Thursday, April 30, 2020

Bullying and Fraud: China Plows Ahead with Threats and Bogus Humanitarian 'Help' - Senator Dianne Feinstein and Mark Zuckerberg there to aid the Chinese dictators


Bullying and Fraud: China Plows Ahead with Threats and Bogus Humanitarian 'Help'

Guy Benson
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Posted: Apr 29, 2020 1:05 PM

Bullying and Fraud: China Plows Ahead with Threats and Bogus Humanitarian 'Help'
Source: AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File
Last week, we wrote about the global backlash to China's pattern of bullying and bogus humanitarianism in the midst of a global pandemic exacerbated by China's secrecy and lies. Undeterred, the communists of Beijing continue to press ahead with this alienation strategy, evidently determined that economic dependence will compel the world to ignore or at least soften its collective reaction to the regime's treachery. This cynical calculation may prove correct in some cases, but they're not making many friends these days. Let's start with Australia, whose government's insistence on an independent review of how the virus originated has drawn negative reactions from Beijing. It started with dismissive taunts and has now graduated to menacing:
Australia has been warned by the Chinese ambassador that it could face an economic hit if it does not back down from a push into the nation’s handling of the coronavirus. Ambassador Cheng Jingye on Monday said the push was “dangerous” and could encourage Chinese citizens to not purchase Australian exports or travel to the nation. The government however is not backing down from the call for an independent inquiry, with Foreign Minister Marise Payne criticising the threat of an economic hit due to the push...“We reject any suggestion that economic coercion is an appropriate response to a call for such an assessment, when what we need is global co-operation."
Good for Canberra for not backing down. These threats are outrageous, and the United States should firmly stand beside our cousins down under. Prime Minister Scott Morrison is enjoying strong popularity at home for his handling of coronavirus, so he has the political capital to stay firm. Unfortunately, in Europe, China's pressure campaign is paying early dividends. The regime was able to push the European Union to tone down its report on China's pandemic-related disinformation campaign, resulting in frail avoidance:
Bowing to heavy pressure from Beijing, European Union officials softened their criticism of China this week in a report documenting how governments push disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, according to documents, emails and interviews. Worried about the repercussions, European officials first delayed and then rewrote the document in ways that diluted the focus on China, a vital trading partner — taking a very different approach than the confrontational stance adopted by the Trump administration. The initial European Union report, obtained by The New York Times, was not particularly strident: a routine roundup of publicly available information and news reports. It cited Beijing’s efforts to curtail mentions of the virus’s origins in China, in part by blaming the United States for spreading the disease internationally. It noted that Beijing had criticized France as slow to respond to the pandemic and had pushed false accusations that French politicians used racist slurs against the head of the World Health Organization...

The report also highlighted Russian efforts to promote false health information and sow distrust in Western institutions.  “China has continued to run a global disinformation campaign to deflect blame for the outbreak of the pandemic and improve its international image,” the initial report said. “Both overt and covert tactics have been observed.” But China moved quickly to block the document’s release, and the European Union pulled back. The report had been on the verge of publication, until senior officials ordered revisions to soften the language. “The Chinese are already threatening with reactions if the report comes out,” Lutz Güllner, a European Union diplomat, wrote to colleagues on Tuesday in an email seen by The Times. The sentence about China’s “global disinformation” campaign was removed, as was any mention of the dispute between China and France. Other language was toned down.
If Europe can't bring itself to tell obvious truths about China's actions in the middle of this worldwide lethal outbreak, the prospects for long term courage and clarity are rather dim. As Margaret Thatcher once said, "They're a weak lot, some of them, in Europe. Weak. Feeble." Thatcher's country is preparing to adopt a much stronger line with Beijing, with officials telling the press that London's relationship with China will never be the same after all of this. There were initial reports that the government was moving toward axing its planned 5G partnership with the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, but those rumors were swatted down. But reports persist that key players within Boris Johnson's government still want him to pull the plug on the deal. We shall see what actually happens, but America's position has been quite clear all along, and recent events only vindicate it further. Meanwhile, the Chinese pattern of exporting junk continues apace:
This keeps happening, all across the planet. A White House adviser says he's concerned by what he's seeing on this front here in the US: “One of the things that’s on my radar though that’s really troublesome is there is a lot of these antibody tests coming in from China now that are low quality, false readings and things like that. We've got to be really careful,” Peter Navarro told "Fox and Friends." And China's ludicrous lies just won't stop:

That risible statistic comes on the heels of similarly clumsy propaganda released last week, while China's persecution and human rights abuses march forward unabated. I'll leave you with polling data that demonstrates that the American people, generally across the spectrum, are seeing this pretty clearly:
Politicians are acting accordingly, on both sides, with the exception of the hopelessly woke Left.
Editor's Note: Want to support Townhall so we can keep telling the truth about China and the virus they unleashed on the world? Join Townhall VIP and use the promo code WUHAN to get 25% off VIP membership!


I LOVE THIS IMAGE OF THE LITTLE SHIT ZUCKERBERG SURROUNDED BY HIS GROVELING ASS-KISSING TOADIES!


Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is applauded as he delivers the opening keynote introducing new Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram privacy features at the Facebook F8 Conference at McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California on April 30, 2019. - Got a crush on another Facebook user? The social network will …

China Committed an Act of War


Xi and the CCP thugs running China committed a deliberate act of war the moment they banned air travel from Wuhan to all other Chinese cities while allowing international flights to proceed unmolested to the far corners of the globe.  They did this despite knowing those flights out of China comprised desperate souls escaping a homegrown pandemic and a communist regime willing to let them die to save face.  It was an artificial diaspora intended to seed humanity with the Xi Plague.
It has been shown that ChiVid-19 came from a "wolf" bat, a particular type of bat not sold in the Wuhan "wet" market located mere feet from China's only level 4 research lab — a lab that, coincidentally, was studying various strains of coronavirus.
Did China deliberately unleash COVID-19?  I doubt it.  Hanlon's Razor dictates that one should never put off to malice what can be explained more easily by incompetence.  No, COVID-19 is not a deliberately created biological weapon.  While the infectious nature is perfect, its kill rate is minimal, rendering it marginal as a weapon of war.  The actual weapons being worked on in China's labs are likely much more deadly.
The WuFlu was a viral study gone awry — an accident that escaped the lab because although China is a first-world manufacturer, it is a third-world country with a per capita income not much greater than Botswana's.  China is a nation where tens of millions of people still live in caves and half the population still does not have indoor plumbing or toilets.
Once the virus was out, China had a choice.  It could seal the borders to protect humanity and fight to halt its progression in China, which would mean that China alone would bear the brutal economic costs.  It did shut down much of its economy for a month while it isolated the disease and learned from it.  Or it could remain silent and share with innocents the world over the misery it had created.
For most people not living in a mercantilist, authoritative dictatorship, it would be an easy decision.  Few civilized human beings would choose to make millions pay for their own mistakes, much less seek a means to not only make others suffer, but to profit from their suffering.
China needed time.  With the first case in the city of Wuhan on November 17, the country used the ensuing six weeks to learn exactly what it had and how it could be turned to China's advantage.  China kept mum long enough to acquire sufficient knowledge to understand the parameters of the pandemic.
What the Chinese discovered in that time is exactly what we in the West had discovered during the previous six weeks.  Although ignored by the Dem-left-media cabal, the virus presents as extremely contagious, while, for the vast majority of those afflicted, it exhibits asymptomatically and results in a kill ratio between 1 and 3 out of every 10,000 infected.  Those deaths almost entirely comprise people over 65 and suffering from other morbidities, such as diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and poor lifestyle choices.
Opportunity Knocks
Pretend you are Xi.  You have used the years since you rose to power to consolidate and eliminate rivals and enemies.  You have become the "capo di tutti capi" of the mafia-like CCP.  But it is not all lollipops and rainbows, especially since America elected a new president not terrified of his own shadow and willing to see China for what it is and act accordingly.  Your economy has suffered under Trump and his insistence that China play fair, keep its word, and not cheat on every deal and promise it makes.
Your scientists tell you the Wuhan Flu is a pandemic candidate that infects many but kills few.  As an added benefit for a nation soon to have the oldest population on Earth, it kills primarily the old and infirm.  Bingo!  Who's better than you?  Your country is suffering dramatically from an aggressive American president who called you on your game and acted on your thievery, unfair trade practices, and all around "China wins, and everyone else loses" attitude.
You could take the hit, bear the additional damage the WuFlu will do to an already suffering economy at the hands of the American dogs in addition to the effect it would have on your — some say — precarious hold on total power. Or you could share your baleful bounty with the rest of the world, knowing that you alone understand what other nations do not.  There is a good chance that if you keep your mouth shut, throw your propaganda apparatus into overdrive with meaningless diversions (the virus originated in America, a benevolent China bought the world crucial time), and continue to reward American politicians and media figures, America can be convinced to overreact and commit economic suicide, leaving China the last man standing.
As a bonus, you could use the interregnum to corner the market on PPE (personal protective equipment), while seizing foreign-owned factories producing the medical supplies that countries suffering from your pandemic will need, and then sell to them those same supplies at exorbitant prices — all while portraying China as graciously generous in supplying supplies at triple the price to countries suffering from your plague.
And if the pandemic comes back to China, which it surely will (the "what goes around comes around" thing), it can be useful in fixing the demographic catastrophe headed your way.  Eliminate the nonproductive aged, and China will never have to worry about being old before it is rich.
To recap, Xi, and the CCP, helped make a local error into a worldwide pandemic and then kept quiet about how little danger the virus created to productive nations, knowing that people who are allowed to think would let their imaginations run wild, resulting in actions that would destroy their economies — allowing you to make a buck while becoming more powerful.
It is the often heard but rarely experienced win-win-win situation.
Xi talks often about  the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation."  "Rejuvenation," to Xi, means nothing like what we who speak English mean by it. To Xi, it means control.  To Xi, it means supremacy.  It means that the world surrenders to China's rightful position as the premier nation here on Earth under the guiding hand of Xi's "Mandate from Heaven," over tianxia — over "everything beneath heaven."
Just as blockbuster movies have sequels, China, having succeeded with the premiere of COVID-19, is already planning COVID-20 — coming soon to a civilized nation near you.
Please follow the author on Twitter at @williamlgensert.




LITTLE SHIT MARK AND HIS ASS KISSING TOADIES ARE ONE OF AMERICA'S GREATEST THREATS!




Silicon Valley’s Control Virus


The tech industry’s Chinese surveillance solution to the Wuhan virus.
 
