Is the Biden administration just using the weaponization of the DOJ against Republicans? We’ve been hearing about how ehis administration was focusing on Trump and Republican groups, but some say that they’re not the only ones.
In the past 24 months, New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, former California Congressman TJ Cox, former Louisiana Democratic Party chief Karen Carter Peterson and former Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum have all been arrested and charged by the DOJ.
For time reasons, I had to cut my actual address a bit short Thursday. This statement, which began with a nod to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, is what was entered into the congressional record:
November 30, 2023
Chairman Jordan, ranking member Plaskett, members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak.
Exactly one year ago today I had my first look at the documents that came to be known as the Twitter Files. One of the first things Michael, Bari Weiss and I found was this image, showing that Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya had been placed on a “trends blacklist”:
This was not because he was suspected of terrorism or incitement or of being a Russian spy or a bad citizen in any way. Dr. Bhattacharya’s crime was doing a peer-reviewed study that became the 55th-most read scientific paper of all time, which showed the WHO initially overstated Covid-19 infection fatality rates by a factor of 17. This was legitimate scientific opinion and should have been an important part of the public debate, but Bhattacharya and several of his colleagues instead became some of the most suppressed people in America in 2020 and 2021.
That’s because by then, even true speech that undermined confidence in government policies had begun to be considered a form of disinformation, precisely the situation the First Amendment was designed to avoid.
When Michael and I testified before the good people of this Committee in March we mentioned this classically Orwellian concept of “malinformation” — material that is somehow both true and wrong — as one of many reasons everyone should be concerned about these digital censorship programs.
But there’s a more subtle reason people across the spectrum should care about this issue.
Former Executive Director of the ACLU Ira Glasser once explained to a group of students why he didn’t support hate speech codes on campuses. The problem, he said, was “who gets to decide what’s hateful… who gets to decide what to ban,” because “most of the time, it ain’t you.”
The story that came out in the Twitter Files, and for which more evidence surfaced in both the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit and this Committee’s Facebook Files releases, speaks directly to Glasser’s concerns.
There’s been a dramatic shift in attitudes about speech, and many politicians now clearly believe the bulk of Americans can’t be trusted to digest information. This mindset imagines that if we see one clip from RT we’ll stop being patriots, that once exposed to hate speech we’ll become bigots ourselves, that if we read even one Donald Trump tweet we’ll become insurrectionists.
Having come to this conclusion, the kind of people who do “anti-disinformation” work have taken upon themselves the paternalistic responsibility to sort out for us what is and is not safe. While they see great danger in allowing anyone else to read controversial material, it’s taken for granted that they’ll be immune to the dangers of speech.
This leads to the one inescapable question about new “anti-disinformation” programs that is never discussed, but must be: who does this work? Stanford’s Election Integrity Project helpfully made a graphic showing the “external stakeholders” in their content review operation. It showed four columns: government, civil society, platforms, media:
One group is conspicuously absent from that list: people. Ordinary people! Whether America continues the informal sub rosa censorship system seen in the Twitter Files or formally adopts something like Europe’s draconian new Digital Services Act, it’s already clear who won’t be involved. There’ll be no dockworkers doing content flagging, no poor people from inner city neighborhoods, no single moms pulling multiple waitressing jobs, no immigrant store owners or Uber drivers, etc. These programs will always feature a tiny, rarefied sliver of affluent professional-class America censoring a huge and ever-expanding pool of everyone else.
Take away the high-fallutin’ talk about “countering hate” and “reducing harm” and “anti-disinformation” is just a bluntly elitist gatekeeping exercise. If you prefer to think in progressive terms, it’s class war. The math is simple. If one small demographic over here has broad control over the speech landscape, and a great big one over there does not, it follows that one group will end up with more political power than the other. Which one is the winner? To paraphrase Glasser, it probably ain’t you.
It isn’t just one side or the other that will lose if these programs are allowed to continue. It’s pretty much everyone, which is why these programs must be defunded before it’s too late.
Progressive writer attacks a child in the name of WOKE. Yes the left has no shame a no name writer tweeted part of a childs face showing what this writer called racism and somehow connected it as derrogatory towards Native Americans and Blacks. Because of that child the KC Chiefs must stop using an Indian name.
