society

Sky News has been accused of shutting down a former Scotland Yard chief for claiming Black Lives Matter is deliberately stirring up a false anti-police narrative.

Ex-chief superintendent Kevin Hurley claimed senior figures in the movement were waging a 'misinformation' campaign to 'destabilise and disrupt' society.

He also suggested the ugly clashes in Brixton on Wednesday night were products of Afro-Caribbean single parenting and said constables had 'given up' enforcing the law on young black Britons for fear of jeopardising their careers.

Anchor Adam Boulton challenged Mr Hurley and suggested it was unhelpful to view the violence through the prism of race - before later cutting him off entirely when the former top brass was in full flow.

The abrupt end to the interview sparked accusations online that Sky News did not want to air 'uncomfortable' opinions, but this has been vehemently denied by Boulton who insisted he was constricted by rigid time slots.

Reacting to the violence in Brixton, Mr Hurley, who also served as Surrey's Police and Crime Commissioner, said yesterday: 'The only way you're going to deal with this is with social intervention to get upstream and manage the problems that comes with single parenting, particularly among young African-Caribbean women.

'And I'm talking about intervening and supporting women when the children are three to four years of age, to prevent them going down this route of rebelliousness and often offending.'

He added: 'We've got into a vicious circle with police officers dealing with young black people, who always come to the perspective that the police are trying to suppress them.

'And the police very quickly come to learn that dealing with young black people is quite frankly aggravation that puts their careers and mortgages at risk.

'That's the reason why so many black youth are killing each other in London, because the police have given up trying to stop them carrying knives and guns and killing each other.'

Boulton picked Mr Hurley up on his claims, and retorted: 'Do you think it is really helpful at this time of heightened concern over Black Lives Matter to see this so clearly in racial terms.'

But the ex-police chief swatted away the anchor's critcism and insisted that 'this is not a BAME issue, this is an issue relating to people of West African heritage in terms of the relationship between the police and the public'.

He pressed on: 'There's an awful lot of misinformation going on about police killing black people in custody.

'Last year 16 people died for various reasons in police custody - largely from drug overdoses - of those 16, only one was black.

'Last year the police shot three people dead - only one was black. There is a narrative going on here, I think driven by people within the Black Lives Matter movement who want to destabilise and disrupt society.'

But as he went to start another sentence, Bolton suddenly interjected: 'Ok we're going to have to leave it there, thank you very much indeed,' and the video feed to Mr Hurley was cut off.

The hasty wrapping up of the interview was seized upon by many on Twitter, who hit out at the presenter directly.

But Boulton slapped down his critics and tweeted: 'I didn't (cut him off). But we are subject to automatic cut-offs for ad breaks, half hours, top of the hour and even the weather.

'We aim to give all guests the time to have their say and normally succeed.'

The presenter, who tweets in a personal capacity, also said: 'There have been incidents of bad crowd behaviour by all sorts of people around the UK, not just those singled out by Kevin Hurley.' 

Sky News declined to comment.

Some viewers took to Twitter to voice their outrage at Mr Hurley's comments.

Luke Hubbard, whose profile says he is a PhD student and hate crime researcher, said: 'This is absolute garbage from Kevin Hurley!'

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Leftist Wordplay

The "social justice" cultural revolutionaries change the definition of words to confuse and confound.

“We need to have a conversation about… [fill in any myriad of leftist social-justice causes]” is a popular tactic used by today’s “woke” culture that means precisely the opposite of what is suggested. As Power Line’s Steven Hayward puts it, “What ‘we need a conversation’ means in practice is, ‘You shut up and agree with the left.’” Or, in the parlance of “The Princess Bride’s” Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

This Orwellian tactic of subtly redefining words and terms is not new, but it has proven highly effective in both confusing people and intentionally conflating issues. It’s the same tactic used by Black Lives Matter. As we have repeatedly noted, if BLM was truly concerned about ending violence against black lives, then why the objection to focusing on the biggest causes of violence and injustice against blacks in America — the disproportionally high crime rate in black neighborhoods (almost entirely perpetrated by other blacks) and abortion (which takes exponentially more black lives than any other single factor)? It’s impossible to take a complaint or grievance seriously when those espousing it don’t actually mean what they’re saying. Once again, the BLM movement is not really about bettering the lives of black Americans but about pushing a neo-Marxist revolution.