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Silicon Valley was both the epicenter of one of the country’s first Wuhan Virus outbreaks, hosting the 2nd case in California and the 7th in the country, and of the technological tools of the lockdown, from contact tracing and drone tracking, to the virtualization of everything from education to socialization.
The tech industry represents the apex of both globalization and repression. On its massive campuses, foreign workers likely played a role in spreading the virus even as their industry became the public face of fighting the virus by unleashing a new wave of censorship and surveillance against Americans.
Before long, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg could be seen warning that the social media giant would delete any protests against the lockdown, YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki declaring that any videos that contradicted WHO would be deleted, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates speculating about immunity passports.
And Google and Apple came together to build a contact tracing system that would track everyone.
Silicon Valley’s titans and monopolies want to be the heroes of this pandemic, but the only things they have to offer are the totalitarian tools of surveillance that have destroyed public trust in the industry.
Santa Clara County has, as of this writing, experienced nearly 100 deaths. A Stanford study last month speculated that there were 48,000 infected. Even as Silicon Valley has helped spread the Wuhan Virus, it has its own form of immunity. Barbers can’t work online, but interface designers can. Tech industry stocks may have taken a beating, but unlike countless small businesses, they will bounce back.
And the virus culture of lockdowns and social distancing, wholesale civil rights violations and the elimination of privacy is trending the tech industry’s way. The massive databases of the huge monopolies are making it a lot easier for the authorities to track lockdown scofflaws. The creepy visions of an automated posthuman society have become the default response to the virus across America.
Social distancing is completing Silicon Valley’s vision of a world of isolated people who can only connect to each other through the mediation of their services. The brave new world in which Facebook is family, Twitter is politics, and Google is reality is a lot closer than ever before in the new Safer at Home society.
While the tech giants have much to say about what people can and can’t do, they have little to say about the origins of the Wuhan Virus and how Santa Clara County ended up with its own pandemic.
"China did a lot of things right at the beginning, like any country where a virus first shows up," Bill Gates told CNN. In a Washington Post editorial, he described Microsoft China as a model of whose "roughly 6,200 employees", "about half are now coming in to work."
China is more than the tech industry’s partner: it’s the future. The social credit system and surveillance society, the skyscrapers and robotics, the high-speed rail and the massive factories are more than just TED talks, they’re a grim chrome-plated reality. The censorship, surveillance, and propaganda deployed by Silicon Valley in response to the pandemic was a Chinese solution privatized in an American fashion.
Gates, like other Silicon Valley technocrats, has to keep spreading the myth of Chinese expertise in battling the Wuhan Virus, not just because Microsoft needs the approval of the Communists, but because the Peeps are to tech industry technocrats what the Soviet Union with its collective farms and planned economy was to the New York and Chicago academics of nine decades ago. The future.
That’s why Democrats have spent the last generation mumbling that we should be more like China. Perhaps not the forced abortions, organ trafficking, or camps, but they do make the trains run on time. And California can’t even manage to build a train. It’s no wonder that Silicon Valley looks westward even as it uses the pandemic to unleash technodystopian solutions worthy of three William Gibson novels.
The one thing that China’s Xi and Gates’ corporate culture in Redmond could agree on is that people are stupid and need to be told what to do. Most will never do what they’re supposed to unless they’re manipulated, prodded, and even bullied into doing what the masters of the universe think they should.
That’s exactly why the tech industry’s monopolies have created a toxic culture that has infected our culture, poisoned our politics, and is depriving us of our civil rights. Its number dot zero web divides and conquers, fragmenting our society along algorithmic lines, creating crises for its own profit, and then brutally stamping on the consequent conflicts with its unseen machinery of surveillance and censorship.
Silicon Valley isn’t fixing the pandemic with its control freak responses, instead it’s worsening it. The tech industry might have learned from its Chinese cohorts that censorship doesn’t inspire confidence, it creates distrust, manufacturing a consensus by silencing everyone who disagrees spreads paranoia.
In a dissentless culture, everyone echoes the propaganda, but no one really trusts or believes anything.
Control, surveillance, and suppression don’t solve problems. They just convince members of the elite that the problem is under control. That’s what the Communist elite accomplished in China. Their lies, intimidation, and likely killings aren’t fooling the people in the affected areas, just their bosses.
That’s also how Silicon Valley works. Instead of proverbs from Mao’s Little Red Book, there are buzzwords. But they all serve the same function, ghost cities and vaporware, phantom industries and fake economics, entire Potemkin realities built on lies that fall apart when you pull back the curtain.
Who really needs this level of control and deceit? Thieves and liars. The bigger the con, the harder you have to grip the tiger so it doesn’t eat you. That’s as true in China as it is in California.
Communist China’s dirty little secret is that it doesn’t work. Its fake economy is built on massive thievery and fraud. If the United States ever stopped buying its own stolen property back from the Commies, along with the rest of the world, the whole thing would collapse as badly as Mao’s sparrow hunt.
American technocrats who insist that we imitate China are falling for a fraud. And every time the Democrats try to sincerely imitate a fraud, the whole thing fails miserably on them like all their high-speed rail projects that never get off the ground and only do one thing at high speed, spend money.
High-speed rail, like an internet run by a handful of monopolies, seems very appealing to control freaks. But the American model is two cars in every garage and a decentralized web that has room for everyone. The pandemic solution championed by American technocrats envisions one lockdown for everyone and one token ring to bind them all. People, both Commies and dot commies often assume, are interchangeable. What holds true in New York will be just as true in South Carolina or Wyoming.
The Wuhan Virus is a wake-up call about globalization and centralization. America isn’t just a gear in a global machine, and states aren’t interchangeable parts in a national puzzle. Americans are as individualistic as their communities. We’re not glowing dots to be herded by drones, barked at by public safety announcements, and lied to for our own good by dot com and gov public-private partnerships.
The tech industry’s monopolies have built a dystopian culture that has divided neighbors, families and a nation.  It’s time to break up the dystopia, end the monopolies, and rebuild the American community.
WSJ: Mark Zuckerberg Is Tightening His Control over Facebook
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is applauded as he delivers the opening keynote introducing new Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram privacy features at the Facebook F8 Conference at McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California on April 30, 2019. - Got a crush on another Facebook user? The social network will …
AMY OSBORNE/Getty
2:33

