COUNT US IN JOE! WE'RE GOING TO HELP YOU GET ELECTED ...... AS BITCH OF GITMO!
Report: Biden Recruits ‘Army of Influencers’ for 2024 Race
President Joe Biden, who has yet to officially announce he is running for reelection, is reportedly going to rely on an “army” of online “influencers” for his reelection campaign and they could have their own “briefing room” at the White House.
The president’s campaign seeks to “boost Biden’s standing among young voters who are crucial to Democrats’ success in elections” and will be used to counter former President Donald Trump’s “massive social media following” if he is the nominee, Axios reported.
The report noted that the president’s digital strategy team would like to connect with influencers across the county to help Biden tout his record to those who do not follow the social media accounts of Biden, the White House, or the Democratic Party. Reportedly, there are four Biden digital staffers — run by Rob Flaherty, who has been named assistant to the president and will hold the same rank as press secretary — focused on influencers and independent content creators on the White House payroll, not the Biden campaign.
Some “unpaid and like-minded” content creators working with the White House include TikTokers Harry Sisson, who talks about news on the Chinese social media app, and Vivian Tu, who talks about financial topics on the Chinese social media app.
Biden’s effort comes as polling shows younger voters, ages 18 to 29, preferred Biden over the former president by a 26-point margin during the last presidential election and preferred Democrats over Republicans by a 28-point margin in the 2022 midterms, according to a Tufts University Tisch College poll.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, White House deputy chief of staff, told Axios, “We’re trying to reach young people, but also moms who use different platforms to get information and climate activists and people whose main way of getting information is digital.”
Axios also noted that social media influencers might have their own briefing room in the future and allow influencers more access to the president. Sisson had reportedly asked the White House, “When are we going to get press briefing passes?” He noted that the White House was “very responsive to it.”
Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jbliss@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter @JacobMBliss.
Biden Admin Taps Liberal Journalism Institute To Teach Reporters How To Be ‘Balanced and Bias-Free’
Poynter Institute came under fire for releasing a "blacklist" of conservative news organizations
The Biden administration tapped a liberal journalism academy that once promoted a "blacklist" of conservative outlets to train reporters on how to create "balanced and bias-free" journalism.
The Poynter Institute held the training course with reporters as part of a contract with the U.S. Agency for Global Media, according to a federal spending database. The agency, which paid Poynter $23,500 for the course through March 31, oversees Voice of America and other government news outlets.
The agency could seemingly use the training. Republicans have accused the organization of whitewashing stories about Iran and engaging in partisan advocacy in favor of President Joe Biden.
But Poynter may not be the best choice to teach journalists the art of unbiased and balanced reporting. While the organization bills itself as "nonpartisan," it is funded largely by wealthy Democratic donors George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark, Bill Gates, and Tim Gill, an LGBT activist whose husband is Biden’s ambassador to Switzerland.
In 2019, Poynter released a "blacklist" of conservative news organizations, including the Washington Free Beacon, deemed "unreliable." Poynter retracted the list, called "UnNews," after widespread criticism. Poynter’s fact-checking site, PolitiFact, often displays pro-liberal and anti-conservative bias. A Free Beacon analysis found that of PolitiFact’s fact-checks of politicians, 62 out of 86 targeted Republicans. The site has also retracted numerous fact-checks later deemed inaccurate, including one in 2020 that said the theory that the coronavirus emerged from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, was "inaccurate and ridiculous."
In September 2020, Poynter executive Kelly McBride took part in a tabletop exercise held by the liberal Aspen Institute to plot how journalists, social media executives, and others would handle the hypothetical "hack and dump" of First Son Hunter Biden’s emails. The working group advised participants to treat any release of Biden documents with skepticism and to consult with other news organizations and intelligence officials before publishing stories based on the records.
Poynter appeared to follow the advice after emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop appeared in October 2020, when the organization lauded news organizations for ignoring the story. "Hardly any media outlets, except for conservative ones, are giving the story any credence at all," crowed one Poynter writer. McBride, the working group participant, is chair of Poynter’s Craig Newmark Center for Ethics & Leadership. Newmark, a major Joe Biden donor, contributed $5 million to Poynter and millions more to the Aspen Institute.
The government’s contract with Poynter comes amid heightened scrutiny of this growing network of think tanks and watchdog groups that purport to track disinformation. Many of the organizations involved in the network receive federal funding and have shown a tendency to label conservative viewpoints as misinformation.
The State Department has funded organizations like the Global Disinformation Index, which has advised companies to pull advertising from conservative websites, according to a Washington Examiner report.
Poynter and other organizations in the network have pressured social media companies to crack down on what they dub to be disinformation, raising concerns that doing so could lead to censorship of unpopular viewpoints. That pressure campaign has been lucrative for Poynter, which in 2021 urged Facebook to permanently ban former president Donald Trump over his comments about the 2020 election.
