TWO AMERICAS. Liberal Celebrity Chef Gets Exemption From Gas Stove Ban in California City. Liberal celebrity chef José Andrés is building a new restaurant in Palo Alto, California, which has a law banning gas stoves in new construction. Andrés threatened to pull out of the project over the gas stove ban, so they gave him an exemption. Membership in the liberal elite has its privileges, you see.
Liberal Celebrity Chef Exempt From Gas Stove Ban, California City Says
A California city will make an exception to its natural gas ban for world-famous chef José Andrés, after the landlords for the chef’s planned restaurant warned Andrés may pull out over the regulation.
After the owners of the mall where Andrés is set to open the restaurant threatened to sue the city, Palo Alto administrators will allow Andrés’s Mediterranean restaurant Zaytinya to use natural gas lines, despite a new law this year that bans them in construction.
The restaurant relies on “traditional cooking methods that require gas appliances to achieve its signature, complex flavors,” said Anna Shimko, a lawyer representing the group that owns the shopping center where Andrés leased space for the project.
The lawyer argued the building’s plans were approved in 2019, years before the gas ban was imposed. She added that some of the appliances the restaurant staff needs “do not have electrically powered equivalents.” Shimko added that if the ban is enforced, “Zaytinya will likely choose not to locate within the city.”
So Jose Andres thinks it's better for cooking and gets to have a gas stove, but not you plebes. https://t.co/ooA7OTLA87
By Geraldyn Berry for One America News 2:55 PM – Wednesday, May 17, 2023
Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser baffled legislators when she claimed in her testimony that just over 200 homeless persons live in the nation’s capital.
In her hearing on Tuesday before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, Bowser asserted that her figures are “the facts,” despite the fact that other estimates are far higher. She spoke with Representative William Timmons (R-S.C.).
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser says there are only 221 homeless people in Washington. pic.twitter.com/eWNlEYfCZI
“Do you agree that we have a major, major problem in Washington, D.C., as it relates to homelessness?” Timmons asked.
“We have 221 people, as of today’s count, who are living on the street,” Bowser responded. “Those are the people that you are referring to.”
“Councilman [Charles] Allen gave me a 5,000 number. He sent me a report that was produced by your –,” Timmons said prior to Bowser interrupting him off.
“There are not 5,000 people living on the street, sir –,” she said before being cut off herself.
“There’s 221 people living under 395. We can go right now. It’s 300 yards away,” Timmons responded. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about facts,” Bowser said. “There are not 300 people under 295 or 395. We have outreach teams that are out across all eight wards, and those are the facts.”
“Your own councilman sent me a report saying 5,000 people are homeless in D.C. What are you – OK, look, we’re going to move on,” Timmons said.
A copy of the homelessness study from Timmons’ office showed that, according to a point-in-time study from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, 4,922 “people experiencing literal homelessness” were present in the city as of 2023.
A request for Bowser’s office to clarify how she calculated the 221 number went unanswered.
In a news statement issued by her own office in April of last year, Bowser used the report’s 2022 iteration. According to the 2022 report, there were 4,410 homeless individuals in the city, a 13.7% decrease from 2021, she boasted.
Despite the inclusion of certain regions that are not strictly inside the city limits, the MWCG report from 2023 revealed that 8,944 people were homeless throughout the entire Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.
A request for Bowser’s office to clarify how she calculated the 221 number went unanswered. The mayor’s office also did not explain why she chose a number that was far less than her earlier estimate of 4,410.
If you believe her story, I have a wonderful deal for you. Cash only, and small bills.
A bigger question would be why she had to preface her answers with a paragraphs-long statement about how DC hadn’t had an elected government until a year after she was born. I won’t even bother to check whether her parents could not vote for President before that time. I’m pretty sure that the President was the ONLY office they could vote for in D.C.
I sincerely doubt that — in the District of Columbia proper — they pay more in Federal taxes than some states do. Too many federal buildings, for one thing.
What the Durham Report is and isn’t. I’m sure you’ve heard by now that the Durham Report is out and both some on the right are upset and most on the left continue with the misinformation. Let’s review.
The report isn’t a document that asked for or atgave indictments. Durham after all is a Democrat who’s been in the government service for years. It also isn’t a whitewash of the FBI, DOJ, and the Obama administration.
And it isn’t a tell all or vindication of all the rumors from the left and right in reference of what it would contain. It is a document of facts. Let me explain. It’s a report of just the facts.
It’s a vindication of not just Trump, but of Conservative talk show hosts and Conservative media. They for three years were saying that there was no Russian interference on Trumps side.
It’s a report that fills in the blanks for all. It confirms that Clinton was the one who used Russian misinformation to smear Trump. It proves that Obama, Biden, and heads of the FBI and DOJ knew that Clinton was using Russian documents that were false.
What’s really daming is that it confirms that Obama had Trump wired. It proves that the FBI and DOJ went to the FISA courts without real intel.
Finally on what is. The Durham Report released on Monday highlighted that in 2016, McCabe, the FBI’s deputy director, and Strzok, the agency’s deputy assistant director for counterintelligence, beghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSXhRKA_XIEan the probe — dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane” — without “ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information.
In other words, Obama and his party -- via the DNC -- really did have Trump's "wires tapped."