Yet another example of this leftist wordplay is the term “inclusion.” This one is especially popular when a school, organization, or business seeks to justify its decision to dismiss or cancel an individual or relationship with someone with the “wrong” opinion. How many times have we seen the self-contradictory statement, “[So and so] was expelled/fired because they failed to uphold our school/company’s commitment to diversity and ‘inclusion’”? Logically, if leftists claim to be committed to “inclusion,” then how could they “exclude” anyone? The simple answer is that in the Left’s lexicon, “inclusion” refers not to a commitment to accept all individuals but rather to promote the exclusive idea that only the Left’s views are just and virtuous.

In the end, the rallying motto for conservatives concerned with upholding principles of truth and consistency in language might be Accurate Definitions Matter. For without a commitment to consistently accurate definitions, there can be no genuine conversations and no hope for unalloyed unity.

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Coronavirus: How Donald Trump created an uproar – and a new slogan for his supporters – with two words

Several days after the President used the term “Kung flu” at a rally in Tulsa, it continues to reverberate with both his supporters and opponents.

“It’s a disease that without question has more names than any disease in history,” Mr Trump said at the rally last Sunday, Australian time.

“I can name Kung Flu, I can name 19 different versions of names. Many call it a virus, which it is. Many call it a flu; what difference?”

His use of the words drew a widespread ongoing backlash as a racist slur against Asian-Americans.

By the time he reached his second rally in Phoenix on Tuesday, Mr Trump’s supporters were chanting the phrase before he had even opened his mouth.

“Kung flu — yeah,” he said on stage, to roars of approval from the young crowd. “Kung flu.”

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Reddit Purges 2,000+ Communities Including The_Donald

Reddit has purged some of the most popular communities on the site today after a recent announcement that they will be cracking down on “hate speech.” Over 2,000 communities were purged including the pro-Trump community r/The_Donald and the popular left-wing community r/ChapoTrapHouse.

Last year Reddit took $150m investment from the Communist Chinese, so these bans and the pivot away from freedom should not be a surprise to anyone. Reddit is not only purging thousands of communities from the site, but they are also banning users who “upvote” content that breaks their new “hate speech” rules. Meaning even if you don’t post the content yourself, Reddit will ban you if you engage with it.

“I have to admit that I’ve struggled with balancing my values as an American, and around free speech and free expression, with my values and the company’s values around common human decency,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said.

Perhaps all that communist Chinese money made his decision a little easier.

At Gab we saw this purge and wave of censorship coming years ago. Which is why we have been building the market-leading free speech social network that now has millions of users from around the world. We welcome everyone who is getting banned from Reddit–both on the left and the right ideologically– to join Gab.

Gab has a groups feature which is similar to Reddit’s subreddit functionality. Users have already set up a The_Donald group on Gab with 14,000 members. Get on Gab, and speak freely.

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Zuckerberg caves and says Facebook WILL ban hate speech in its ads and put warning labels on 'harmful' posts by public figures after nearly 100 advertisers boycotted the tech giant

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced new content policies for the platform, including tighter restrictions on advertising and labels for 'harmful' posts from public figures, following an advertising boycott campaign.

Zuckerberg said in a Facebook Live video on Friday that the company would begin labeling 'harmful' content from politicians that remains 'newsworthy'.

Though he did not name President Donald Trump, the policy comes in response to a campaign demanding Facebook impose tighter restrictions on 'misinformation' in the president's campaign ads, and on his inflammatory posts.

Twitter has already slapped warning labels on some of the president's tweets that it deemed abusive or threatening, and unlike Facebook, Twitter banned all political campaign ads.

Zuckerberg slammed the move when Twitter first labeled a Trump tweet, saying it wasn't up to social media companies to be the 'arbiters of truth' - but the Facebook CEO appears to have had a change of heart following the punishing advertiser boycott.

'We will soon start labeling some of the content we leave up because it is deemed newsworthy, so people can know when this is the case,' Zuckerberg said in the livestream.

Zuckerberg said in a Facebook Live video on Friday that the company would begin labeling 'harmful' content from politicians that remains 'newsworthy'

'We'll allow people to share this content to condemn it, just like we do with other problematic content, because this is an important part of how we discuss what's acceptable in our society - but we'll add a prompt to tell people that the content they're sharing may violate our policies,' he continued.

Zuckerberg also announced new policies cracking down on hateful language in ads, as well as guidelines on voting information.

'We already restrict certain types of content in ads that we allow in regular posts, but we want to do more to prohibit the kind of divisive and inflammatory language that has been used to sow discord,' Zuckerberg said.

