More bias and propaganda at Google

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From Allum Bokhari at Breitbart (h/t Blazing Cat Fur):

Google’s senior director of U.S. public policy, Adam Kovacevich appeared to describe the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) as a “sideshow Circus,” in a leaked audio recording in which he also argued that Google should remain a sponsor of the conference to “steer” the conservative movement “away from nationalistic and incendiary comments.”

The comments came to light in leaked audio files allegedly of a company-wide meeting at Google, part of which is now exclusively reported by Breitbart News. 

Another part of the transcript was released last Friday on Tucker Carlson Tonight, while further snippets revealing Google’s funding of establishment conservative think-tanks were published by the left-leaning tech magazine Wired in December.

The alleged meeting took place in the wake of Google’s sponsorship of CPAC in 2018, which triggered an internal rebellion from left-wing employees of the tech giant. Breitbart News exclusively reported on the revolt at the time, in which radical left-wingers inside Google accused CPAC of “ethno-nationalism” and “hate.”

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Read the rest here (scroll down for transcripts).

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Amazon and censorship

Robert Spencer’s website is Jihad Watch, and he contributes to other websites, such as PJ Media and the Geller Report. His books and columns focus on Islam’s history, ideology, scriptures, and related topics.  He recently posted an article at PJ Media that should raise grave concerns about our First Amendment rights:

. . .Amazon has just dropped the book Mohammed’s Koran by the renowned British activist Tommy Robinson and Peter McLoughlin -- and apparently only because its censors dislike Robinson.

. . .

Whatever anyone thinks of Tommy Robinson or the Qur’an, this is a serious matter that anyone who cares about the freedom of speech should be extremely concerned about.

Mohammed’s Koran is critical of Islam’s holy book. It endeavors to illustrate how violent jihadists justify their actions by referring to Islamic texts and teachings -- and that’s all. Robinson and McLoughlin call for no violence. Their book is accurate.

. . .

Both AmazonUS and AmazonUK still carry other products by or about Tommy Robinson, but neither carries his book about the Qur’an. As Spencer points out:

This is an extremely ominous development. Amazon and Barnes and Noble -- which is also not carrying this book -- have a virtual monopoly on book sales. When these two giants refuse to carry a book, that book effectively does not exist. If they are now going to ban books that are critical of Islam and opposed to jihad terror and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others, then an Islam-critical perspective will be almost impossible to find anywhere.

We see censorship every day in the media which pushes propaganda instead of real news, which ignores conservative voices, which refuses to report on news with which they disagree. And now Spencer reports on book-banning!!! Read the rest here.

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Close the border : Alert

From Steve Salvi at Ohio Jobs & Justice Pac :

The President needs to assert himself as Commander in Chief and:

1. Close the US Mexico border until Mexico stops helping any aliens from reaching the US border.

2. Close all of Mexico's consulates in the US until Mexico stops helping aliens from reaching the US border.

3. Warn Mexico if it does not eliminate the cartels within its territory, the US military will.

It's time the US stop being a paper tiger and letting the tail wag the dog.

White House comment line: 202-456-1111

Switchboard: 202-456-1414

Tweet President Trump: @realDonaldTrump

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Sen. Portman’s finger to the wind

Either Sen. Portman has his finger to the wind, or he is stalling until he has enough cover to vote for the bill. Cleveland.com reports:

“I’m trying to come up with an alternative way to deal with this,” Portman told reporters on Tuesday. “I’ll make a decision next week, of course, when the issue comes before us, but I’m trying to get a result here. I know some in the media are very eager to see an immediate decision, but that’s not the way I look at this."

Portman, a Republican, says he supports Trump’s border security plan and wants to help him achieve it. But he wants it done in a way “that doesn’t lead to setting a bad precedent and having some of the funds be tied up in court.”

With that in mind, Portman says he’s seeking to change the wording of the House-passed resolution, to include language that would ensure the national emergency process is not being abused and to clarify that there is money from sources like drug seizures that Trump could use for the border wall.

“One way to handle this is to clarify that so there’s no need to go to an emergency,” said Portman. “And we’re looking at other ideas as well.”

Uh huh. Read the rest here. From the Wikipedia page:

Between the enactment of the National Emergencies Act in 1976 through February 15, 2019, 59 emergencies have been declared;[3] 27 have expired while 32 are currently in effect, each having been renewed annually by the president.

The list is here. Yes, Congress can vote to end an emergency, but the present southern border crisis is an emergency. Sen Portman, Sen. Mitch McConnell, et al, are once again just trying to obstruct President Trump's efforts.

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Re: the media’s double standards

image credit:catholicleague.org

Here's Howie Carr on the media’s double standards (h/t Instapundit):

Have you ever noticed how differently Republicans are treated in the media than Democrats?

Every newsroom in the country used to have what was called the “AP Stylebook” to use in writing news stories.

Now you need two AP stylebooks, one for Democrats, about whom seldom is heard a discouraging word, and a second for the GOP, with a hundred different pejoratives.

Two parties, two vocabularies. One positive, one negative — very bad, evil in fact.

Consider the testimony by Michael Cohen last week in front of various Congressional committees.

For example, since he worked for Donald Trump, Cohen was described about a million times as a “fixer.” Democrats, on the other hand, have lawyers.

