Friday, May 1, 2020

KISSING CHINA'S RED ASS - NO, NOT JUST MARK ZUCKERMAN AND SENATOR DIANN FEINSTEIN, HOLLYWEIRD IS RIGHT UP CHINA'S ASS


FEINSTEIN HAS SPENT HER ENTIRE POLITICAL LIFE STALKING THE HALLS OF CONGRESS SNIFFING OUT DEALS THAT PUT MULTIPLE FORTUNES IN HER HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM’S POCKETS EVEN AS SHE SOLD OUT AMERICA

The deal would impose no review of human rights and impose no conditions for democratic reforms, supervised multi-party elections and such. All that, and more, is already a done deal with China, like the USSR a one-party Communist dictatorship that never produced a single product the United States needs. This has come about, in large part, due to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, San Francisco Democrat.
                                                                                      LLOYD BILLINGSLEY


After Feinstein was elected to the Senate in 1992, Blum continued profiting off their ties to China. A the same time, the freshman lawmaker was pitching herself as a “China hand” to colleagues, even once claiming “that in my last life maybe I was Chinese.” HARIS ALIC

FEINSTEIN HAS SPENT HER POLITICAL LIFE STALKING THE HALLS OF CONGRESS SNIFFING OUT DEALS THAT PUT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN HER POCKETS.

SHE HAS AVOIDED PROSECUTION BY VOTING AGAINST ANY ETHICS BILLS AND HER HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM'S HANDING OUT "CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION" BRIBES TO EVERY DEMOCRAT OUT THERE!


  
IN THE November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.


“All in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red China than other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon


“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan  AMERICAN THINKER.com


Senator Who Employed Chinese Spy Endorses Joe Biden for President

 

  

A high-profile U.S. senator with professional and personal ties to China — including once employing one of its spies — is backing former Vice President Joe Biden amid mounting questions over his son’s business dealings with the communist regime.


Ted Cruz Pushes Bill to Stop Hollywood from Censoring Films for Chinese Communist Party


April 30, 2020 Updated: April 30, 2020
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is seeking to advance legislation that would ban the Pentagon from supporting Hollywood studios that censor their films for screening in China, or that otherwise cater to the Chinese Communist Party.
Cruz said the aim of his bill, called the “Stopping Censorship, Restoring Integrity, Protecting Talkies” (SCRIPT) Act (pdf), is to cut off the influence that China’s Communist regime exerts on American perceptions through movies.
“This legislation is part of Sen. Cruz’s comprehensive push to combat China’s growing influence over what Americans see and hear, which includes legislation targeting information warfare from the Chinese Communist Party across higher education, sports, films, radio broadcasts, and more,” a press release announcing the initiative stated.



Epoch Times Photo
An aerial view of the Pentagon. (AFP/Getty Images)

Hollywood studios often contract with the Department of Defense (DOD) to feature military assets like ships, tanks, and jets in their films. To maximize profit by gaining access to the lucrative Chinese film screening market, studios sometimes cave to demands by Chinese censors to portray the Communist regime in a favorable light or will avoid broaching sensitive topics like human rights violations.
By withholding taxpayer-funded military assets from studios that agree to such demands from Beijing, the Pentagon would be serving to constrain China’s efforts in what Cruz says amounts to information warfare waged against the United States.
“The Chinese Communist Party spends billions and billions of dollars to mislead Americans about China and shape what our citizens see, hear, and think,” the GOP senator said in the release. “All of these activities are part of China’s whole-of-state approach to amass more influence around the world through information warfare—and we need to put a stop to it.”



Navy Jet Crash
A Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet in flight after refueling over the Pacific Ocean near the coast of Brisbane, Australia on July 17, 2019. (Senior Airman Elora J. Martinez/U.S. Air Force?AP)

An example of Hollywood self-censorship to appease Chinese demands, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, was when MGM re-edited the movie Red Dawn to show North Koreans, as opposed to what was originally meant to be Chinese forces, as occupying America.
Cruz, who is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, framed the issue as Hollywood being “complicit in China’s censorship and propaganda in the name of bigger profits.”
He said his bill would specifically prohibit the DoD from providing assets to any film whose creators would refuse to promise not to censor it, as well to any movie co-produced with a Chinese company subject to Beijing censorship, or to a studio that has recently censored its films to gain access to China’s market.
“The SCRIPT Act will serve as a wake-up call by forcing Hollywood studios to choose between the assistance they need from the American government and the dollars they want from China,” he said.