'So today we're prohibiting a wider category of hateful content in ads. Specifically, we're expanding our ads policy to prohibit claims that people from a specific race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, gender identity or immigration status are a threat to the physical safety, health or survival of others,' he said.

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"The West Australian" blasted over racist Indigenous cartoon

The term "Aborigine" is NOT offensive.  It is the normal term for Australian blacks and is Latin for "from the beginning" -- so recognizes their priority.

And "Abo" is simply an abbreviation.  Australians are great abbreviators so "Abo" is a normal abbreviation with no offensive intentions

It is however true that some Leftists have recently pushed the Canadian term "First peoples" as an alternstive term.  Ironic that the term Aborigine says the same thing in Latin

And some Aborigines use their tribal name as an identification (Murri", Boori" etc.)  But such names are too specific to be generally useful.  "Boong" appears to have originally been a tribal name but is now a derogatory name for Aborigines generally


The West Australian newspaper is copping backlash after publishing a cartoon that refers to an Indigenous character using an offensive racial slur and compares them to a dog.

The Modesty Blaise comic, published yesterday, shows  characters discussing an Indigenous tracker who is trying to find them.

One character says they are being chased by “four men, all armed ... and an Aborigine” — a term some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people find offensive.

The characters go on to describe the Indigenous character as an “abo tracker”.

“It’s no use hiding, that abo will smell us out quicker than a bloodhound,” a character says in the comic.

The publication is being blasted on social media with many labelling it “disgusting”.

“Just wondering how many people were involved in the chain of decision making, to allow this cartoon to be printed in the @westaustralian newspaper in 2020?” asked radio and television presenter Shelley Ware.

“I’m literally devastated this has been printed and our children have access to this. Honestly wish I was surprised though!!”

Late on Monday evening, The West Australian published an apology to its website stating the cartoon was written in 1981 and was supplied by an outside agency.

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The Cultural Revolution Comes for the National Anthem

First they kneeled for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Then they toppled a statue of Francis Scott Key. Now they want to purge the anthem entirely. 

A recent Yahoo! News article outlined the ballad's “problematic background” and suggests it be replaced by a song with a “less troubling history and a more inclusive message.”  

Historian and scholar Daniel E. Walker said the calls for revision are about America living up to its creed. 

“I do side with the people who say that we should rethink this as the national anthem, because this is about the deep-seated legacy of slavery and white supremacy in America, where we do things over and over and over again that are a slap in the face of people of color and women,” Walker said in the article. “We do it first because we knew what we were doing and we wanted to be sexist and racist. And now we do it under the guise of ‘legacy.’”

The problem with the anthem, writes reporter Lyndsey Parker, goes back to Key’s “bigoted background.” Key was born to an aristocratic family on a Maryland plantation. He owned several slaves and, as a lawyer, prosecuted both black and white abolitionists. The article also cites Key’s friendship with President Andrew Jackson and brother-in-law Roger Taney, the fifth chief justice of the Supreme Court and author of the majority opinion in the Dred Scott decision, as evidence of racism. 

But others argue that Key publicly spoke out against slavery.

“Key was an early and ardent opponent of slave trafficking,” writes historian Marc Leepson. “By all accounts, Key treated his own slaves humanely, and freed several during his lifetime. What’s more, he had a deserved reputation for providing free legal advice to impoverished free blacks and slaves in Washington.”

There is evidence that Key's contemporaries agreed. When a respected leader in the free African-American community passed away, a long trail of men on horseback followed his casket to the cemetery, all of them African-American except for Key. Even an abolitionist newspaper admitted that Key’s decision to ride with the mourners as a lone white man “evinces an elevation of soul above the meanness of popular prejudice, highly honorable to Mr. Key’s profession as a friend of men of color.” Likewise, the Rev. John T. Brooke, a friend of Key’s, described him as a “true friend to the African race.”

Nonetheless, the woke mob has "cancelled" both Key and the anthem he penned.

It’s not the first time groups have urged the song to be ditched. In 2017, the California chapter of the NAACP urged Congress to remove “The Star-Spangled Banner,” calling it “anti-black” and “wrong.” A year earlier, the New York Times ran a piece with the headline, “Is the National Anthem Racist?” and pointed to lyrics in the anthem’s rarely-sung third stanza which includes the lines, “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” Key’s words referred to those the British had enslaved aboard their ships and during the war of 1812, both black and white—including freed slaves.

As for a replacement, suggestions include "Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which some consider the “Black national anthem,” and John Lennon’s “Imagine.” One soccer club in Tulsa, Oklahoma announced they will play Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” before games instead of the national anthem.