The media also owe Trump a massive apology. I'm sure they'll get right on that, and the story. https://t.co/bdwBAxIUxo
On January 17, 1961, outgoing President and former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower gave one of the most consequential speeches in American history. Eisenhower for eight years had been a popular president, whose appeal drew upon a reputation as a person of great personal fortitude, who’d guided the United States to victory in an existential fight for survival in World War II. Nonetheless, as he prepared to vacate the Oval Office for handsome young John F. Kennedy, he warned the country it was now at the mercy of a power even he could not overcome.
Until World War II, America had no permanent arms manufacturing industry. Now it did, and this new sector, Eisenhower said, was building up around itself a cultural, financial, and political support system accruing enormous power. This “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” he said, adding:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes… Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
This was the direst of warnings, but the address has tended in the popular press to be ignored. After sixty-plus years, most of America – including most of the American left, which traditionally focused the most on this issue – has lost its fear that our arms industry might conquer democracy from within.
Now, however, we’ve unfortunately found cause to reconsider Eisenhower’s warning.
While the civilian population only in recent years began haggling over “de-platforming” incidents involving figures like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos, government agencies had already long been advancing a new theory of international conflict, in which the informational landscape is more importantly understood as a battlefield than a forum for exchanging ideas. In this view, “spammy” ads, “junk” news, and the sharing of work from “disinformation agents” like Jones aren’t inevitable features of a free Internet, but sorties in a new form of conflict called “hybrid warfare.”
In 1996, just as the Internet was becoming part of daily life in America, the U.S. Army published “Field Manual 100-6,” which spoke of “an expanding information domain termed the Global Information Environment” that contains “information processes and systems that are beyond the direct influence of the military.” Military commanders needed to understand that “information dominance” in the “GIE” would henceforth be a crucial element for “operating effectively.”
You’ll often see it implied that “information operations” are only practiced by America’s enemies, because only America’s enemies are low enough, and deprived enough of real firepower, to require the use of such tactics, needing as they do to “overcome military limitations.” We rarely hear about America’s own lengthy history with “active measures” and “information operations,” but popular media gives us space to read about the desperate tactics of the Asiatic enemy, perennially described as something like an incurable trans-continental golf cheat.
Indeed, part of the new mania surrounding “hybrid warfare” is the idea that while the American human being is accustomed to living in clear states of “war” or “peace,” the Russian, Chinese, or Iranian citizen is born into a state of constant conflict, where war is always ongoing, whether declared or not. In the face of such adversaries, America’s “open” information landscape is little more than military weakness.
In March of 2017, in a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee on hybrid war, chairman Mac Thornberry opened the session with ominous remarks, suggesting that in the wider context of history, an America built on constitutional principles of decentralized power might have been badly designed:
Americans are used to thinking of a binary state of either war or peace. That is the way our organizations, doctrine, and approaches are geared. Other countries, including Russia, China, and Iran, use a wider array of centrally controlled, or at least centrally directed, instruments of national power and influence to achieve their objectives…
Whether it is contributing to foreign political parties, targeted assassinations of opponents, infiltrating non-uniformed personnel such as the little green men, traditional media and social media, influence operations, or cyber-connected activity, all of these tactics and more are used to advance their national interests and most often to damage American national interests…
The historical records suggest that hybrid warfare in one form or another may well be the norm for human conflict, rather than the exception.
Around that same time, i.e. shortly after the election of Donald Trump, it was becoming gospel among the future leaders of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” that interference by “malign foreign threat actors” and the vicissitudes of Western domestic politics must be linked. Everything, from John Podesta’s emails to Trump’s Rust Belt primary victories to Brexit, were to be understood first and foremost as hybrid war events.
This is why the Trump-Russia scandal in the United States will likely be remembered as a crucial moment in 21st-century history, even though the investigation superficially ended a non-story, fake news in itself. What the Mueller investigation didn’t accomplish in ousting Trump from office, it did accomplish in birthing a vast new public-private bureaucracy devoted to stopping “mis-, dis-, and malinformation,” while smoothing public acquiescence to the emergence of a spate of new government agencies with “information warfare” missions.
The “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.
Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the “defense” sector, the “anti-disinformation” complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have “military limitations.” The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign “disinformation.” It’s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy’s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy.
They suggest we must rethink old conceptions about rights, and give ourselves over to new surveillance techniques like “toxicity monitoring,” replace the musty old free press with editors claiming a “nose for news” with an updated model that uses automated assignment tools like “newsworthy claim extraction,” and submit to frank thought-policing mechanisms like the “redirect method,” which sends ads at online browsers of dangerous content, pushing them toward “constructive alternative messages.”
Binding all this is a commitment to a new homogeneous politics, which the complex of public and private agencies listed below seeks to capture in something like a Unified Field Theory of neoliberal narrative, which can be perpetually tweaked and amplified online via algorithm and machine learning. This is what some of the organizations on this list mean when they talk about coming up with a “shared vocabulary” of information disorder, or “credibility,” or “media literacy.”
Anti-disinformation groups talk endlessly about building “resilience” to disinformation (which in practice means making sure the public hears approved narratives so often that anything else seems frightening or repellent), and audiences are trained to question not only the need for checks and balances, but competition. Competition is increasingly frowned upon not just in the “marketplace of ideas” (an idea itself more and more often described as outdated), but in the traditional capitalist sense. In the Twitter Files we repeatedly find documents like this unsigned “Sphere of Influence” review circulated by the Carnegie Endowment that wonders aloud if tech companies really need to be competing to “get it right”:
In place of competition, the groups we’ve been tracking favor the concept of the “shared endeavor” (one British group has even started a “Shared Endeavour” program), in which key “stakeholders” hash out their disagreements in private, but present a unified front.