Last year, Poynter called on YouTube to beef up its moderation of misinformation, claiming the company was allowing its platform "to be weaponized by unscrupulous actors to manipulate and exploit others." YouTube and its parent company, Google, subsequently gave a $13.2 million grant to Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network to help users identify misinformation.
The International Fact-Checking Network, which has received funding from the State Department, pulled a similar coup on Facebook. After offering to "engage with you about how your editors could spot and debunk fake claims," Facebook partnered with the Network and Politifact to provide misinformation analysis. Facebook now relies heavily on PolitiFact, the Poynter subsidiary, to fact-check news articles on its platform.
This is not the first time the U.S. Agency for Global Media enlisted Poynter to train journalists. The agency paid the group $20,100 in July 2021 to conduct four "balanced and bias" training sessions. The State Department has paid Poynter $360,000 over the years to train journalists in Japan, Thailand, Turkey, and India.
Poynter and the U.S. Agency for Global Media did not respond to requests for comment.
CUT AND PASTE YOUTUBE VIDEO OF THE CRIME FAMILIES
HOW MANY OF THESE ARE PARASITE GAMER LAWYERS?...............EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM BUT PELOSI AND TRUMP.
The Blame Game
“Protect and enrich.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the Clinton
Foundation (TWO GAMER LAWYERS) and the Obama (TWO
GAMER LAWYERS) book and television deals. Then there is the
Biden family (THE CHINESE - BIDEN - PENN INSTITUTE)
(FOUR GAMER LAWYERS - JOE, HUNTER, JAMES &
FRANK) corruption, followed closely behind by similar abuses of
power and office by the Warren (GAMER LAWYER) and Sanders
families, as Peter Schweizer described in his recent book “Profiles in
Corruption.” These names just scratch the surface of government
corruption (ADD GAMER LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS AND
HER LAWYER HUSBAND AND THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY,
LAWYER CHUCK SCHUMER).
The letter, signed by Foxx and Rep. Burgess Owens (R., Utah), the chairman of the higher education subcommittee, comes amid weeks of damage control at the elite law school. Though Steinbach is on leave, Stanford has declined to discipline the students who disrupted Duncan, saying it would be unfair to do so given the "conflicting signals" they received. That decision has compounded the law school's public relations problem, with at least one prominent law professor, John Banzhaf of George Washington University, preparing to file a bar complaint against the hecklers.
These are remarks delivered by Fifth Circuit judge James Ho on Saturday, April 1, to an annual gathering of the Texas Review of Law & Politics.
Thank you, Lisa, for that lovely introduction. Allyson and I first met Lisa at a Federalist Society lawyers convention over two decades ago. And we’ve been good friends ever since. It’s always a privilege to stand with her—whether in New Haven, Connecticut, or Austin, Texas.
And thank you to the Texas Review of Law & Politics. I can’t believe this is TROLP’s 25th Annual Banquet—or that I’m TROLP’s 25th Jurist of the Year. I’m deeply honored to be included in such an extraordinary group of jurists.
Adam tells me I’m the first Jurist of the Year who first worked with TROLP as a law student. I’ve attended over twenty TROLP banquets since then.
So standing here at the podium today—it’s profoundly humbling—but it also causes me to reminisce about how much has changed since I was in law school.
I.
I’m a graduate of Stanford University and the University of Chicago. As we consider recent events, I wonder if my first alma mater has a lot to learn from my second.
The University of Chicago has long been a national leader when it comes to freedom of speech in higher education.
One former President of the University of Chicago put it this way: "Education is not intended to make people comfortable—it’s meant to make them think."
But law schools today are turning this upside down. At some law schools, education is more about making students comfortable—at the expense of making them think.
Law schools like to say that they’re training the next generation of leaders. But schools aren’t even teaching students how to be good citizens—let alone good lawyers. We’re not teaching the basic terms of our democracy.
In a nation of over 300 million Americans, we’re bound to disagree on a wide number of issues. But we’re supposed to know how to agree to disagree with one another. We’re supposed to engage one another with a presumption of good faith and in the earnest belief that there’s something we can learn from our fellow man. We’re supposed to fight it out in the political sphere—but then come together as colleagues, neighbors, and fellow citizens.
But what some law schools tolerate and even encourage today is not intellectual exploration—but intellectual terrorism. Students don’t try to engage and learn from one another. They engage in disruption, intimidation, and public shaming. They try to terrorize people into submission and self-censorship, in a deliberate campaign to eradicate certain viewpoints from the public discourse.
And they’re doing it to accomplished litigators, legal scholars, even federal judges. Judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits, as well as the Fifth Circuit, have been disrupted while trying to speak on campus.