As the movement gains momentum, it remains to be seen whether Key’s words will yet be sung in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

SOURCE 

When scientific truth is racist

The MOST unwelcome truth that riots REDUCE support for the Donks

A perfectly sholarly article was attacked because its conclusions were inconvenient. Must not criticize rioters.  To do so is "racist"

A man actually lost his job for  pointing out reality

David Shor is a 28-year-old political data analyst and social democrat who worked for President Obama’s reelection campaign. On May 28, Shor tweeted out a short summary of a paper by Princeton professor Omar Wasow. The research compiled by Wasow analyzed public opinion in the 1960s, and found violent and nonviolent protest tactics had contradictory effects. Shor’s synopsis was straightforward:

It is easy to see why a specialist in public opinion whose professional mission is to help elect Democrats while moving the party leftward would take an interest in this research. But in certain quarters of the left — though not among Democratic elected officials — criticizing violent protest tactics is considered improper on the grounds that it distracts from deeper underlying injustice, and shifts the blame from police and other malefactors onto their victims.

One universal fact of political life is that people tend not to enjoy highlighting faults committed by their own side, and often respond to others bringing up behavior they don’t want to defend outright by deflecting blame. Conservatives are united less by a zeal to affirm every one of Donald Trump’s actions than a reluctance to denounce them. Likewise, while few leftists go so far as to explicitly advocate violent or destructive acts, refraining from criticism of violent protests is, among parts of the far left, almost a social norm.

And so, despite its superficially innocuous content, Shor’s tweet generated a sharp response. To take one public example, Ari Trujillo Wesler, the founder of OpenField, a Democratic canvassing app, replied, “This take is tone deaf, removes responsibility for depressed turnout from the 68 Party, and reeks of anti-blackness.” Shor replied politely:

"The mechanism for the paper isn’t turnout, it’s violence driving news coverage that makes people vote for Republicans. The author does a great job explaining his research here:

https://twitter.com/owasow/status/1265709670892580869?s=21 "

Trujillo Wesler repeated the accusation of racism (“YOU need to stop using your anxiety and ‘intellect’ as a vehicle for anti-blackness”), and then tagged Dan Wager, the CEO of Civis Analytics, the firm employing Shor, “Come get your boy.”

At least some employees and clients on Civis Analytics complained that Shor’s tweet threatened their safety. The next day, Shor apologized for tweeting Omar’s paper:

Civis Analytics undertook a review of the episode. A few days later, Shor was fired. Shor told me he has a nondisclosure agreement preventing him from discussing the episode. A spokesperson for Civis Analytics told me over email, “Out of respect for our employees and alumni, Civis does not publicly discuss personnel matters, and we don’t plan to comment further.”

Over the weekend, “Progressphiles,” a progressive data listserv, announced it was kicking Shor out, according to another member of the group. Shor, who did not respond to comment, has been a member of the group but has not posted there in two years. The entire reason for his removal is the controversy over his “racist” tweet:

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White supremacist, the new meaningless term of abuse

Below is just one example of a term that is now flung about widely by the Left. Overuse has deprived "racist" of much of its force so now all conservatives from Trump down are alleged to be "white supremacists"
 
 I have myself been called a white supremacist for no obvious reason.  I have always said that I think China will be -- at least economically -- supreme by the end of this century so that is a pretty odd idea for a white supremacist.  Many of my descendants will be frantically learning to speak Mandarin, I think.  Or maybe Cantonese.

The whole idea is pretty incoherent to start with.   There are a lot of whites in humble occupations.  Are they supreme? To group all whites together under one heading is a great overgeneralization.  It is in fact a Leftist habit to lump lots of people together into such broad categories. They are incapable of dealing with individuals. So "white supremacist" is really a Leftist concept. White supremacists mainly exist in Leftist imaginations. Conservatives are more interested in the individual

There are no doubt some people who believe that whites are superior to all other groups but that too is incoherent.  Superior in what way?  Superior at sprinting?  Hardly. Superior in IQ?  Jews and the Chinese have better claims there. If you are to use "white supremacist" as a term, you surely have to ask "In what respect"?  The term says nothing unless it is expanded


Emancipation Memorial Paid For by Former Slaves Is...White Supremacy

I mean for those who thought this was just about Confederate statues, I don’t know what to tell you. It was never about that—anyone could see this from miles away. The Left will bait the wider public with a carrot, like slamming Confederates because it’s not like they’re attacking the Founding Fathers, and then take a hard turn to…tearing down statues to the Founding Fathers. Right now, the lefty mob, which has marched unopposed for days, vowed to tear down the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park because it’s racist. It’s a statue of Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, with a freed slave. It was commissioned by former slaves. How is this racist? I’m not kidding. We have one Ph.D. student wrote in The Washington Post that the monument of the president who spearheaded the 13th Amendment, which forever abolished slavery, is white supremacy:

In the District of Columbia, there is no shortage of commemoration for Lincoln. There is perhaps no person (with the exception of George Washington) in the United States who has more memorials, buildings, roads, towns and counties named in his or her honor.