Who are the leaders of these messaging campaigns? If you care to ask, the groups below are a good place to start.
“The Top 50 List” is intended as a resource for reporters and researchers beginning their journey toward learning the scale and ambition of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Written like a magazine feature, it tries to answer a few basic questions about funding, organization type, history, and especially, methodology. Many anti-disinformation groups adhere to the same formulaic approach to research, often using the same “hate-mapping,” guilt-by-association-type analysis to identify wrong-thinkers and suppressive persons. There is even a tendency to use what one Twitter Files source described as the same “hairball” graphs.
Where they compete, often, is in the area of gibberish verbiage describing their respective analytical methods. My favorite came from the Public Good Projects, which in a display of predictive skills reminiscent of the “unsinkable Titanic” described itself as the “Buzzfeed of public health.”
Together, these groups are fast achieving what Eisenhower feared: the elimination of “balance” between the democratic need for liberalizing laws and institutions, and the vigilance required for military preparation. Democratic society requires the nourishment of free debate, disagreement, and intellectual tension, but the groups below seek instead that “shared vocabulary” to deploy on the hybrid battlefield. They propose to serve as the guardians of that “vocabulary,” which sounds very like the scenario Ike outlined in 1961, in which “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific and technological elite.”
Without further ado, an introduction to the main players in this “CIC”:
1. Information Futures Lab (IFL) at Brown University (formerly, First Draft):
Type: A university institute, housed within the School of Public Health, to combat “misinformation” and “outdated communications practices.” The successor to First Draft, one of the earliest and more prominent “anti-disinformation” outfits.
You may have read about them when: You first heard the terms Mis-, dis-, and malinformation. The term was coined by FD Director Claire Wardle. IFL/FD are also the only academic/non-profit organization involved in the Trusted News Initiative, a large-scale legacy media consortium established to control debate around the pandemic response. Wardle was Twitter executives’ first pick for a signal group of anti-misinformation advisors it put together. She also participated in the Aspen Institute’s Hunter Biden laptop tabletop in August 2020 (before the laptop story broke). IFL’s co-founder Stefanie Friedhoff serves on the White House Covid-19 Response Team. First Draft staffers were also revealed in the #TwitterFiles to be frequent and trusted partners to a leading public face of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, Renee DiResta, now of Stanford University.
What we know about funding: First Draft was funded by a huge number of entities including Craig Newmark, Rockefeller, the National Science Foundation, Facebook, the Ford Foundation, Google, the Knight Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, Open Society Foundations, and more. Funding for the IFL includes the Rockefeller Foundation for a “building vaccine demand” initiative.
What they do/What they are selling: IFL/First Draft position themselves as the vanguard of disinformation studies, acting as key advisors to media, technology, and public health consortiums, bringing together a wide range of academic skill sets.
Characteristic/worldview quotes: High use of terms like coordinated inauthentic behavior, information pollution, the future Homeland Security catchwords mis-, dis-, and malinformation, and information disorder.
In the #TwitterFiles: First Draft is featured extensively in the files. They were the first proposed name when Twitter decided to assemble a small group of “trusted people to come together to talk about what they’re seeing,” were part of the Aspen Institute’s Burisma tabletop, and appeared in multiple emails with Pentagon officials.
Goofy graphage:
Closely connected to: Almost all the leading lights of the CIC, including the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Trusted News Initiative, Shorenstein Center, DFRLabs, the World Economic Forum, the Aspen Institute, Meedan, and Bellingcat.
In sum: With a strong ability to both know and direct emerging trends, and with a large array of elite networks in tow, the IFL will continue to serve as one of the key tastemakers in the “anti-disinformation” field.
Type: Medium-sized non-profit specializing in technology and countering “disinformation.”
You may have read about them when: Meedan ran a range of Covid-19 misinformation initiatives “to support pandemic fact-checking efforts” with funding from BigTech, the Omidyar Foundation, the National Science Foundation and more. Partners included Britain’s now-disgraced Behavioural Insights Team, or “nudge unit,” known for scaring the pants off Brits about a range of medical manias. Among Meedan’s “anti-disinformation” projects is an effort to peer into private, encrypted messages. The Meedan board includes Tim Hwang (former Substack General Counsel), free speech skeptic Zeynep Tufecki, and Maria Ressa, a Nobel Prize winner with very close ties to eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and the National Endowment for Democracy. Ressa believes Wikileaks “isn’t journalism.” Meedan co-founder Muna AbuSulayman was the founding Secretary General of the Saudi Alwaleed bin Talal Foundation. Alwaleed bin Talal is one of the largest shareholders in Twitter, both pre-Elon Musk and now, with Musk.
What we know about funding: Widespread public and private funding including from Omidyar, Twitter, Facebook, Google, the National Science Foundation, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and more.
What they do/What they are selling: Meedan positions itself as an NGO leader in the “anti-disinformation” field; convening networks, developing technology, and establishing new initiatives. Strong support and development are given to “fact-checking” organizations and building the technology to support them.
Characteristic/worldview quote: “Detection of controversial and hateful content.”
Gibberish verbiage: “Our work shows that there are far more matches between tipline content and public group messages on WhatsApp than between public group messages and either published fact checks or open social media content.”
Connected to: Twitter, Factcheck.org, AuCoDe, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, the Behavioral Insights Team, the Oxford Internet Institute, Stanford Internet Observatory, and First Draft.