Now, I have zero concern about judges being criticized. Thank goodness we live in a country where people are free. So judges should expect to be criticized. And we shouldn’t sweat it. People should become judges for public service, not public applause.
My concern is how law students are treating everyone else they disagree with. I’m concerned about what this is doing to the legal profession—and to our country.
Students learn all the wrong lessons. They practice all the wrong tactics. And then they graduate and bring these tactics to workplaces across the country. What happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus. And it’s tearing our country apart.
II.
Here’s the good news. This problem should be easy to solve. Most universities already have rules in place ensuring freedom of speech and prohibiting disruptions.
The problem is that these rules aren’t enforced. Students disrupt without consequence. Administrators tolerate or even encourage the chaos.
It’s not because most students or faculty support these tactics. When I visit law schools, I’m always told it’s just a small fraction of students who practice intolerance. But the majority tolerates it, because faculty members don’t want to be controversial. And students just want to graduate, get a job, and move on with their lives.
But I want to draw a sharp distinction between students being afraid and faculty being afraid.
Students are just starting their lives. They don’t want to end their careers before they even begin.
We shouldn’t be putting it on the students to police other students. It should be on the grown-ups to lead, to teach, and, where necessary, to punish.
But the grown-ups are scared to do anything. We’re the opposite of the Greatest Generation. We’re leaving our country worse off, not better, for the next generation.
The 1980s were called the decade of greed. Today, we’re living in the decade of fear.
But fear is no excuse for those who seek positions of leadership in our profession. And that includes the legal academy. No one forces you to become a law school dean—just like no one forces you to become a judge. But if you take the job, you take the responsibility to enforce the rules—no matter how loud you’re booed.
III.
We need law school leaders to put aside their fears of the mob, and get serious about enforcing the rules and enforcing intellectual freedom. If they’re serious, it seems obvious that there are three steps they need to take.
First, it’s not enough to have a policy. You have to enforce it.
Rules aren’t rules without consequences. Administrators who promote intolerance don’t belong in legal education. And students who practice intolerance don’t belong in the legal profession.
I go back to my alma mater, the University of Chicago. A few years ago, the law school held an event featuring a professor who favors anti-boycott laws to protect the State of Israel. Before the event, the law school reminded students of its free speech policy.
But one law student thought he found a clever loophole. Rather than disrupt the event himself, he recruited others to campus to disrupt the event.
Well, my law school was not impressed. Chicago suspended the law student for the rest of the year—and told him that he’d have to re-apply for admission if he ever wanted to come back.
And guess what: Chicago hasn’t experienced a disruption ever since.
Yale knows how to discipline students, too—at least students who hold the wrong views. If you’re a member of the Federalist Society, and you send an email that another student says is offensive, Yale administrators may threaten a negative report on your character and fitness report to state bar officials. That’s what they did to the student who wrote the infamous "traphouse" email.
By contrast, a few months later, Yale refused to impose any consequences when students yelled and screamed during a Federalist Society event featuring Kristen Waggoner.
The point is that law schools know what their options are. They know they can suspend or expel students for engaging in disruptive tactics. They know they can issue a negative report on a student’s character and fitness to state bar officials. They know it because schools have done it.
Second, at a minimum, law schools should identify disruptive students, so that future employers will know who they’re hiring.
Schools issue grades and graduation honors to help employers separate wheat from chaff. Likewise, schools should inform employers if they’re at risk of injecting potentially disruptive forces into their organizations.
Without that information, employers won’t know if the person they’re hiring is in one category or another. Now, some employers may be okay with that. But others may not be. No one is required to hire students who aren’t taught to live under the rule of law.
Third, it’s not enough to just promise freedom of speech. The Soviet Constitution promised free speech, too. But it was just words on paper—what our Founders called a "parchment promise."
Our Founders taught us that it’s not enough to just promise certain rights. You need to establish a structure of government to ensure that your rights will be protected.
So what does it mean to establish structural protections in the academy?
Well, I’ll put it this way: It’s not a coincidence that the worst disruptions typically occur at the worst schools when it comes to one critically important metric: intellectual diversity on the faculty and in the administration.
If you don’t have intellectual diversity in positions of leadership, who has the power, the motivation, and the strength of character to stand up for students, and for disfavored viewpoints, when these incidents occur? How do we know everyone’s views will be protected, if everyone’s views aren’t represented? Why should students welcome disfavored viewpoints in the classroom, when those viewpoints aren’t welcome on the faculty? What message does it send when you say you believe in diverse viewpoints—but it’s so obviously a lie?
The same checks and balances that we take for granted in our Constitution are entirely missing at too many schools.
IV.