Mark Zuckerberg’s personal control over the operation of Facebook and its affiliated tech platforms is growing, according to an in-depth report in the Wall Street Journal.
The Journal reports that Zuckerberg is “pushing aside dissenters” as he reasserts control over the company he founded, and is taking new power over Facebook-owned services like Instagram and WhatsApp, despite earlier promises to leave the acquired platforms relatively independent.
Facebook announced the departure of two directors, and added a longtime friend of Mr. Zuckerberg’s to the board. The moves were the culmination of the chief executive’s campaign over the past two years to consolidate decision-making at the company he co-founded 16 years ago. The 35-year-old tycoon also jumped into action steering Facebook into a high-profile campaign in the coronavirus response, while putting himself in the spotlight interviewing prominent health officials and politicians.
The result is a Facebook CEO and chairman more actively and visibly in charge than he has been in years.
….
Mr. Zuckerberg in 2018 took on the role of a wartime leader who needed to act quickly and, sometimes, unilaterally. He announced a series of products that took Facebook in new directions, starting with the March 2019 announcement that the company would emphasize private, encrypted messaging instead of the public posts that made it famous.
As Breitbart News covered in a column last week, Zuckerberg’s tightening control over the social media giant coincides with a series of unprecedented acts of censorship, including the censoring of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. The Facebook CEO has also described anti-lockdown protests as “misinformation,” as his company proactively reached out to state governments to collude in the suppression of the protests’ organization on the platform.
As Zuckerberg’s control over Facebook grows, so too does Facebook’s control over the global flow of information — aided by the ongoing panic over coronavirus “misinformation.”
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.


Facebook is Spending Millions to Plant Radical Activists in Local Newspapers

Renting out newsrooms to a left-wing agenda.
 
Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism
When the Alliance Defending Freedom helped a local church sue Chattanooga for banning its drive-in prayer service, the article in the Chattanooga Times Free Press repeated the Southern Poverty Law Center's smear of the religious civil rights organization as a hate group. But the reporter who wrote the article was no ordinary employee. Wyatt Massey was one of the 225 members of Report for America's 'corps' who are planted in local newsrooms to promote the radical agendas of the left-wing group.
“Will Trump’s new public charge rule close door on immigrants’ hope of the American dream?” Manuel Obed asked at The Dallas News. Obed has been with the RFA ‘corps’ pushing out pro-illegal stories.
In 1976, William Garrison, along with two other thugs, broke into a home in Detroit, killed a man, and shot two other people. When Garrison recently died of coronavirus, the Detroit Free Press article treating him like a victim was written by Angie Jackson, another 'corps' member. Jackson’s beat, according to Report for America, is “formerly incarcerated citizens re-entering the community.”
While Report for America claims that it’s funding local journalism, what it’s actually doing is embedding social justice activists in local papers who are often targeted at pursuing a narrow political agenda.
Leah Willingham was placed at the Associated Press to focus on the "Mississippi state legislature" and its "actions affecting the poor", Kyeland Jackson was planted in Twin Cities Public Television to cover the "causes, effects and solutions to racial disparities in Minnesota", Shivani Patel was dispatched to the Ventura County Star to write about “equity in education  in the county”, and Devna Bose was shoved into The Charlotte Observer to report on "poor and minority communities in prosperous Charlotte".
The agenda is often built into the very description of what Report for America’s activists are doing. Or at least it is to Report for America’s donors who are told what the activists they fund are doing. But ordinary readers of local publications and stations are often not told that what they’re reading isn’t real local reporting: it’s the work of activists funded by a national organization and its wealthy backers.
The lack of transparency is dishonest, unethical, and a new low even in the era of fake news.
The left-wing foundations and donors aren’t funding journalism, they’re buying coverage that fits their agenda. And local newspapers are renting out their newsrooms to wealthy left-wing organizations. Beyond the usual radical foundations like the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Knight Foundation, the Facebook Journalism Project has poured millions of dollars into RFA.
“Local journalists are providing us with an extraordinary public service 24 hours a day,” Facebook's Campbell Brown, falsely claimed. “We all need to understand how the virus is impacting the communities where we live—it’s vital information that’s helping keep our friends and families safe, and we’re proud to support Report for America in this effort.”
Except that Report for America’s model is finding young activists and parachuting them into local communities to purse some narrow political agenda. That’s not journalism. 6 of the activists from RFA’s current class will be covering ‘climate change’, 9 will be covering poverty, and 4 will be covering prisons.
Report for America's focus on identity politics and its base of white lefties parachuting in to produce agitprop sometimes results ludicrous pairings like Samuel Bojarski, a Jewish freelance writer from Pittsburgh, being dumped into The Haitian Times to cover the Haitian community. But mostly its activists are young women, some have worked for lefty organizations, and their politics are predictable.
Facebook has often been accused of spreading fake news. Here it, along with the Google News Initiative, which kicked in $400,000, is literally financing a fake news project which pays half the salaries of the reporters it embeds in local newsrooms, while its own funding comes from wealthy left-wing groups.
Most newspapers are happy with the arrangement: it’s the readers who are cheated.
Facebook has claimed that its Journalism Project will fight fake news, instead it’s funding it. If the social media monopoly giant wanted to support journalism, it could do so in any number of ways. By financing Report for America’s activism, it’s helping fund papers on the condition that they run propaganda.
This isn’t philanthropy, it’s politics.
Not only is Facebook financing a political agenda, its funding of RFA represents an even deeper conflict of interest when the embedded activists from the left-wing group start functioning as fact checkers. The social media monopoly has used media fact checkers in an on and off way to censor conservatives.
The current RFA 'corps' class embedded Clara Hendrickson, of the left-wing Brookings Institute think tank, into the Detroit Free Press, where she’s tasked with 'fact checking' Michigan politicians for the paper and for the PolitiFact site.
The conflicts of interest here are so convoluted that they require their own flow chart.
A research analyst for a partisan think tank is funded by a left-wing organization to ‘fact check’ political candidates for a major newspaper which has already accepted two other embedded RFA activists. PolitiFact then intends to treat her attacks on Republicans as ‘facts’, and Facebook, which is funding the whole shebang, will censor conservatives on social media based on her partisan hit pieces.
Fact checking already consists of partisan attacks by the media under the guise of objectivity. RFA is helping the media shelve even the thinnest pretenses of objectivity and ethics in pursuit of its goals.
Or, as Hendrickson tweeted, “I'm thrilled to say I'll be joining @freep in partnership with @PolitiFact as a @report4america corps member, fact-checking federal, state and local candidates in a key swing state ahead of the 2020 election.” Is ‘fact checking’ federal candidates any more important in a swing state? It is if your goal isn’t searching for the truth, but helping Joe Biden win the White House.
Like its activist, RFA zeroed in on the ‘key swing state’ element to justify Hendrickson’s role, explaining that, “Michigan’s need for fact-checking is particularly critical because it has been identified as one of only four true “swing” states in the 2020 presidential election… additionally, there is a Senate race in Michigan in 2020 that is widely considered a toss-up.” This isn’t journalism, it’s an election strategy.
Or, as PolitiFact Editor Angie Drobnic Holan noted in her gushing statement about the 'fact checking' site's partnership with a left-wing group, "We intend to fact-check the messaging of the presidential election, as well as the race for U.S. Senate." Actual journalists check their own facts. Activists redefine activism, partisan messaging, and hit pieces as fact checking because it still fools some people.
Here's a sample of Clara's commitment to truth and facts, "Spoiler: Trump's racist rhetoric has encouraged violence in America."
The only thing the PolitiFact partnership demonstrates is that ‘fact checkers’ are just as eager to rent out their coverage to wealthy donors as newspapers as long as it’s for the same left-wing causes.
Brokering complicated entanglements between wealthy lefty donors, lefty non-profits, and newspapers into unethical conflicts of interest is one of the few things that Report for America does well.
The Kansas City Star accepted three of RFA’s activists who will all be tasked with finding solutions to gun violence. These solutions will not involve locking up the shooters and throwing away the key. One of the RFA activists at the Kansas City Star is Humera Lodhi, a Muslim blogger at the Huffington Post, with a fellowship at the Marshall Project, a left-wing pro-crime think tank that blames gun violence on guns.
The Star not only managed to bring in an activist who is funded by one left-wing organization, but two left-wing organizations, while having her cover the very area of advocacy that is a major focus of the second organization. It’s hard to imagine how this arrangement could be any more biased and unethical. But there’s little doubt that Report for America will find a way.
Report for America is an initiative of the Ground Truth Project, a non-profit, which is partnering with for-profit papers, and the Project was born out GlobalPost, a for-profit organization. GlobalPost was going to use GTP to produce reporting for it. This conflict of interest went national when GTP was spun off into its own non-profit and RTA is used to seed content into for-profit publications.
Despite its peans to journalism, dumping a few activists into local papers and then paying half their salaries won’t keep local news alive. If anything, it will help alienate more of the remaining subscribers. RTA is just another venture by former journalists to monetize the last remains of journalism by turning it into a political weapon. There’s not much money in journalism, but lots of cash flowing into politics.
Corrupting, prostituting, and weaponizing journalism is helping destroy what little integrity it has.
RTA is eliminating what little difference there is between the media and political activism. It’s not alone in the field, but it’s the most successful organization and has the best financed of any of its rivals. Its founders have seen the bright future where journalism is a vestigial limb of political non-profits who instead of buying election ads, buy the whole paper without having to manage it or pay taxes on it.
And the whole thing is funded by the dot com monopolies who helped destroy journalism.


Free Speech Platform Parler: ‘Facebook Egregiously Spun Their Six-Year Web of Lies’

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
2:38

Social media start-up Parler is once again punching above its weight class, saying that Facebook ought to pay more than the $5 billion fine recently approved by a federal judge for the company’s violations of user privacy.
Facebook agreed last year to pay a record $5 billion fine to the Federal Trade Commission to settle a government investigation into its privacy practices. The settlement, which was approved last week by a federal court in Washington, D.C., also requires Facebook to improve privacy protections for its 2 billion users and report to an independent oversight board.
The social media giant was caught up in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the personal information of millions of Facebook users was used without their consent ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Parler said in a statement Tuesday that $5 billion is inadequate given Facebook’s valuation, which exceeds $550 billion, and the seriousness of the offense.
“Facebook conned and misled its community members by using their private information to build an empire” Parler Chief Marketing Officer Elise Rhodes said in a statement this week.
“They got caught with their back against the wall and agreed to stop the abuse. Facebook then made the conscious and intentional decision to keep exploiting, plundering, and peddling their community member’s data for every possible penny with the objective to extract every ounce of flesh. While Facebook egregiously spun their six-year web of lies, their value exploded to nearly $600 billion. In that perspective, what’s a $5 billion fine?”
Facebook has defended the settlement, saying last week that it goes beyond what the law requires. “The agreement approved today goes beyond anything required by U.S. law, and we believe that it can and should serve as a roadmap for more comprehensive privacy regulation, as other parts of the world have explored. We hope this leads to further progress on developing consistent legislation in the U.S. and elsewhere,” Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Michel Protti said in a statement.
“Ultimately, our goal is to honor people’s privacy and focus on doing what’s right for people. We believe that’s what the billions of people who use our products expect from us, and we’re going to keep doing that work for them.”
Parler, which launched in 2018, promotes itself as a politically unbiased platform that protects its users’ rights.
Follow David Ng on Twitter @HeyItsDavidNg. Have a tip? Contact me at dng@breitbart.com