In sum: Meedan exemplifies the NGO-to-Stasi stylistic shift, where spying and snitching on private messages in the name of “anti-disinformation” is now considered a public good.
3. Harvard Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy (Technology and Social Change Project)
Type: An elite academic project once regarded as one of the leading centers in the “anti-disinformation” field.
You may have read about them when: It was announced that the center would be closed in 2024 on the spurious grounds that project lead Joan Donovan lacked sufficient academic credentials to run the initiative (what was spurious is that it took that long for this realization to come about). Donovan was already widely known for partisanship and getting things wrong, in particular repeatedly claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was not genuine. The Shorenstein Center birthed two other key “anti-disinformation” initiatives, the aforementioned First Draft and the Algorithmic Transparency Initiative. Cameron Hickey, ATI’s lead, is now CEO of the much larger National Congress on Citizenship. In this video, Joan Donavan sits alongside Richard Stengel, the first head of the Global Engagement Center, an agency housed in the State Department with a remit to “counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.” The closing of the Technology and Social Change Project is a minor victory in an otherwise exploding field.
What we know about funding: Money from: the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Gates Foundation, Google, Facebook Journalism Project, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
What they do/What they are selling: Academic research into “disinformation,” a fellows program, field convening, and frequent media commentary. The Shorenstein Center also produces a leading “misinformation studies” journal.
Characteristic/worldview quote: Donovan’s infamous tweet, posed with an Atlantic staffer: “Me and @cwarzel Looking at the content on the Hunter Biden Laptop, the most popular straw man question at #Disinfo2022.”
Closely connected to: First Draft, Algorithmic Transparency Initiative/NCoC, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Data and Society, and the Aspen Institute.
In sum: An “anti-disinformation” project that got it wrong so often, even the center that housed it cut ties.
Type: Non-profit consultancy, specializing in health communications, marketing, technology and “disinformation.”
You may have read about them when: Whilst PGP seem to do some front-facing work, they are also guns for hire for a large range of corporate and government programs. Twitter files show PGP had contracts with biotech lobby group BIO (whose members include Pfizer and Moderna) to run the Stronger campaign, which according to Lee Fang “worked w/Twitter to set content moderation rules around covid ‘misinformation.’” Jennifer McDonald of Twitter’s Public Policy team noted in an email that PGP was also among Twitter’s four “strongest information sharing partnerships” for Covid “misinformation”. PGP partnered with UNICEF on the Vaccine Demand Observatory which aims to “decrease the impact of misinformation and increase vaccine demand around the world.” The board includes the former CEO of Pepsi and Levi’s, a Morgan Stanley Vice-President, and Merck Pharmaceuticals’ Director of Public Health Partnerships.
What we know about funding: $1.25 million from BIO as well as partnerships with Google, Rockefeller, and UNICEF.
What they do/What they are selling: A suite of communications activities including marketing, research, media production, social media monitoring, vaccine promotion, and campaigns. They also use AI and natural language processing to “identify, track, and respond to narratives, trends, and urgent issues” in order to “perform fact-checking” and “power behavior change strategies.”
Type: For-profit firm with defense connections specializing in “digital marketing and disinformation & analysis.”
You may have read about them when: Graphika was one of two outside groups hired in 2017 by the Senate Intelligence Committee to assess the Russian cyber menace. Graphika was also a “core four” partner to Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership and its Virality Project, both subjects of #TwitterFiles reports. Made headlines for claiming a leak of US-UK trade discussions, publicized by Jeremy Corbyn, was part of an operation called “secondary Infektion” traceable to Russia.
Former Director of Investigations Ben Nimmo was previously a NATO press officer and DFRLabs fellow, and is now Facebook’s Global Threat Intelligence Lead. Head of Innovation Camille Francois was previously Google Jigsaw’s principal researcher.
What we know about funding: $3 million from the Department of Defense for 2020-2022, “to support and stimulate basic and applied research and technology at educational institutions”; boasts of partnerships with the Defense Advanced Partnerships Research Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Air Force. According to USAspending.gov, defense agencies have provided almost $7 million.
What they do/What they are selling: Long-form reports and subscription services for corporate and governmental clients, often focused on identifying “leading influencers” and “misinformation and disinformation risks,” along with highly sophisticated AI for surveilling social media.
Characteristic/worldview quote: “seeding doubt and uncertainty in authoritative voices leads to a society that finds it too challenging to identify what’s true.”
Gibberish verbiage: Tendency to impressively horrific puns (“More-troll Kombat,” “Lights, Camera, Coordinated Action!” “Step into my Parler”).
In the #TwitterFiles: In 2017-2018, Twitter was unaware the Senate Intelligence Committee would be sharing their data on supposed Russia-linked accounts with commercial entities.
In sum: With deep Pentagon ties and a patina of public-facing commercial legitimacy, Graphika is set up to be the Rand Corporation of the Anti-Disinformation age.
Connected to: Stanford Internet Observatory, DFRLabs, Department of Defense, DARPA, Knight Foundation, Bellingcat
Type: Public-facing disinformation research arm of highly influential, extravagantly funded, NATO-aligned think tank, the Atlantic Council.