Guam
The aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) transits Apra Harbor as the ship prepares to moor in Guam on Feb. 7, 2019. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Terence Deleon Guerrero)

Cruz’ new initiative comes on the heels of his earlier proposal to amend existing federal communications legislation to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from propagandizing to Americans from radio stations in Mexico or Canada.
“China should not be able to set up shop in Mexico and blanket America with propaganda,” Cruz said in a statement.
“Every year, the CCP spends billions of dollars purchasing news outlets and waging information warfare to extend the reach of its propaganda and whitewash the unflattering and politically inconvenient truths about its totalitarian regime,” he said.
“We are seeing this play out right now as news outlets across the country parrot Chinese talking points about the coronavirus pandemic—a pandemic that could have prevented,” he added.
Follow Tom on Twitter: @OZImekTOM


Silicon Valley’s Control Virus
The tech industry’s Chinese surveillance solution to the Wuhan virus.
April 30, 2020 
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

1 AMY OSBORNE/Getty
30 Apr 20208
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.
April 29, 2020 
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
29 Apr 20209
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’4 Lee Haywood via Flickr (Creative Commons)
27 Apr 2020306
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”.
UK Health Sec Thanks Muslims for Lockdown ‘Sacrifice’ on St George’s Day, Doesn’t Mention St George’s Day https://t.co/3Xg9E5XZUt
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) April 24, 2020
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.
Home of Couple Celebrating St George's Day Defaced with Dog Dirt and 'NAZI' Graffiti https://t.co/5ofesIg5fW
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) April 26, 2020
Follow Jack Montgomery on Twitter: @JackBMontgomery
Follow Breitbart London on Facebook: Breitbart London
 


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


Exclusive — Coronavirus: Congressman Probes into Pentagon ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ Grant to Firm that Sent Taxpayer Dollars to Wuhan Lab

Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Pa., listens during a House Judiciary Committee markup of the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, on Capitol Hill, Thursday, Dec. 12, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
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Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA) is investigating a multimillion-dollar Pentagon biological warfare research grant that went to a New York firm that sent taxpayer money to a lab in Wuhan, China, from which U.S. intelligence officials believe the COVID-19 coronavirus, which is plaguing the world, may have leaked.
Reschenthaler told Breitbart News that he considers it “disgusting” that U.S. taxpayer dollars went to this Wuhan laboratory. He has written to Secretary of Defense Mark Esper inquiring about a grant that went to a firm that provided some taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology:
“It’s disgusting hardworking US taxpayer dollars were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. President Trump was absolutely correct to freeze that funding from the National Institute of Health,” Reschenthaler said in a statement provided exclusively to Breitbart News. “To learn a $6.5 million Department of Defense grant was awarded to the same organization that sent US taxpayer dollars to the WIV, EcoHealth Alliance, is deeply concerning. I sent this letter to the DOD because we must get to the bottom of whether DOD grant funding was also sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the potential epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak. Given the Chinese Communist Party’s cover-up of the origins and global threat posed by COVID-19, it is critical we ensure taxpayer dollars are not being used to support their activities.”
In his letter to Esper, Reschenthaler asked detailed questions about the EcoHealth Alliance grant that the Pentagon disbursed a few years ago.
“I write to bring your attention to a 2017 grant awarded by the Department of Defense (DOD) to EcoHealth Alliance Inc., an organization that has a history of collaborating with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which reports suggest may be linked to the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak,” Reschenthaler wrote to Secretary Esper in the letter on Thursday, obtained exclusively by Breitbart News ahead of its public release.
“In 2017, DOD awarded a $6.5 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance under Assistance Listing 12.351 – Scientific Research – Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction,” the congressman continued. “The description of this grant is listed as ‘understanding the risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in Western Asia.’ On March 23, 2020, EcoHealth Alliance received their final payment in the amount of $1,509,531 for the continuation of their research, which is projected to be completed in October 2022.”
The congressman is correct that in 2017, the Pentagon did indeed begin funding a $6.5 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. Federal records show that the grant description is: “UNDERSTANDING THE RISK OF BAT-BORNE ZOONOTIC DISEASE EMERGENCE IN WESTERN ASIA.”
The “objectives” of the grant to EcoHealth Alliance, according to the federal grant documents, include studying how to combat or counter Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).
“To support and stimulate basic, applied and advanced research at educational or research institutions, non-profit organizations, and commercial firms, which support the advancement of fundamental knowledge and understanding of the sciences with an emphasis on exploring new and innovative research for combating or countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD),” the grant’s objectives section on the federal website disclosing the disbursement reads.
It is not clear from the federal disclosures on this particular grant if taxpayer money from it went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese lab from which intelligence officials believe the coronavirus may have leaked. But another grant EcoHealth Alliance obtained—from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—did see taxpayer money disbursed to, among other places, the Wuhan lab.
That grant, which Breitbart News revealed exclusively this week, is under investigation by NIH and has seen any funding sent to the Wuhan lab halted, came from the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). NIAID is run by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has gained fame for his increased public profile during the coronavirus pandemic.
What Breitbart News uncovered was a letter from Dr. Michael Lauer, the NIH’s deputy director for extramural research, to EcoHealth Alliance officials informing them the firm’s grant is under investigation because of the taxpayer money sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Lauer’s letter also did two other very important things. First, it was the first time anyone in the U.S. government confirmed publicly that federal authorities believe the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan lab and are investigating the Chinese facility. Secondly, it informed EcoHealth that the grant is being cut off as it relates to funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology—a major and dramatic escalation from public health officials who generally do not have an issue spending more on research matters.
“EcoHealth Alliance, Inc., is the recipient, as grantee, of an NIH grant entitled ‘Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergency,’” Lauer wrote in the April 19 letter that Breitbart News revealed. “It is our understanding that one of the sub-recipients of the grant funds is the Wuhan Institute of Virology (‘WIV’). It is our understanding that WIV studies the interaction between corona viruses [sic] and bats. The scientific community believes that the coronavirus causing COVID-19 jumped from bats to humans likely in Wuhan where the COVID-19 pandemic began. There are now allegations that the current crisis was precipitated by the release from WIV of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19. Given these concerns, we are pursuing suspension of WIV from participation in Federal programs.”
Lauer added that EcoHealth Alliance is instructed to cease funding to the Wuhan lab while the investigation is ongoing.
“While we review these allegations during the period of suspension, you are instructed to cease providing any funds from the above noted grant to the WIV,” Lauer continued. “This temporary action is authorized by 45 C.F.R. § 75.371 (d) (‘Initiate suspension or debarment proceedings as authorized under 2 C.F.R. part 180’). The incorporated OMB provision provides that the federal funding agency, through suspension, immediately and temporarily exclude from Federal programs persons who are not presently responsible where ‘immediate action is necessary to protect the public interest.’ 2 C.F.R. § 180.700 (c).”
After the publication of this piece, Politico reported in a follow-up to the Breitbart News investigation that “suddenly ending a grant early is an unusual move for the NIH.” The Politico story includes more emails and back-and-forth between Lauer and the head of EcoHealth Alliance Peter Daszak, who denied money going to the Wuhan lab in the latest iterations of the grant even though federal documents as even fact checker Snopes confirmed demonstrate that some money did make it there.
In the wake of the NIH revelations, the U.S. intelligence community publicly confirmed the belief—unanimous across the agencies—that the virus may have emanated from the lab in Wuhan.
“The entire Intelligence Community has been consistently providing critical support to U.S. policymakers and those responding to the COVID-19 virus, which originated in China. The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified,” the Intelligence Community statement issued by the office of the Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Richard Grenell read. “As we do in all crises, the Community’s experts respond by surging resources and producing critical intelligence on issues vital to U.S. national security. The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan”:
It is worth noting that nobody in the intelligence community is accusing this virus of being an intentionally released biological weapon, nor are members of Congress, including Reschenthaler. His inquiry specifically asks the Pentagon about this grant that was clearly sent to a firm that has a history of sending U.S. taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan laboratory to study such coronaviruses from which intelligence community officials and U.S. public health officials believe the virus may have leaked in some way. What’s more, this particular grant from the Pentagon—notably to study “bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in Western Asia,” with public documents detailing the research related to “Weapons of Mass Destruction”—sounds eerily similar to the NIH grant that has been partially cut off and is under investigation.
Rep. Reschenthaler’s letter to Defense Secretary Esper continued by detailing how the NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance has been cut off as it relates to the Wuhan lab funding, noting the similarities between the two grants:
“As you are likely aware, on April 24, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) cut all grant funding for EcoHealth Alliance after reports circulated that the organization sent US taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” the congressman wrote. “It is my understanding that the NIH grant was for research on coronaviruses spread from bats to humans.”
Reschenthaler then noted “similarities between EcoHealth Alliance’s NIH research and the description of the 2017 DOD grant” and asked Esper a series of questions on this:
  1. Has any portion of DOD funding granted to EcoHealth Alliance or any other DOD grant recipient been given to or used in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology or any research laboratory in the People’s Republic of China (PRC)?
  2. If no, what, if any, steps is DOD taking to determine whether department grant funding was utilized by the Wuhan Institute of Virology or another research laboratory in the PRC?
  3. If yes, what is the DOD doing to ensure American dollars can no longer be utilized by the 
Wuhan Institute of Virology or another research laboratory in the PRC?
While the U.S. government increasingly believes that the virus emanated from the lab in Wuhan, the Chinese government and the lab officials there keep denying it. President Donald Trump has increased his criticisms of China in recent days, discussing publicly investigations the United States has ongoing and foreshadowing potential coming actions the administration intends to take to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for its actions on this front.
Reschenthaler, in the conclusion of his letter to Esper, noted that he is concerned U.S. taxpayer dollars may have been connected to this Wuhan lab and wants to be sure taxpayer funds were not misused.
“Given the Chinese Communist Party’s cover up of the global threat posed by COVID-19, it is critical we ensure taxpayer dollars are not being used to support their activities,” Reschenthaler wrote. “I appreciate your commitment to our national security, our servicemembers, and their families.”

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