Facebook Admits Banning Users for Saying They Are ‘Proud to Be English’24
Lee Haywood via Flickr (Creative Commons)
Lee Haywood via Flickr (Creative Commons)
2:22

Facebook has admitted to banning swathes of users for posting messages saying they were “Proud to be English” on St George’s Day.
As England’s patron saint, St George’s Day has long been celebrated as the English national day — if with less official enthusiasm than St Patrick’s Day in neighbouring Ireland, given the embarrassment of much of the academic, media, and political establishment at expressions of “Englishness”, which they have associated with racism and imperialism.
Someone, some group, or some algorithm moderating also appears to have bought into this mentality, with people who marked St George’s Day with messages expressing pride in the country and their heritage reporting that they were banned from the social media platform.
An image bearing the legend “Proud to Be English” and two crossed flagpoles carrying the English St George’s Cross and the white lion on a red field — a banner associated with Anglo-Saxons — appears to have proved particularly offensive to the so-called “Masters of the Universe“.
Users who shared the image reported receiving messages informing them they had been subject to various bans and suspensions because they had posted content which “goes against our Community Standards on dangerous individuals and organisations”.
Facebook would eventually confirm that claims they were banning people for the “Proud to be English” posts were true — but that this was “likely” a “mistake”.
“We’re investigating what happened. Our team reviews millions of pages, posts and images each week and we occasionally make a mistake, as has likely happened here,” a spokesman said in comments reported by The Sun.
“We have removed any restrictions placed on the impacted accounts,” they continued, adding that “We apologise for any upset caused.”
Hostility to St George’s Day in 2020 was not just limited to Big Tech and establishment figures, however, with one couple who celebrated the English national day by putting up a model of the country’s patron saint holding a sign saying “The NHS will slay Covid-19” — a reference to his legendary dragon-slaying exploits — having their home vandalised with “NAZI” graffiti and 50 bags of dog faeces thrown into the garden.
Follow Jack Montgomery on Twitter: @JackBMontgomery
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Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires


JOHN BINDER



The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.


In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.

Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.

“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:

At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.

“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

Tucker Carlson Exposes D.C. ‘Conservatives’ for Doing Big Tech’s Bidding

Rich Polk/Getty
21 Dec 20190
3:53
Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed establishment conservatives for taking money from big tech companies to do their bidding, on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Friday night.
The popular host, known for his no-holds-barred denunciations of establishment conservatives as well as Democrats, revealed massive spending by the establishment conservative Koch Foundation to protect big tech in Washington.
Tucker revealed that Americans for Prosperity, a “purportedly conservative group” controlled by the Kochs, launched an ad campaign trying to stave off the closing net of antitrust enforcement against Google and Facebook. The ads targeted Republican and Democrat state attorneys general that were investigating alleged antitrust violations by big tech companies.
The Koch-funded group also targeted members of the Senate Judiciary Committee with digital ads urging them to “oppose any effort to use antitrust laws to break up America’s innovative tech companies,” reported Carlson.
The Fox host ran through a laundry list of allegedly “conservative” D.C. think tanks that take money from big tech, and often advocate against regulating them over political bias or any other matter.
“In all, the Koch network quietly spent at least $10 million defending Silicon Valley companies that work to silence conservatives.”


Tucker Carlson Slamming Conservative Inc. for Defending Big Tech

Tucker Calls Out
-Kochs
-Heritage Foundation
-American Conservative Union
-AEI

"Big Tech Companies silence Conservatives, Conservative Non-Profits try to prevent the government from doing anything about it."

“Google has given money to at least 22 right-leaning institutions that are also funded by the Koch network,” reported Carlson.
“Those institutions include the American Conservative Union, the American Enterprise Institute, the National Review Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Mercatus Center.”
Carlson explained that this spending gets results.
“In September of 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and three other groups funded by Google and the Kochs sent a joint letter to the Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, expressing grave concerns over the DoJ’s plans to look into whether search engines and social media were hurting competition and stifling speech.”
Carlson also called out The Heritage Foundation, arguing that its shilling for big tech meant that it “no longer represents the interest of conservatives, at least on the question of tech.”
“A recent paper by Heritage, entitled ‘Free Enterprise Is the Best Remedy For Online Bias Concerns,’ defends the special privileges that Congress has given to left-wing Silicon Valley monopolies. And if conservatives don’t like it, Heritage says, well they can just start their own Google!”
Evidence of big tech’s efforts to co-opt establishment conservatives has been accumulating for some time. In March, Breitbart News published leaked audio from a senior director of public policy at Google, talking about using funding of conservative institutions to “steer” the movement. Another part of the leaked audio transcript was also revealed on Tucker Carlson’s show at the same time.
The Heritage Foundation has continued to defend big tech against efforts to strip them of their special legal privileges, which were given to them by Congress in the 1990s and are enjoyed by no other type of company.
This is despite the fact that Google publicly snubbed the foundation last year, canceling the formation of a planned “A.I ethics” council after far-left employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over the fact that Heritage president Kay Coles James was set to be one of its members.
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.