You may have read about them when: In May of 2018, Facebook announced a “New Election Partnership With the Atlantic Council,” to “prevent our service from being abused during elections.” The announcement was made by former National Republican Senatorial Committee Chief Digital Strategist Katie Harbath, weeks after a contentious hearing in the Senate in which Mark Zuckerberg answered questions about the “abuse of data” on Facebook. The Atlantic Council’s DFRLabs at the time included such figures as Eliot Higgins (from Bellingcat) and Ben Nimmo, future Director of Investigations at Graphika. This became a watershed moment, as Facebook soon after announced a series of purges of accountsaccused of “coordinated inauthentic activity,” including small indie sites like Anti-Media, End The War on Drugs, ‘Murica Today, Reverb, and Anonymous News, beginning an era of mass deletions.
DFRLab was a core partner for Stanford’s “Election Integrity Partnership,” and the “Virality Project.” The Atlantic Council also organizes the elite 360/Open Summit whose 2018 disinformation edition included the private Vanguard-25 forum that brought together Madeleine Albright, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, the head of the Munich Security Conference, Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, Edelman (the world’s biggest PR company), Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Bellingcat, Graphika, and more.
What we know about funding: “DFRLab has received grants from the Department of State’s Global Engagement Center that support programming with an exclusively international focus,” Graham Brookie of DFRLabs told Racket. The Atlantic Council receives funding from the U.S. Army and Navy, Blackstone, Raytheon, Lockheed, the NATO STRATCOM Center of Excellence and a long list of other financial, military, and diplomatic entities.
Characteristic/worldview quote: On “rumors about Covid-19s origins,” particularly the “disinformation” that the virus may have originated in a laboratory: “The cumulative effect of this was to distract the U.S. public’s attention away from the federal government’s disjointed approach to mitigating the virus and point the blame at China.”
Gibberish verbiage: Awesome quantities; site seethes at public’s unwillingness to popularize nom d’équipe “Digital Sherlocks”; insists so often it is relying only on “open-source information” that one doubts it; relies heavily on schlock military (“Narrative Arms Race”) and medical (“Infodemic”) metaphors to describe disinformation threat.
In sum: DFRLabs is not only funded by the Global Engagement Center, and had initial GEC chief Richard Stengel as a fellow, but uses substantial state and corporate resources to evangelize GEC’s “ecosystem” theory of disinformation, which holds that views that overlap with foreign threat actors are themselves part of the threat.
Connected to: the Stanford Internet Observatory, University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, Bellingcat, and the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics
Joe making stuff up. AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File
Views: 7
President Joe Biden falsely claimed again on Tuesday that Republicans’ legislation to raise the debt ceiling and curb spending cuts “$22 billion in veterans’ healthcare.”
Speaking at SUNY Westchester Community College in Valhalla, New York, Biden falsely asserted that the Limit, Save, Grow Act takes aim at veterans’ benefits.
“Now, they want to go back to the levels where we cut those folks that now provide that kind of help. This amounts to a $22 billion cut in veterans’ health care,” he said. It appears that Biden meant to say “22 percent,” the figure he has falsely used in other recent claims about the legislation.
However, the Limit, Save, and Grow Act makes no mention of veterans or their health benefits but caps discretionary spending at $1.47 trillion with one percent annual increases, as Breitbart News reported when he tweeted the claim earlier this month:
The bill would also take back all unobligated COVID relief money, rescind nearly $71 billion to the IRS to hire new workers and upgrade technology, block Biden from waiving $10,000 to $20,000 in student loan debts and reduce monthly payments for undergraduate loans, repeal most of the tax breaks Democrats passed to promote their clean energy agenda, and impose work requirements for federal cash and food assistance.
Republicans said that veteran health benefits would not be touched ahead of the vote a few weeks back, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) reiterated this while speaking with CNN in Israel last week, as Just the News noted:
Can you tell me where in the bill it cuts the V.A.? It doesn’t. See this is the damage that when people do not tell the truth about the bill. It actually goes to the funding where we were four months ago. If you look back to the Obama-Biden budget that they passed for the next ten years, this actually spends more than what they proposed at this time, and the work of Congress gets to decide where spending and it’s just like every family household. I’m very sad that the Democrats would think about cutting the veterans because we would not.
The “22 percent” cut that Biden has seized onto comes from an estimate provided by hisdirector of the Office of Management and Budget, Shalanda Young. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler detailed how the Biden administration sewed the narrative by seizing on the lack of detail surrounding discretionary spending in the Limit, Save, Grow, and Act. Young’s estimate assumes that Republicans would make no cuts to 050-funded programs – which the House Budget Committee notes “includes the military activities of the Department of Defense (DoD), the nuclear weapons-related activities of the Department of Energy (DOE), the national security activities of several other agencies” – meaning that steep savings would need to come from other programs to cap the figure at $1.47 trillion. Per Kessler, the administration used the Department of Veterans Affairs and the help of Democrat-leaning veterans’ groups to create the narrative:
The administration carefully laid the groundwork for the attack. On April 21, the Department of Veterans Affairs issued a news release warning of the bill’s impact, with specific numbers — “30 million fewer Veteran outpatient visits, and 81,000 jobs lost across the Veterans Health Administration.” Then, more than 20 veterans groups allied with Democrats, such as VoteVets, sent lawmakers a letter requesting that VA funding be protected in the bill. The president of Veterans of Foreign Wars also wrote McCarthy, seeking “explicit assurances” that funding for veterans care would not be disrupted.
VoteVets even launched an advertisement claiming that veterans could die as a result of the legislation, a claim Kessler said warranted four Pinocchio’s.
“The VoteVets ad, using the White House numbers as a source, takes the spin to a Four-Pinocchio extreme, suggesting veterans may die when in fact no vote on the fiscal 2024 Veterans Affairs budget has yet been cast,” he wrote.