Of the major commemorative markers to Lincoln in D.C., the most troubling is the Emancipation Memorial (also known as the Freedmen’s Memorial Monument to Abraham Lincoln), which sits in Lincoln Park, steps away from the U.S. Capitol. The statue features a standing Abraham Lincoln with the Emancipation Proclamation in his hand over a kneeling newly freed African American man. But this monument has been the subject of some controversy since its unveiling in 1876 because of who originated the idea of the monument, who paid for it and who ultimately designed what it would look like.

The monument was paid for almost exclusively by formerly enslaved people, who from 1865 onward raised more than $16,000 for the building of the statue. According to the story told and retold in newspapers at the time, on the day after Lincoln’s assassination, Charlotte Scott, a formerly enslaved black woman living in Marietta, Ohio, gave her first earnings as a free woman to build a monument to Lincoln. From there, more donations grew and then became a national movement when the Western Sanitary Commission, the wartime relief agency, took control and publicized the idea of for a monument from the freedmen in honor of Lincoln. A New Orleans Tribune article from Aug. 10, 1865, proclaimed: “On the spot where Freedom’s ‘best defender fell,’ let his name and the cause for which he died be most highly honored.”

The men and women who raised the money, however, did not choose the design of the monument.

[…]

On the day of the dedication, Frederick Douglass, the African American civil rights advocate, gave a speech where he spoke of his ambivalence of a statue that solely praised Lincoln, and in an offhand remark said that the statue “showed the Negro on his knee when a more manly attitude would have been indicative of freedom.”

The statue fed a narrative that men like Lincoln led emancipation, rather than showing how the struggle for freedom was driven by the millions of African Americans who fought for their liberation from the institution of slavery.

[…]

While this doesn’t mean that we need to tear down the Emancipation Memorial, it does require that we recontextualize it to ensure that it gives voice to those who have been left out and acknowledges the very people who paid for it in the beginning.

Okay, well, at least there’s no call for it to be destroyed or so it seems. Former slaves paid for it, Frederick Douglass was there to dedicate it, and somehow, it’s white supremacy because it’s too focused on, I don’t know, the man who was president during our nation’s more dire and destructive crisis. Nuance cannot be afforded. It has to be what the woke crowd deems suitable now and retroactively applied…to late 19th Century America. That’s not how this works, but that’s also the point. It’s erasure. The Left hates this country and its history and in order to destroy the American cultural identity, it needs to be torn down, burned, and rewritten within the of this hyper-left-wing revisionist prism. To destroy one’s enemy, strip them of their cultural identity. That’s the long war the Left is waging. Luckily, authorities put barricades to protect the monument.

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Censorship: Twitter Claims Trump Tweet About Upholding the Law Is 'Abusive' and Boosts Competitor Parler

Twitter is determined to get itself in trouble it seems. While Big Tech claims to not be in the business of censorship, they continue to censor Republicans on a daily basis. Twitter’s new favorite target is Donald Trump. On Tuesday, Twitter put a warning over the president’s tweet about upholding law and order and hid the tweet from view. If you want to read it, you must click on their warning.

How can a tweet about upholding the law be “abusive”? Autonomous zones are not legal. Citizens are not allowed to set up pseudo-countries in the middle of American cities and ignore our laws and violate public safety. Using force to disperse such action is required by our laws. Twitter marking this tweet as “abusive behavior” is beyond the pale. It was probably the same people who decided to fact-check a joke meme the president tweeted.

But Twitter got what was coming to it and Parler, an alternative platform similar to Twitter, began trending at number one on the censor-happy Twitter. Thousands of people began announcing their new handles at Parler. Even some lawmakers got into it.

After Twitter banned meme-maker Carpe Donktum (probably for being too popular and having his memes retweeted by the president) other high-profile conservatives began jumping ship as well, saying they aren’t long for the Twittersphere.