Deadspin writer Carron Phillips smeared an innocent child who attended Sunday’s Kansas City vs Las Vegas game by posting a deceptive photo of only one side of his face.
“It takes a lot to disrespect two groups of people at once. But on Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas, a Kansas City Chiefs fan found a way to hate Black people and the Native Americans at the same time.” Carron Phillips wrote.
On January 6th, 2021, “insurrectionists attacked the United States Capitol intent on preventing the certification of a democratic election and, apparently, inflicting violence upon elected officials… Several lives were lost, including at least one Capitol Police officer…” wrote Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), then-Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security to Transportation Security Administration Administrator David Pekoske on January 11th, 2021, in a previously unrevealed letter. This committee “focuses on legislation and oversight related to the security of the United States” with the goal of “[ensuring] that the American people were protected from terrorist attacks.”
Chairman Thompson started his letter with unproven charges and false information in this salacious statement of fiction as he requested an Executive Branch agency ignore due process and deprive thousands of Americans of their Constitutionally protected rights to travel freely within the United States (a right recognized since at least 1870.) Rep. Thompson’s account of the events on January 6th, 2021, could have been lifted directly from a far-left opinion website like HuffPost or ProPublica. While Thompson does not source his wild allegations, he could have easily credited a ProPublica article that made identical claims: law enforcement agencies were “unprepared,” and “the attack was planned largely in open internet forums.” A subsequent article by the same author falsely claimed that “Officer Brian Sicknick died defending the Capitol.”
But Congressman Thompson’s concern was not about how to better protect the U.S. Capitol. His immediate concern, less than a week after the events of January 6th, was punishing those who came to Washington, DC, without trial or investigation. He said the “perpetrators have continued to enjoy freedom of movement throughout the country. Only a fraction of the insurrectionists have been arrested, and many of those arrested have been released pending a future court date. To our knowledge, the Federal government has not prevented a single insurrectionist from boarding an aircraft.” Perhaps the Chairman is less than familiar with the U.S. Constitution to which he was required to swear allegiance in his 15 terms as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, but the 5th Amendment is quite clear on the following: “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Chairman Thompson continued with a statement he attributed to “growing online chatter,” which informed his belief that “many of the same groups that planned and carried out Wednesday’s attack intend to return to Washington, D.C., to cause further disruption and violence in the coming days, including at the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.” Those of us who were working in law enforcement during the inauguration of Joe Biden marveled at the speed and efficiency of locking down Washington DC into a Police State scene out of the Cold War. The anti-scale fencing, which was nowhere to be found during the summer riots of 2020, was installed with an efficiency that shocked the government sensibilities in a place like Washington, DC. But at the bottom of his third paragraph, Rep. Bennie Thompson says the so-called quiet part out loud: “It appears little is being done to disrupt the travel of terrorists who just attacked the seat of the U.S. Government and wish to do so again.” Furthermore:
“Please provide a briefing not later than the end of this week on the following topics:
Current efforts to disrupt the travel of white supremacist and other domestic terrorist groups who may be planning further attacks against the U.S. Government and may be targeting the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden;
Options available for quickly denying air carrier service to individuals identified as posing a potential threat, including TSA’s authorities to prevent individuals from flying on a temporary or flight-by-flight basis;”
After this letter was received by the top official at the TSA, many Americans who had simply traveled to the National Capitol Region on or around January 6th, 2021, were welcomed to the “Quiet Skies.” These unsuspecting (and unconvicted) American citizens were added to a secretive program known as Quiet Skies—which the TSA claims identifies “international travelers who may require enhanced screening” by a “set of risk-based, intelligence-driven scenario rules.” It further claims that “these rules have strict oversight by the Department of Homeland Security, including the privacy, civil rights and liberties, and general counsel offices.” However, several Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) whistleblowers and retired supervisory FAM Sonya Labosco have blown the lid off some of the abuses of this program in numerous national interviews and a previous article published by UncoverDC. Additional coverage by UnCoverDC’s Wendi Mahoney introduced those unfamiliar with Quiet Skies to the “Quad S” designation.