Biden pointed to the veterans’ groups while speaking Wednesday as evidence that the bill would cut veterans’ benefits:
Nowhere in their actual proposal, are there exclusive protection for veterans. But they say I’m – it’s unusual language we use with presidents these days – they say I’m lying when I say that. Well, the truth is, why have so many veteran groups spoken out in opposition the Republican proposal. They’re not all Democrats.
The Limit, Save, and Grow Act is the only legislation to raise the debt ceiling in Washington, DC. However, Senate Democrats refuse to take up the bill while simultaneously failing to offer any alternative measures on how to offset runaway debt.
Following congressional leadership’s meeting with Biden at the White House Tuesday, McCarthy stated, “I didn’t see any new movement,” but added their staff would continue talks.
“What we have here is we’re running out of time,” said Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). “It’s time for the president to get serious and to sit down with the speaker and get a solution.”
U. S. Government Concerns Grow Over EPCOT’s New Offering
Why did the government feel that EPCOT might present a threat to homeland security? According to heavily redacted FBI files, the Bureau had major concerns, particularly about the China pavilion at World Showcase. As such, FBI agents closely monitored all of the delegates on World Showcase.
EPCOT’s China pavilion/Credit: Disney Parks
According to a post at MuckRock, EPCOT’s World Showcase “initially called for cultural installations from nine countries” and was “intended to be the ultimate harmonious international village, a shining example of global unity. Naturally, the FBI had a problem with it.”
While this has been going on since 1982, when Epcot opened, there seems to be an increase in their presence there. Why?
Per Muckrock:
The Tampa field office [of the Federal Bureau of Investigation] seemed concerned that any terrorist organizations operating within or around the participating nations, “Canada, France, China, Italy, Japan, UK, West Germany, Africa, and Mexico,” would converge on EPCOT.
Real good job there, FBI. You were so busy chasing and spying all those dangerous EPCOT delegates that you completely missed the 9/11 terrorists training at TWO nearby flight schools. Bravo! /s
If they are still there and have increased their presence, why? Shouldn’t they be along the Mexican border to help with the onslaught of illegal immigrants pouring across our southern border?
Oh, wait, the illegals are future Democratic voters. Carry on.
The Biden White House barred the New York Post from attending Monday’s event in the South Court Auditorium as prosecutors consider charges against Hunter Biden.
On Monday, Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg delivered remarks on flight delays and cancelations from Biden’s fake White House set in the South Court Auditorium.
Biden mumbled through his remarks before shuffling away and refusing to answer questions.
Only 30 reporters were present.
The White House press office blocked the New York Post from attending Biden’s only public event for the day.
According to The Post, there were 20 empty seats in the South Court Auditorium on Monday, but their request for a press credential was still denied.
The White House press office barred The Post from attending President Biden’s only daytime public event Monday as federal prosecutors near a decision on criminally charging first son Hunter Biden for tax fraud and other crimes.
The Post has closely covered the president’s ties to his relatives’ foreign dealings and first reported in October 2020 on files from Hunter’s abandoned laptop that link Joe Biden to ventures in China and Ukraine.
Biden, who falsely characterized The Post’s reporting as Russian disinformation, appeared with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to talk about airline policies in the White House-adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building
In a Monday email, White House staff informed The Post: “We are unable to accommodate your credential request to attend the Investing in Airline Accountability Remarks on 5/8. The remarks will be live-streamed and can be viewed at WH.gov. Thank you for understanding. We will let you know if a credential becomes available.”
The email does not claim that the exclusion is due to “space limitations” — an excuse that was used until recently to justify the press office’s mysterious prescreening of reporters let into large presidential events, which under past administrations were open to all journalists on White House grounds.
In the same room this February, Biden chose to answer The Post’s query about whether his family’s links to China compromised his ability to steer US policy. He fumed about the lack of “polite” reporters and stormed out.
The Post has the fifth-largest news website by US readership — or fourth when excluding aggregator MSN. It is the nation’s second-most-read newspaper online and as of last year, The Post had the fifth-largest print circulation.
In June 2022, 73 journalists representing nearly two-thirds of White House briefing room seats signed a letter demanding the end of the mysterious prescreening process for events. But the unprecedented access restrictions remained in place, and press officers refused to explain the criteria for selection even to leaders of the White House Correspondents’ Association.
The White House did not respond to questions from The Post about the exclusion from Monday’s presidential event. At least two other journalists were initially barred, but the press office relented and let one of them in.
Empty seats at the press conference.
In addition to prescreening reporters let into Biden’s events — which critics say sets a troubling precedent for press access — the White House moved Friday to close a longstanding legal loophole that prevented authorities from stripping reporters of press badges and unveiled a formal process to do so.
Less than 1/3 of the White House press corps were present. WHY?
It’s obvious what the criteria for admittance are:
Do you report things contrary to or supportive of the narrative?
Do you ask hard or softball questions?
Are you reporting on the Biden crime family or just handwaving it away as “disinformation”?
And while holding airlines responsible for at-fault delays is a good idea, when will Pete Buttigieg be held accountable for the delays HE caused? Oh, wait…
This photo shows the California State Capitol building. (File photo by Anda Chu, Bay Area News Group)
Views: 7
California business owners received an unpleasant surprise in filing their taxes this year — the state of California has defaulted on its $18.5 billion federal unemployment insurance loans, and as a result, every employer in California is being forced to pay additional federal taxes to make up the difference until the loan is repaid in full. If you found this news baffling, you’re not alone. I did too.