But the alternative site won’t really take off until the president deletes his Twitter account and moves. With that one action, every media network would have to follow him and so would everyone else, including the left. And social media isn’t any fun in an echo chamber, so Parler can’t work properly unless everyone migrates. Maybe instead of regulating Twitter, the president could just make it irrelevant. That would be fun to watch. Set up your Parler account now just in case. (I’m @MeganFoxWriter on Parler).

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Science Blogger Deletes Site After Doxxing Threat by 'New York Times'

A well-known science blogger writing for Slate Star Codex has reluctantly shuttered his blog because a reporter for the New York Times insisted on publishing his last name. Psychiatrist Scott Alexander (his first and middle name) was interviewed by New York Times tech reporter Cade Metz for a nice article on his eclectic blog and the community of writers who feed it. When Alexander realized that Metz was going to publish his last name, he begged him not to do it. The psychiatrist had a thriving practice and doxxing him would put his livelihood in danger. He had also received several death threats from his writings from some who disagree with his politics.

In short, the New York Times was about to ruin his life, so Alexander felt he had no other option than to delete his blog.

Slate Star Codex:

When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he said that it was New York Times policy to include real names, and he couldn’t change that. After considering my options, I decided on the one you see now. If there’s no blog, there’s no story. Or at least the story will have to include some discussion of NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks.

It may be the Times policy to include real names when it comes to people they want to doxx, but they somehow lose sight of that policy when quoting numerous anonymous sources when trying to destroy conservatives.

The Washington Free Beacon questions whether that policy even exists.

Alexander and others interviewed by Metz told the Free Beacon that they do not believe Metz wanted to write a “hit piece.” But Metz did insist that Times guidelines compelled him to disclose Alexander’s real name, derailing an interview with the blogger.

There is little evidence that such a policy exists at the Times, which has granted anonymity or pseudonymity to an Apple news executive, a left-wing podcaster, and even other subjects of Metz’s story. This confusion, Alexander’s fear of national news attention, and the resultant backlash on social media—and even among the Times‘s own alumni—raise uncomfortable questions about the power that the media have to ruin lives—and the cavalierness with which that power has recently been exercised.

It’s understandable that Alexander would want to remain anonymous when you consider the rabid fanaticism of his enemies.

SSC has also developed a reputation for free and open discussion, which has sometimes caused Alexander to butt heads with others, particularly the Internet’s large and vocal progressive feminist contingent. He strongly criticized a perceived tendency in modern feminism to demonize “nerd entitlement” in one particularly controversial 2015 post, and has also argued that imbalanced gender outcomes are not driven exclusively by prejudice.

Alexander’s public views are broadly liberal with some libertarian influence, but his controversial arguments have attracted the ill will of what Aaronson called “social media mobs who despised Scott and wanted to end his blog because of political disagreements”—part of what made Alexander wary of the article.

We live in an age where destroying people’s lives has become an organized spectator sport. The techniques used to destroy people date to the early modern age with Mussolini using his job as a radio commentator to reach mass audiences, denouncing those who disagreed with him.

Joseph Goebbels used newspapers and magazines to accomplish the same thing. Today, it’s the same way with the internet — just different tools. But the kinds of people attracted to the sport of doxxing haven’t changed at all. They are fascists all. And they’re tearing this country apart with no thought to the consequences except the exercise of raw power.

The Times, which has become one of the participants in the destruction, thinks that the ends they seek are so noble, the means are unimportant. It may be to reporters at the Times. But for many, it’s jobs, their homes, their families, their hard-won reputations, and in some cases — their lives.


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UK: Rebecca Long-Bailey has been sacked as shadow education secretary by Sir Keir Starmer, after sharing an article containing "an antisemitic conspiracy theory"


This thing was a major contender for leadership of the Labour party

A spokesman for the Labour leader confirmed he had asked her to step side and stressed his commitment to "restoring trust with the Jewish community".

The spokesman said: “This afternoon Keir Starmer asked Rebecca Long-Bailey to step down from the Shadow Cabinet. The article Rebecca shared earlier today contained an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

“As Leader of the Labour Party, Keir has been clear that restoring trust with the Jewish community is a number one priority. Antisemitism takes many different forms and it is important that we all are vigilant against it.”

Earlier today Ms Long-Bailey had shared an interview with the actress Maxine Peak, in which she claimed Israelis taught American police the technique that killed George Floyd.

In the interview Ms Peak said: "The tactics used by the police in America, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, that was learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services.”

The Israeli police force has firmly denied such claims.