The simple fact is—thousands of Americans are now subjected to invasive “security” screenings for several years as a form of extrajudicial punishment that was called for by a powerful Congress member and implemented by a feckless administrative agency. The saddest part for those of us who have engaged in surveillance activities of alleged but unindicted terrorists is—legitimate investigations of sworn aspiring members of ISIS or Al-Qaeda are not nearly as destructive to those members’ lives. The entire point of covert surveillance in a law enforcement setting is to document the subject’s behavior without them altering it from the heavy-handed or visible presence of police. The “SSSS” designation on the boarding passes of many attendees of a 1st Amendment-protected activity or even those who coincidentally flew into the region during that timeframe leads to an experience that is the opposite of productive for any “domestic terrorism” investigation. We only know this information because of the tireless work of the AMNC and former FAMs like Sonya Labosco.
Labosco is the Director of a private advocacy group called the Air Marshal National Council (AMNC). Historically, the FAMS have spent the majority of their time traveling internationally. Armed federal agents with specialized training to stop a terrorist hijack attempt or reclaim a seized aircraft, the FAMS are unique in their skillsets and focus on a post 9/11 airborne jurisdiction. But since January 2021, this highly specialized counterterrorism force has been aimed at surveilling Americans who have not been identified under any other federal law enforcement agency watch list.
The AMNC has been quietly working to unravel the chain of events that has led to the weaponization of this agency. This letter from Chairman Thompson appears to be one of the first movements by the eventual “Chairman of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol” (J6 Unselect Committee) to craft the Democratic Party fantasy that “white supremacists and domestic terrorists groups” were the cause of the riot that day. It also appears to be an underhanded request to the TSA, an agency Congressman Thompson’s Committee had “special oversight functions” over, to “disrupt the travel” and “[deny] air carrier service” to Americans who simply found themselves on the wrong side of the Congressman’s politics. Of note, this letter was co-signed by the Committee’s Ranking Member, John Katko, a 3-term New York Congressman who declined to seek re-election in 2022. Former Rep. Katko is currently a senior advisor to Hill East Group—a Washington, DC-based consulting and lobbying firm.
What Americans should know after reading this letter is that the Democrat narrative regarding what they would set out to show in their highly curated, nominally bipartisan Committee on January 6th was already sent out as marching orders to one of the federal government’s most inefficient and theatrical entities: the TSA.
Kyle Seraphin is a former FBI Agent assigned to the Washington Field Office on January 6th, 2021. After a transfer to Las Cruces, NM, he “blew the whistle” on the FBI’s partisan investigations into parents at school board meetings. He was suspended for a year without pay before “resigning,” but not before continuing to blow the whistle on numerous issues, including breaking the story the FBI was targeting Catholics with UnCoverDC. His work has spawned multiple Congressional and Attorney General investigations.
For thee not me. Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images
Winning. Only 14% of Americans get the latest jab. If you want or did get the latest jab, that’s fine. But don’t come crying when you get side effects, hospitalization, and of course death (of course it’s too late then).
The loons over at VOX call it a miracle drug. But what they and the CDC leave out is that since the so called miracle drugs arrived, more Vaccinated folks are getting COVID, Hospitalized, and dying.
Efforts to Silence Trump Harm All Americans. If you think that these attacks on former President Trump, doesn’t affect you, you’re dead wrong. Be you from all sides of the political spectrum, you will be in danger of government weaponization.
You have judges making decisions before the trial even starts. Judges allowing the prosecution to attack the defense, but stopping the defense from responding and defending themselves.
An attorney for Donald Trump told Newsmax on Friday that efforts to place gag orders on the former president in two court cases not only violate his First Amendment right to free speech, but also the rights of others who wish to hear what he has to say.
Gag orders have been placed on Trump by a judge presiding over his D.C. election interference case and by a judge presiding over his $250 million civil fraud trial in New York. Trump was fined $15,000 by New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron for twice violating that gag order, which was temporarily stayed by a New York appellate court.
“The First Amendment not only protects President Trump’s right to speak freely about what’s happening to him, but it also protects our rights as American citizens to receive information,” Christina Bobb told “Eric Bolling The Balance” guest host Sebastian Gorka. “They’re trying to block us from receiving information from the most popular presidential candidate in the race currently, Republican or Democrat.
“This very much is an effort to try to interfere with our ability to understand what President Trump is doing, what’s going on with him with his policy positions, with his views on this. They’re absolutely trying to prevent him from gaining popularity because everything he does and everything they do to him, he only grows in the polls.”