To prevent the release of embarrassing information, Democrats’ lawyers negotiate NDA’s — nondisclosure agreements. Republican fixers’ NDAs are “hush money,” or “bribes.”

Hillary Clinton paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrat operatives who then bought or made up false Russian dirt on Trump — that was opposition research. Republicans, on the other hand, “collude!”

Republicans lie, Democrats misspeak.

Democrats plan, Republicans scheme.

Republicans hire lobbyists, Democrats use advocates. Republicans employ operatives or hired guns, Democrats prefer community activists.

If a Democrat changes his or her position on an issue, they have evolved … grown. Republicans “flip-flop.”

Whenever an unfamiliar politician is ensnared in some scandal, you naturally wonder which party he or she is a member of. If the “embattled” pol is a Republican, affiliation is usually noted in the headline, or at the very latest in the first paragraph.

If, however, you reach the third paragraph of the story without his party being identified, you can be absolutely certain you are reading about a Democrat miscreant.

. . .

The rest is here at the Boston Herald.

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More censorship on social / online media

Daniel J.Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator, points out the chilling effect of de facto censorship on social media and online platforms. (One of the most recent examples is Amazon, which yanked Tommy Robinson’s new book on the Koran.)

Creepy people at massive corporations imagine themselves as the policemen of public content, except they would never use such as gendered term as policemen to describe themselves.

A former Facebook worker revealed evidence to Project Veritas that the online platform secretly uses a “deboost” function to suppress conservative speech on the social media platform. “The ‘deboost’ tag appears after the word ‘Sigma,’ which Project Veritas has learned is an artificial intelligence system used to block potential suicide and self-harm posts,” the exposé explains.

Does this mean Facebook analysts rationalize the suppression of conservative speech on the grounds that it induces self-harm? The corporate behemoth refuses to say. Facebook responded to the Project Veritas revelations by noting that it had fired the whistleblower, as though this discredits her instead of credits her story of a company fixated on controlling information.

Online Goliaths that deny suppressing speech strangely openly boast of banning it.

. . .

“Currently, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram pretend that they are not publishers to avoid lawsuits involving libel law,” Zmirak tells The American Spectator. “But they are acting like editors of magazines. If they are editing content based on it not being illegal but it being objectionable to them, they should lose their exemption. They have to pick, either they are neutral platforms or they are publishers.”

Flynn identifies four potential solutions: 1)  eliminating exemptions from libel law;  2) billionaire-funded alternative platforms;  3) trust-busting;  4) individuals refraining from using FB, Twitter, etc.  Flynn does not favor option #4, and his fuller evaluations are here.

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Censorship: Losing our freedom of speech on social media

 openclipart.org

James Delingpole reports on the bad news from Great Britain:

Facebook has banned the third largest political page in the UK from their service, Tommy Robinson. Amazon has just stopped selling his book on the Quran. Twitter and Paypal already acted along these lines months ago.

This is a terrible day for freedom of speech. And possibly an even worse one for the future of social cohesion in Britain.

And Michelle Malkin reports the latest on her battles with the censors -- because she is conservative:

. . .

The Twitter notice assured me that the company “has not taken any action on the reported content at this time,” yet advised me that I should “consult legal counsel about this matter” in response to complaints from unnamed “authorized entities.”

Don’t worry, lawyer up? Gulp.

I’m used to getting threats directly from bloodthirsty cartoon jihadists. In 2006, I spearheaded a “Mohammed cartoons blogburst” in support of the Danish cartoonists at Jyllands-Posten. After posting all 12 of the drawings to educate the public about the publication’s brave stand against sharia-enforced self-censorship in the West, death and rape threats from radical Muslims around the world poured into my e-mail box. Vengeful thugs based in Turkey and Germany called me a “whore” and “prostitute,” vowing “We will kill you” unless I deleted the pictures from my server. My website was targeted by jihadist hackers who launched a week of denial-of-service attacks.

Thirteen years later, however, who knew that using an American company’s microblogging service from my secluded mountain top in Colorado could get me in hot water with foreign Muslim stone-age goons 8,000 miles away still hung up on the cartoons?

. . .

Over the past few months, several other prominent critics of Islamic extremism have received similar warning letters from Twitter’s legal department, including Saudi-Canadian activist Ensaf Haidar, the wife of imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi; Imam Mohammad Tawhidi, an Iranian-born Muslim scholar and reform advocate from Australia; Jamie Glazov, a Russian-born Canadian columnist who just released a new book called “Jihadist Psychopath”; and Pamela Geller, an anti-jihad blogger and activist.

. . .

Among others targeted by SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center], which collaborates with credit card companies and banks to silence influential thinkers and activists on the right: David Horowitz, a venerable scholar and investigative author who successfully beat back Mastercard’s attempt to drop him over his organization’s opposition to Islamic radicalism and illegal immigration, and the Center for Immigration Studies, which is suing the SPLC for labeling its mainstream think tank a “hate group.”

Read the rest here. Malkin’s list of silenced, de-platformed, or demonetized conservatives is long, but not long enough. And last month, John Hawkins at Townhall reported on his personal experience as the proprietor of Right Wing News; he describes HOW these gigantic companies/monopolies methodically target and silence conservative voices.

Project Veritas (James O’Keefe’s group) has more chapter-and-verse (h/t Ace of Spades).

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