Federal unemployment insurance loans were essential to helping Californians weather the COVID-19 pandemic, and in fact, most states participated in the federal loan program. As the state mandated business closures for months on end, these payments helped Californians who were out of work to put food on the table and keep the lights on. However, out of the 22 states that were forced to take federal loans during the pandemic, California is one of only four to fail to repay its loan, and it owes the largest amount of any state by far.
When states across the country received loan-free federal aid as a result of the federal government’s unprecedented emergency spending packages, most chose to use at least a portion of those funds to pay back the federal loans they’d been forced to take to support their unemployment programs. California received $15.3 billion in federal Coronavirus Relief Funds, but allocated none of it to repaying its outstanding loans.
Even more baffling is the fact that last year California declared a historic $97.5 billion budget surplus after passing a $300 billion budget in May. That budget surplus was enough money to repay the federal government loan more than five times over. Instead of making the fiscally prudent decision to pay off the debt with part of this vast surplus, California has instead allowed its loan obligations from the Federal Unemployment Trust Fund to go unfulfilled for two years in a row, triggering a provision that transfers responsibility for repaying the debt from a state government to that state’s employers.
As a result of California’s failure to repay its debt, millions of our state’s employers will be required to pay penalties to the federal government this month in the form of higher Federal Unemployment Act (FUTA) taxes. FUTA imposes a 6% gross federal unemployment tax rate on the first $7,000 paid by employers for each employee. This results in a maximum federal tax of $420 per employee per year. Typically, California employers receive a credit which reduces the tax paid per employee to only $42 per worker per year.
When a state fails to repay federal unemployment insurance loans it takes from the Federal Unemployment Trust for two or more consecutive years as California has done, the FUTA credit is reduced for that state, meaning every businesses in the state is forced to pay progressively more in FUTA taxes for each year the state remains delinquent on its loans. After five years, a different FUTA credit reduction calculation kicks in, levying an even bigger penalty on the state’s employers and its economy.
The last time California was in arrears on these Title XII loans, it took seven years to repay them, meaning that in the final year of repayment (2017), every employer in California was forced to pay an extra $147 per employee in FUTA penalties. That amounted to thousands of dollars for the average small business that could have instead been used to grow employment in our communities.
Small and large companies in California alike are already reeling from economic instability, high interest rates, and skyrocketing inflation. They’re also still struggling with supply chain fluctuations and recovering from one of the longest state-mandated COVID-19 economic shutdowns in the country. Forcing a higher tax burden on our employers as a result of California’s gross fiscal mismanagement will undermine job creation and drive prices even higher.
To add insult to injury, it is notable that better fraud enforcement by the Employment Development Department alone could have repaid the state’s federal loans.
A LexisNexis data analysis performed by the reporters at KCRA showed that California paid out at least $32.6 billion and counting in fraudulent disability and unemployment compensation during the pandemic, much higher than the department’s publicized $20 billion number. But by either statistic, the state would have had more than enough to repay its loans from the federal government if it had only administered its programs correctly.
It was the state’s own actions that shut down businesses and caused much of the resulting unemployment that California faced, and yet it is our small businesses that will once again be forced to pay the penalty for California’s mismanagement. Forcing Californians to pay higher federal taxes because of the state’s failure to either prevent rampant fraud or repay its debts in a year when the state had a multibillion-dollar budget surplus is nothing short of theft. This baffling mismanagement of our state’s finances is totally unacceptable, and our small businesses and employers should not be forced to pay the price. I am leading eleven members of the California congressional delegation in sounding the alarm on this issue and calling on Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California Legislature to act immediately and repay California’s outstanding federal unemployment insurance loans to prevent this burden from unfairly falling on California employers. It is the state’s duty to take fiscal responsibility for its actions. Failure to do so could jeopardize the financial stability of millions of California’s small employers.
Peter Baldrige, former Assistant General Counsel of the Calif Dept of Public Health, notified the agency they were violating the law by not investigating COVID vaccine injuries and deaths. They ignored him. So I will be filing a writ of mandamus, a court order to force them to do their job. If the court grants the writ, we will likely get to have input on how they do it. That will be a nice change, won’t it?
Executive summary
The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) hasn’t investigated any link between the COVID vaccines and death. That’s a violation of California law to look the other way.
Peter Baldridge, former Assistant Chief Counsel of the CDPH, expressly brought this violation to the attention of the head of the department. As you might expect, the CDPH ignored him and did absolutely nothing.
We have proof of this.
Since the California government is not doing its job in following the law, I will be filing a writ of mandamus to compel the CDPH to do their job. The California court should also award me attorney fees. Also, the investigation should be under the supervision of the court and they should be required to:
do the requisite histopathology tests to assess causality
produce the death-vax records.
In addition, Mr. Baldridge and I have both made a FOIA request to see the death-vax records; something that no state or world government has ever produced.
One way or another, the truth will be exposed soon for all to see.
Peter Baldridge’s requests
By letter dated December 17, 2022, Mr. Baldridge requested under the Public Records Act (Govt. Code, §§6250, et seq.) all records pertaining to any and all special investigations conducted or being conducted by the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) into the COVID vaccine adverse events.
On January 10, 2023, he received CDPH’s response: CDPH provided no records of any special investigation in Covid-19 vaccine adverse events after January, 2021, and had no records of any other investigation for periods later than June, 2021.