Bobb said the efforts to silence Trump, whether through gag orders or civil and criminal proceedings, have been a systematic assault on the president and the rights of all Americans, from the Department of Justice (DOJ) on down.
“It absolutely appears coordinated,” she said. “A few years ago, people used to talk about the deep state or the administrative state or the political class. Whatever you want to call it, the political establishment. I think we all kind of thought of it as this thing that didn’t really have form.
“But now I think we can see exactly how coordinated it is and how calculated they communicate with folks. If you look at [DOJ special counsel] Jack Smith all the way down to [Fulton County Prosecutor] Fani Willis. A county DA. I mean, this is a local race. This is a local district attorney in one county in Georgia and then coordinating with the state attorney general in New York [Letitia James]. It’s exceptionally coordinated from the highest levels down to simple county officials.”
Who will they come for next? Progressives goal to wipe out diversity and social disagreement. Have you noticed that those who claim that diversity is their goal want only those who think like they do?
The target since the Obama age was only single white males, then females, and white married couples were added. Children were the last that were added to the list. And maybe they will achieve their goal when they import the new China virus.
Ann Coulter did a take on a famous poem I’m sure you will recognize. Whites are still the main target, but only the beginning.
First they came for working class whites and I did not speak out— Because I was not a working class white.
Then they came for white police officers and I did not speak out— Because I was not a white police officer.
Then they came for white women who call the police, and I did not speak out- Because I was not a white women who calls the police.
Then they came for the white college applicants, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a white college applicant.
Then they came for statues of white male American heroes and I did not speak out— Because I was not a white male American hero.
Then they came for whites applying for jobs with the S&P 100 and I did not speak out— Because I was not a white applying for a job with the S&P 100.
We had a fake commission of Pelosi handpicked partisans who voted for impeachment. Now that we have the 44,000 hours of video, let’s have a real commission.
Make it small. 2 Democrats and three Republicans. And open up the hearing with Trumps full statement on a peaceful protest. What say you?
Recently, one of our Moderators — one of the nicest, if longwinded, people you will ever meet — was banned from a Disqus house channel for using the word “thug.” The moderator, Kandy and Iodine Tabs stated it was racist to “people of color.” Oh. Really?
‘Thug’ is an oft-used derogatory term, and it turns out the Thuggees of India were actually pretty horrible people.
The word “thug” has been in the American lexicon for a long time, but the origins of the word date well past even the founding of the United States. “Thug” finds its roots in the Hindi word “thag,” which translates into “thief,” and the Sanskrit word “sthagati”, which means “to conceal.”
The first reference to thugs dates back to the writings of Ziau-d din Barni, a Muslim political thinker and writer, in 1356.
The original thugs were members of the Thuggee tribe, a professional class of organized criminals who swindled, robbed, and murdered travelers across the Indian subcontinent from as early as the 14th century. Tracing their origins back to seven Muslim tribes, both Muslim and later Hindu members worshipped Mother Kali, the goddess of destruction.
The Thuggees would join caravans as fellow travelers, gaining their trust until they reached a remote place where it would be safe to attack.
At times, different members would secretly join at different legs throughout the journey, pretending not to know each other, until the Thuggees outnumbered the caravan’s travelers. They would then rob and murder the caravan members. The typical method of murder was strangulation, usually with nooses, leading the British soldiers to nickname them “phansigars” or “noose-operators.”
Once the travelers were dead, the Thuggee members would then dispose of the bodies before stealing the caravan’s belongings and escaping. Various historical estimates place the number of their victims somewhere between 50,000 to 2 million people over the years.
It was largely a hereditary profession with membership being passed down from fathers to sons. However, in some cases, the Thuggees spared the lives of young caravan members, instead adopting them and grooming them to become a part of the Thuggee class, and it was not unheard of that an outsider could befriend and then be recruited by members of the Thuggee tribe.
It wasn’t until the 1830s when the British governor-general of India, Lord William Bentinck, and Captain William Sleeman – British soldier and civil servant – worked to eradicate the Thuggee threat in India.