In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major cities.
December 20, 2019 
California Preening
The Golden State is on a path to high-tech feudalism, but there’s still time to change course.
“We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future . . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie star who once played Hercules says so who’s to disagree? The idea of California as a model, of course, precedes the former governor’s tenure. Now the state’s anti-Trump resistance—in its zeal on matters concerning climate, technology, gender, or race—believes that it knows how to create a just, affluent, and enlightened society. “The future depends on us,” Governor Gavin Newsom said at his inauguration. “And we will seize this moment.”
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major cities. California hasn’t yet become a full-scale dystopia, of course, but it’s heading in a troubling direction.
This didn’t have to happen. No place on earth has more going for it than the Golden State. Unlike the East Coast and Midwest, California benefited from comparatively late industrialization, with an economy based less on auto manufacturing and steel than on science-based fields like aerospace, software, and semiconductors. In the mid-twentieth century, the state also gained from the best aspects of progressive rule, culminating in an elite public university system, a massive water system reminiscent of the Roman Empire, and a vast infrastructure network of highways, ports, and bridges. The state was fortunate, too, in drawing people from around the U.S. and the world. The eighteenth-century French traveler J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur described the American as “this new man,” and California—innovative, independent, and less bound by tradition or old prejudice—reflected that insight. Though remnants of this California still exist, its population is aging, less mobile, and more pessimistic, and its roads, schools, and universities are in decline.
In the second half of the twentieth century, California’s remarkably diverse economy spread prosperity from the coast into the state’s inland regions. Though pockets of severe poverty existed—urban barrios, south Los Angeles, the rural Central Valley—they were limited in scope. In fact, growth often favored suburban and exurban communities, where middle-class families, including minorities, settled after World War II.
In the last two decades, the state has adopted policies that undermine the basis for middle-class growth. State energy policies, for example, have made California’s gas and electricity prices among the steepest in the country. Since 2011, electricity prices have risen five times faster than the national average. Meantime, strict land-use controls have raised housing costs to the nation’s highest, while taxes—once average, considering California’s urban scale—now exceed those of virtually every state. At the same time, California’s economy has shed industrial diversity in favor of dependence on one industry: Big Tech. Just a decade before, the state’s largest firms included those in the aerospace, finance, energy, and service industries. Today’s 11 largest companies hail from the tech sector, while energy firms—excluding Chevron, which has moved much of its operations to Houston—have disappeared. Not a single top aerospace firm—the iconic industry of twentieth-century California—retains its headquarters here.
Though lionized in the press, this tech-oriented economy hasn’t resulted in that many middle- and high-paying job opportunities for Californians, particularly outside the Bay Area. Since 2008, notes Chapman University’s Marshall Toplansky, the state has created five times the number of low-paying, as opposed to high-wage, jobs. A remarkable 86 percent of new jobs paid below the median income, while almost half paid under $40,000. Moreover, California, including Silicon Valley, created fewer high-paying positions than the national average, and far less than prime competitors like Salt Lake City, Seattle, or Austin. Los Angeles County features the lowest pay of any of the nation’s 50 largest counties.
No state advertises its multicultural bona fides more than California, now a majority-minority state. This is evident at the University of California, where professors are required to prove their service to “people of color,” to the state’s high school curricula, with its new ethnic studies component. Much of California’s anti-Trump resistance has a racial context. State Attorney General Xavier Becerra has sued the administration numerous times over immigration policy while he helps ensure California’s distinction as a sanctuary for illegal immigrants. So far, more than 1 million illegal residents have received driver’s licenses, and they qualify for free health care, too. San Francisco now permits illegal immigrants to vote in local elections.
Such radical policies may make progressives feel better about themselves, though they seem less concerned about how these actions affect everyday people. California’s Latinos and African-Americans have seen good blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and energy vanish. According to one United Way study, over half of Latino households can barely pay their bills. “For Latinos,” notes long-time political consultant Mike Madrid, “the California Dream is becoming an unattainable fantasy.”
In the past, poorer Californians could count on education to help them move up. But today’s educators appear more interested in political indoctrination than results. Among the 50 states, California ranked 49th in the performance of low-income students. In wealthy San Francisco, test scores for black students are the worst of any California county. Many minority residents, especially African-Americans, are fleeing the state. In a recent UC Berkeley poll, 58 percent of black expressed interest in leaving California, a higher percentage than for any racial group, though approximately 45 percent of Asians and Latinos also considered moving out.
Perhaps the biggest demographic disaster is generational. For decades, California incubated youth culture, creating trends like beatniks, hippies, surfers, and Latino and Asian art, music, and cuisine. The state is a fountainhead of youthful wokeness and rebellion, but that may prove short-lived as millennials leave. From 2014 to 2018, notes demographer Wendell Cox, net domestic out-migration grew from 46,000 to 156,000. The exiles are increasingly in their family-formation years. In the 2010s, California suffered higher net declines in virtually every age category under 54, with the biggest rate of loss coming among the 35-to-44 cohort.
As families with children leave, and international migration slows to one-third of Texas’s level, the remaining population is rapidly aging. Since 2010, California’s fertility rate has dropped 60 percent, more than the national average; the state is now aging 50 percent more rapidly than the rest of the country. A growing number of tech firms and millennials have headed to the Intermountain West. Low rates of homeownership among younger people play a big role in this trend, with California millennials forced to rent, with little chance of buying their own home, while many of the state’s biggest metros lead the nation in long-term owners. California is increasingly a greying refuge for those who bought property when housing was affordable.