So in a letter dated April 17, 2023, Mr. Baldridge requested, under the California Public Records Act (Govt. Code, §§7920, et seq.), any and all records pertaining to special investigations into Covid-19 vaccine adverse events commenced after January 10, 2023, the date of the Department’s first response in order to see if anything happened.
On April 27, 2023 the Department responded that it had no responsive records to his request:
In other words, they were informed of what the law required them to do and they chose to do nothing.
Peter Baldrige’s letters to CDPH
Here is the full text of the letters Mr. Baldridge sent to the CDPH:
December 17, 2022: Peter requests to produce the records of the investigations that were required by law
Jan 29, 2023: Peter points out that the response to his previous request was inadequate and the department has not done its duty under the law. He reminds them again what is required.
April 17, 2023: Peter asks for the records of the investigation that the department should have commenced after receiving his previous letter.
May 5, 2023: Peter recounts what has happened to date and points out that there was again nothing done in response to his request to comply with the law. Peter shifts gears and makes a FOIA request for the correlated death and vaccination records.
My FOIA request filed on May 5, 2023
I also decided to make a FOIA request using the official CDPH portal:
It appears that the Department has little interest in or intention to investigate the reports of deaths in California related to Covid-19 vaccinations as required by law. I believe it is in the public’s interest that the correlation of vaccination and subsequent deaths be explored, particularly since, as of April 27, 2023, the Department continued to promote the Covid-19 vaccines as both safe and effective.
The Department has in its possession records related to deaths in California commencing January, 2021, when the vaccine rollout began. The Department also has in its possession vaccination records for Californians. The Department also possesses the ability to correlate this data using personally identifying information including, but not limited to: Social Security Number, street address, zip code, date of birth, name, and gender.
Accordingly, I hereby request under the California Public Records Act (Govt. Code, §§7920, et seq.) that the Department correlate these data sets and provide for each individual who has died since January1, 202l the following data fields for each individual as follows:
Date(s) of COVID-19 vaccination(s): <if any>
Five year age range of the individual who died (e.g. 50-54)
Date of death
In lieu of personally identifying information, I request that the Department create a random identification number for each individual so that the identity of the individual remains confidential.
You may contact me at xxxxxx if you have any questions.
Note: the JOIN of the databases cannot be done through the CAIR because they do not have the death records. CDPH controls both databases, so if this is not the proper request portal, please let me know which is the correct place to submit the database JOIN request.
Here is the receipt from my FOIA request: P018493-050523
Who wants to see the data?
As Ryan Cole is fond of saying, “You will never find what you don’t look for.”
Let’s be clear. California is not looking into any injuries or deaths caused by the vaccines. They are looking out for the interests of the drug companies, not your health. They don’t care how many people in California have been injured or died, and your injuries and deaths are immaterial. They don’t care, and they don’t even want to look.
The medical community in California is not better. They don’t want an investigation, either. Have you heard of a single doctor, Dean of Medicine, or medical association in California calling for an investigation? Of course not!
Does Governor Newsom want an investigation? No way. Newsom himself is vaccine injured, so he knows the vaccines cause harm, and that’s why he dropped out of sight for weeks after his booster shot. A proper investigation would show that the vaccines killed people, which means that Newsom instituted policies that likely led to the untimely demise of tens of thousands of innocent residents of California and the injury of many times that number.
The only person who called for an investigation, as required by law, is the former Assistant Chief Counsel of the California Department of Public Health. He worked there for 27 years and is appalled by what is happening there now. They can’t take away his medical license because he’s not a doctor. They could try to take away his license to practice law, but he’s retired. This is a problem for them. They ran into someone they couldn’t intimidate.
The vaccination rollout data
The vax-death data is good, but you need the vaccination data by age pictured below. This allows me to normalize the deaths of the unvaccinated since people move from unvaccinated to vaccinated over time. Without an upward adjustment, it will look like the unvaccinated are not dying at an even rate. With normalization, I can compare death curves for people who got the shot with those who didn’t. I can also compute the death rate of people in the vaxxed group with the death rate of people in the unvaxxed group.
Summary
It is clear at this point that neither the CDPH, the governor, the California legislature, the medical community, nor the mainstream media have any interest or intention to investigate the reports of injuries and deaths in California related to the COVID vaccinations.
This is why I’ll be bringing a writ of mandamus action against the CDPH for not investigating the injuries and deaths.
In addition, I have sent a FOIA to the CDPH for the death-vax records. If the CDPH does not comply with my FOIA request, I will bring another writ of mandamus request action against them.
*This post has been lightly edited for grammar from its original form.*
Considering CA is already a lawsuit hotbed, why wouldn’t they want to hide their culpability? — TPR
Took thre million from a book publisher who had cases before the court.
Views: 32
Race Baiters and White Progressives complain about Thomas and Roberts. What about Sotomayor? Recently we’ve been hearing about Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas. Especially about Thomas having a rich friend. A friend who hasn’t had any cases before the court. But what about one of the race baiting Justices?
Sotomayor did not recuse herself when her publisher had cases before the court. But look what I found. In 2013, Sotomayor voted in a decision on whether the court should hear a case against the publisher called Aaron Greenspan v. Random House. Now-retired Justice Stephen Breyer, who had received money from the book publisher, recused himself in that case.
What say you?
Joe Scarborough responds to the latest Clarence Thomas non-scandal by saying “imagine what would happen if it were Justice Sotomayor” and “everybody at this table would be shocked and outrage and had be critical if this were a liberal justice” Who wants to tell him? pic.twitter.com/EsBrzPF8uL