These three elements are plainly missing at Stanford Law School. Just look at the ten-page letter that was recently issued by the Dean. I know that letter has been praised by some people for standing up for free speech. I don’t share that view.
I’ll agree that there are some good words in that letter. But they’re just words. How do we know if those words are sincere—and not merely strategic? Because there’s good reason to be suspicious.
Remember, this wasn’t the Dean’s first reaction to recent events. Her first reaction was to defend the administrators as "well intentioned."
So at best, this is a dramatic change of heart. Should we believe it?
Well, here’s the problem: The words in that letter are not accompanied by concrete actions. Because it imposes zero consequences on anyone. It doesn’t even say whether there will be consequences if there’s a disruption in the future.
Look, I get that no one wants to be vindictive. I believe in redemption and grace. But we’re not talking about good faith mistakes here.
Is it really that close of a call—whether it’s okay to call for someone to be raped? Do these future leaders really not have fair notice that they shouldn’t ridicule a judge’s sex life?
I’m all for second chances. But I’m not a schmuck.
This shouldn’t be difficult to understand. Rules need to be enforced. Violations must have consequences. You don’t need a fancy law degree to understand this. Anyone who’s ever been a parent understands this. Heck, anyone who’s ever been a kid understands this. Kids don’t obey parents who don’t back up their words with consequences.
V.
These problems aren’t unique to one or two schools. But I think it’s obvious why so much attention has focused on one or two schools. It’s because they present themselves as the nation’s best institutions of legal education. Yet they’re the worst when it comes to legal cancellation. Moreover, what happens at these elite schools impacts the profession and the country.
That’s why Lisa and I announced last fall that we would not hire any student who decides to attend Yale Law School in the future. History is replete with examples of how actions like this can have a positive influence on our country.
We believe our effort will help future students—either by influencing the dynamic at Yale, or by showing these students why they need to choose other schools.
I’m pleased to report that a number of Yale students and scholars have gone out of their way to inform Lisa and I that they support what we’re doing. In fact, some have admitted to us that they disagreed with us at first —but now that they’ve seen how the administration is reacting, they get it. And now they’re the ones urging us to keep it up—and not to pull back.
Why are folks at Yale urging us not to let up? After all, events at Yale have gone much more smoothly this year. Speakers haven’t been disrupted. Yet these students and scholars don’t want us to relent.
I understand why. It’s because the disruption of speakers is not the problem. It’s only a symptom of the problem.
The real problem in the academy is not disruption—but discrimination. Rampant, blatant discrimination against disfavored viewpoints. Against students, faculty, and anyone else who dares to voice a view that may be mainstream across America—but contrary to the views of cultural elites.
Moreover, let’s just say it: The viewpoint discrimination we most often see in the academy today is discrimination against religious conservatives. Just look at which viewpoints are targeted most frequently at speaker events—and excluded most vigorously from faculty appointments.
Unless we take action to solve the real problem—discrimination, not disruption—all we’re doing is giving speeches.
Anyone can talk a big game about freedom of speech. We all know how to give flowery speeches about intellectual freedom. The recent letter from the Stanford Dean contains some good words, too. But that letter promises no meaningful, lasting institutional change to eradicate discrimination.
So we have to start facing the facts. We have to stop burying our heads in the sand. And we have to ask ourselves: If a law school openly tolerates and even practices religious discrimination, who would want to go to that law school? And why would we want to hire them?
The current President of the Stanford Federalist Society put the point well recently: "A lot of us who worked very hard to get to Stanford are kind of feeling like suckers right now. But you get here, you experience this, you see that there’s a mob, there’s a way you’re expected to think. You might have thought the law school was to teach you how to debate with people, and how to make an argument. But in fact, it turns out it’s to teach you how to think a very particular way, to hold a certain set of beliefs. And if you don’t want to do that, then maybe these elite schools are not for you."
So what do we do about it? Well, ask yourself this: What do elite law schools do when they conclude that institutions are failing them? Yale recently called for a boycott of the U.S. News and World Report. And numerous schools have followed suit. Well, imagine that every judge who says they’re opposed to discrimination at Yale and Stanford takes the same path. Imagine they decide that, until the discrimination stops, they will no longer hire from those schools in the future. How quickly do we think those schools would stop discriminating then?
So Lisa and I have made a decision. We will not hire any student who chooses to attend Stanford Law School in the future.
***
Our Nation’s law schools are failing this basic standard. They’re supposed to make the world a better place. I worry they’re making the world a worse place.
That’s why I thank God for the Texas Review of Law & Politics. Thank you for standing when others would prefer to sit. Thank you for showing character when others prefer to show off their credentials. Thank you for demonstrating fortitude rather than fear. You inspire us all. And frankly, you embarrass us all. And you should. I hope you continue to embarrass us into standing with you, rather than sitting on the sidelines. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
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