After Governor Schwarzenegger morphed into a progressive environmentalist, climate concerns began driving state policy. His successors have embraced California “leadership” on climate issues. Jerry Brown recently told a crowd in China that the rest of the world should follow California’s example. The state’s top Democrats, like state senate president pro tem Kevin DeLeon, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, and billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, now compete for the green mantle.
Their policies have worsened conditions for many middle- and working-class Californians. Oblivious to these concerns, Greens ignore practical ideas—nuclear power, natural gas cars, job creation in affordable areas, home-based work—that could help reduce emissions without disrupting people’s lives. Ultra-green policies also work against the state’s proclaimed goal of building more than 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. In accordance with its efforts to reduce car use, the state mandates that most growth occurs in already-crowded coastal areas, where land prices are highest. But in cities like San Francisco, the cost of building one unit for a homeless person surpasses $700,000. California’s inland regions, though experiencing population gains, keep losing state funding for decrepit highways in favor of urban-centric, mass transit projects—yet transit use has stagnated, especially in greater Los Angeles.
The state, nevertheless, continues its pursuit of policies that would eliminate all fossil fuels and nuclear power—outpacing national or even Paris Accord levels and guaranteeing ever-rising energy prices. Mandating everything from electric cars to electric homes will only drive more working-class Californians into “energy poverty.” High energy prices also directly affect the manufacturing and logistics firms that employ blue-collar workers at decent wages. Business relocation expert Joe Vranich notes that industrial firms account for many of the 2,000 employers that left the state this decade. California’s industrial growth has fallen to the bottom tier of states; last year, it ranked 44th, with a rate of growth one-third to one-quarter that of prime competitors like Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.
Similarly, the high energy prices tend to hit the interior counties that, besides being poorer, have far less temperate climates. Cities like Bakersfield, capital of the state’s once-vibrant oil industry, are particularly hard-hit. High energy prices will cost the region, northeast of the Los Angeles Basin, 14,000 generally high-paid jobs, even as the state continues to import oil from Saudi Arabia.
California’s leaders apply climate change to excuse virtually every failure of state policy. During the California drought, Brown and his minions blamed the “climate” for the dry period, refusing to take responsibility for insufficient water storage that would have helped farmers. When the rains returned and reservoirs filled, this argument was forgotten, and little effort has been made to conserve water for next time. Likewise, Newsom and his supporters in the media have blamed recent fires on changes in the global climate, but the disaster had as much to do with green mandates against controlled burns and brush clearance than anything occurring on a planetary scale. Brown joined greens and others in blocking such sensible policies.
Few climate advocates ever seem to ask if their policies actually help the planet. Indeed, California’s green policy, as one paper demonstrates, may be increasing total greenhouse-gas emissions by pushing people and industries to states with less mild climates. In the past decade, the state ranked 40th in per-capita reductions, and its global carbon footprint is minimal. Renewable energy may be expensive and unreliable, but state policy nevertheless enriches the green-energy investments of tech leaders, even when their efforts—like the Google-backed Ivanpah solar farm—fail to deliver affordable, reliable energy.
It’s not so surprising, given these enthusiasms, that progressive politicians like Garcetti—who leads a city with paralyzing traffic congestion, rampant inequality, a huge rat infestation, and proliferating homeless camps—would rather talk about becoming chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
Reality is asserting itself, though. Tech firms already show signs of restlessness with the current regulatory regime and appear to be shifting employment to other states, notably TexasTennesseeNevadaColorado, and Arizona. Economic-modeling firm Emsi estimates that several states—Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Utah—are growing their tech employment faster than California. The state is losing momentum in professional and technical services—the largest high-wage sector—and now stands roughly in the middle of the pack behind other western states such as Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. And Assembly Bill 5, the state law regulating certain forms of contract labor, reclassifies part-time workers. Aimed initially at ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft, the legislation also extends to independent contractors in industries from media to trucking.
At some point, as even Brown noted, the ultra-high capital gains returns will fall and, combined with the costs of an expanding welfare state, could leave the state in fiscal chaos. Big Tech could stumble, a possibility made more real by the recent $100 billion drop in the value of privately held “unicorn” companies, including WeWork. If the tech economy slows, a rift could develop between two of the state’s biggest forces—unions and the green establishment—over future levels of taxation. More than two-thirds of California cities don’t have any funds set aside for retiree health care and other retirement expenses. The state also confronts $1 trillion in pension debt, according to former Democratic state senator Joe NationU.S. News & Report ranks California, despite the tech boom, 42nd in fiscal health among the states.
The good news: some Californians are waking up. A recent PPIC poll found that increasing proportions of Californians believe that the state is headed in the wrong direction—a figure that exceeds 55 percent in the inland areas. And voters dislike the state legislature even more than they dislike Donald Trump. Newsom’s approval rating stands at 43 percent, placing him toward the bottom among the nation’s governors. A conservative-led campaign to recall him is unlikely to succeed, but surveys reveal growing opposition to the new tax hikes proposed by the legislature. There’s a growing concern about the state’s expanding homeless population.
And a rebellion against the state’s energy policies is already under way. Recently, 110 cities, with total population exceeding 8 million, have demanded changes in California’s drive to prevent new natural gas hookups. The state’s Chamber of Commerce and the three most prominent ethnic chambers—African-American, Latino, and Asian-Pacific—have joined this effort.
Californians need less bombast and progressive pretense from their leaders and more attention to policies that could counteract the economic and demographic tides threatening the state. On its current course, California increasingly resembles a model of what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a small population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs. Delusion and preening ultimately have limits, as more Californians are beginning to recognize. As the 2020s beckon, the time for the state to change course is now.

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