Relying on captured informants, they were able to try, convict, and sentence around 2,000 Thuggee members. Despite British claims that the Thuggee criminals had been all but erased from India by the 1870s, they remained pervasive in the cultural conscience of the British. English and later American writers in the 19th century continued to write about the Thuggee class and were responsible for introducing the word “thug” to the wider English speaking population.
While the word has morphed over time, adopting different nuances and cultural significance, the original conception of a thug as someone who operates outside the law has changed little in the last few hundred years.
The first printed reference to a “thug” appeared in Ziau-d din Barni’s History of Fīrūz Shāh, which was written in about 1356. However, the Thuggees as a group weren’t “discovered” by the British or even widely discussed until the 1830s. That’s when the British governor-general of India, Lord William Bentinck, and Capt. William Sleeman made a concerted effort to eradicate the thuggees from India.
Nearly 4,000 thugs were discovered and, of those, about 2,000 were convicted; the remaining were either sentenced to death or transported within the next six years. Sleeman then declared the thuggee to be completely eradicated.
This is a graphic that comes up when you look for “thug.” Is he white or POC?
Mark Twain wrote extensively about the thuggees in two chapters of his classic 1897 travelogue, Following the Equator. As critic Gladys Carmen Bellamy notes, Twain “found India a strange and sinister land,” and these feelings are quite clear in his descriptions of Thuggees. Twain devotes page after page of the book to describing exactly how the Thugs killed their victims; one chapter is titled “Eradication of Thuggee.”
Twain also draws a parallel between India’s Thugs and Westerners in this passage:
“The joy of killing! The joy of seeing killing done — these are the traits of the human race at large. We White people are merely modified Thugs; Thugs fretting under the restraints of a not very thick skin of civilization; Thugs who not long ago enjoyed the slaughter of the Roman arena …”
Gee, I guess Mark Twain was wrong, at least according to this Discus house channel moderator.
A thug is a thug, no matter how much melanin s/he has. It is someone operating outside the law. To claim that the term is inherently discriminatory against “People of Color” seems absurd and is itself racist.
How many blacks proudly use the term themselves? But if a white person uses it to describe ANY person, it’s racist?
Here in the United States, the word thug has long been a staple in rap lyrics. According to the invaluable site Rap Genius, “thug” appears in either the name of the artist or in the lyrics of over 4,800 songs. And Tupac Shakur famously had “Thug Life” tattooed across his abdomen.
Not everyone is happy with the prevalence of thug culture in hip-hop. As Tricia Rose writes in her book The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters: “The thug both represents a product of discriminatory conditions and embodies behaviors that injure the very communities from which it comes.”
In the publishing world, “thug lit” refers to a genre of fiction that is trying to break into the mainstream. Best-selling author Wahida Clark’s website calls her the “Queen of Street Literature.” Clark is signed to Cash Money Content, a Simon and Schuster imprint that’s operated by the Cash Money record label, which is home to rappers Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne and Drake.
I guess Kandy has been into the thug life a little too much.
So if a white person uses it, it’s “cultural appropriation” and “racist.”
And on the subject of racism, African-descent people are racist against fellow ‘blacks’ depending on how dark their respective skin color is. Talk about the pot & kettle… This last meme says it all, Kandy.
I can’t indulge in homilies to Elon Musk’s X as a haven for free speech while he also continues to suppress disfavored accounts (including all Substack contributors), but the X suit at least has a chance of becoming a referendum on serious forms of media manipulation. The X allegations, which obviously need proving out, detail in microcosm a phenomenon that’s been unpleasantly familiar to Americans since about 2016. We’ve grown used to a Twilight Zone existence in which nearly every news story of consequence, from Nord Stream to Bountygate to sonic weapons in Cuba, the Dancing Syringe Panic to “Russia Trying to Help Bernie Sanders” to the pee tape have the feel of invented stories. Later, they’re often proved to be, and worse, we’ve been conditioned to forgive the institutions caught routing such fakes our way, and salute the next narratives sent up the flagpole. The method is never put on trial.
In this case, it might be. MMfA is accused of creating a news story, reporting on it, then propagandizing it to willing partners in the mainstream press. Again, the X allegations need to hold up in an adversarial process, but the company claims to have fully captured a dollhouse version of a generation’s larger media frauds, making this a fascinating case to watch.
This last meme says it all, Kandy.