Drawing attention to the article on Twitter, Ms Long-Bailey described the actress as "an absolute diamond", but later insisted she did not endorse "all aspects" of the interview.

It is understood that a replacement shadow education secretary will be announced within days.

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Must not diss Calabria

An easyJet ad that described Calabria as being largely devoid of tourists because of the threat of the mafia and a history of earthquakes has angered the southern Italian region. "For an authentic taste of Italian life, there’s nothing better than Calabria," the ad on the British airline’s website said.

"The region suffers from a distinct lack of tourists because of its history of mafia activity and earthquakes."

The advertisement said that Calabria was also largely neglected by tourism because of “the lack of iconic cities such as Rome and Venice capable of attracting the Instagram crowd."

An MEP who comes from the town of Cosenza in the heart of Calabria accused the airline of insulting the region, which forms the toe of the Italian boot in the far south of the country

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No, silence is not violence

“The slogan ‘Silence is Violence,’ which has appeared in Black Lives Matters protests in the US, UK and around the world, is a powerful and emotive message. It is also, however, a danger to freedom of speech — the same freedom that has been central to struggles for liberty and against oppression. …

Free speech must always involve the right to offend, to speak what you believe to be true regardless of what others think. The flip side of free speech is that you must have the right to be silent when you choose — particularly when somebody is trying to compel you to speak as instructed.”

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Hate-speech laws are no friend of minorities:  The Scottish case

‘Nothing is more apt to surprise a foreigner than the extreme liberty which we enjoy in this country of communicating whatever we please to the public…’ Thus wrote Scottish philosopher David Hume in 1742, extolling free speech as ‘the common right of mankind’.

Unfortunately, Scotland’s free-speech tradition would be gutted by key provisions in the government’s Hate Crime Bill, introduced in April. It endangers even serious public-policy debates about important – and sensitive – issues touching on ‘age, disability, race, religion or… perceived religious affiliation, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics’.

If passed, the bill would criminalise a broad range of communications ‘relating to stirring up hatred’ based on these characteristics, with draconian seven-year prison terms. Departing from a key precept of Hume’s celebrated ‘common right’, the bill would impose such severe punishment even when the speaker had no negative intent, so long as the expression is deemed ‘likely’ to ‘stir up hatred’. Worse yet, the bill even outlaws the mere ‘possession’ of ‘inflammatory material… with a view to communicating [it] to another person’.

In our polarised political climate, a limitless range of communications about taboo topics can be potentially ‘inflammatory’, which means that the policing thereof will depend on the subjective discretion of the enforcing officials. David Hume warned against punishing the ‘abuse’ of free speech by ‘giving very large discretionary powers to the court to punish whatever displeases them’. And while he acknowledged that ‘the unbounded liberty of the press’ could lead to dangers, he thought that such overbroad restrictions were a cure worse than the disease.

In this case, the bill’s censorial ‘cure’ is worse than the disease of ‘prejudice’, which its proponents commendably target. No matter how well intended, such vague and subjective restrictions – even when formally neutral – tend to perpetuate and entrench the values of dominant in-groups and further marginalise out-groups.

Unfortunately, British history is no exception to this dynamic. And one does not need to go all the way back to 1697, and the execution of the irreverent Edinburgh student Thomas Aikenhead for blasphemy, to find examples.

One might argue that the Scottish Hate Crime Bill is aimed at preventing the sort of racial discrimination that fuelled colonial censorship.

But given their inherent vagueness and overbreadth, even well-intentioned hate-speech laws are prone to majoritarian bias in enforcement. In 1965 the British Race Relations Act introduced important anti-discrimination protections for minority groups. But section six also prohibited ‘incitement to racial hatred’. The first person to be prosecuted for this offence was a black man. Several other black Britons were prosecuted for anti-white hatred, including leaders of the Black Liberation Movement. In 1968, one such leader was sentenced to a year in prison for a speech decrying anti-black discrimination by whites who were ‘vicious and nasty people’. In contrast, such a prominent anti-immigrant crusader as Enoch Powell was left alone. Perhaps the ultimate irony was that this law, which was intended to restrain the neo-Nazi National Front, has also barred expression by the Anti-Nazi League.

There is also reason to fear how Scottish police will enforce the pending bill. At the 2017 Glasgow Pride parade, two ‘anti-fascist’ LGBTQ activists were arrested for ‘breaching the peace with homophobic aggravation’. Their crime? Holding a placard with the words ‘These faggots fight fascists’, which clearly was meant to – and ‘likely’ to – empower rather than offend the gay community. In 2014 Police Scotland tweeted that it would ‘monitor comments on social media and any offensive comments will be investigated’, after an English pundit offended Scottish sensibilities on Twitter. The bill would let loose police and others to comb through social media on the hunt for the innumerable tasteless and intemperate tweets that someone could interpret as ‘likely’ to stir up hatred, with an incalculable chilling effect.

While it has narrow exceptions to safeguard discussion of religion and sexual orientation, the Hate Crime Bill could also pit various groups – including the very marginalised groups that it purports to benefit – against each other in a free-speech race to the bottom. For instance, members of religious communities (including minorities) with traditional beliefs about gender identity and sexual orientation might well still risk punishment for expressing their moral convictions. But women, members of the LGBTQ community or transgender persons could plausibly also be punished for critiquing those religious communities because of their traditional views. This is not idle speculation. In 2017, two British street preachers were arrested and initially convicted for preaching from the Bible, including statements that were deemed ‘insulting’ to LGBTQ persons and Muslims. Conversely in 2016, a leader of a French LGBTQ rights organisation was fined 2,300 euros for calling the president of an organisation that defends traditional family values and opposes same-sex marriage a ‘homophobe’.

As Scottish justice secretary Humza Yousaf stressed in introducing the bill, ‘We all have a responsibility to challenge prejudice’. But human-rights activists around the world have concluded that speech that challenges prejudice may well be more effective than censorship in promoting the ‘inclusive and respectful society’ that Yousaf appropriately endorsed. In the words of veteran LGBTQ-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell: ‘The most effective way to defeat bigoted ideas is not by proscription but by challenging and exposing them.’ As it happens, David Hume also championed this ‘more speech’ approach, explaining that citizens ‘being every day more accustomed to the free discussion of public affairs, will improve in the judgment of them, and be with greater difficulty seduced by every idle rumour and popular clamour’.

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Wrongthink will be spellchecked

In response to the BLM movement, comedy, film and beer have been ‘cancelled’ due to their ‘problematic’ nature. The latest purge reveals how terrifyingly easy it is to use technology to cancel those who transgress the dogma of wokeism.

Netflix removed Chris Lilley’s back catalogue because of his racial depictions;  only the pretentious schoolgirl Ja’mie and Lunatics survived — for now.

Little Britain wasn’t so lucky, as many streaming services hit delete — their creators saying they were “very sorry” because of their portrayal of “characters of other races.”

Other cancellable racial offences include Basil Fawlty accidentally ‘mentioning the war.’ At least John Cleese had the fortitude to stand up for his comedy and his famous series will be reinstated — albeit with “extra guidance.”

And, after being temporarily blown away from HBO Max, Gone with the Wind will return with an introduction to place “the film in its multiple historical contexts.” Hopefully, this can be skipped like those pathetic anti-piracy ads at the start of legally-purchased DVDs.

But it is not only fiction receiving the cancellation treatment.

Coon cheese (named after its founder who developed a new ripening process) was briefly targeted,  before the comedian who tweeted whether we were still cool with the name was cancelled himself when his past comments on diversity in acting surfaced.

Woke bible The Guardian – after cheering the drowning of Edward Colston’s statue – is experiencing a digital pile-on because their paper was founded “using profits from a cotton plantation that used slaves.”

And if all this cancelling has made you thirsty please do not reach for a cold one from the Colonial Brewing Co.,  as the name is deemed so offensive a bottle shop chain pulled it from their shelves.

If only people employed the Microsoft Word ‘inclusiveness’ option to check their work for bias. This check pinged my article for using ‘schoolgirl’ — suggesting the more ‘inclusive’ ‘schoolchild.’

I suppose those are just more words to add to the blacklist. No wait, tech companies have been replacing terms such as, ‘blacklist’, ‘master’ and ‘whitelist’ for less “racially-loaded terms.” And yes, the inclusiveness checker also pulled me up for using ‘blacklist.’

Unfortunately, the AI of PC-checking does not transfer to images. If it had perhaps Kellogg’s would not have been guilted into issuing a statement explaining why the Coco Pops mascot is a monkey. Apparently using a cartoonish, cap-wearing chimp to sell brown food is racist.

All this removing of content, adding warning labels, and language policing was achieved with a few keyboard clicks and some outrage. If this pitiful pandering to the easily hurt continues all art, comedians, and food will eventually be deleted.

But until then it is time to order a slab of Colonial brew, make a toasted Coon cheese sandwich, and flick on Gone with Wind.

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