Next target: Michelle Malkin

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Jeffrey Lord has more on Big Tech censorship at American Spectator:

Facebook has censored Michelle Malkin — for protesting censorship.

. . .

Michelle rejects identity politics out of hand, proudly calling herself an “American.” Amen and Amen! But in the Jim Crow-style of the Left she is what the Left loves to call a “woman of color.” Thus her posting standing up for free speech and opposing censorship has to be silenced. Because, like Diamond and Silk, Michelle Malkin is a threat to the totalitarian mind-set of Facebook rulers who have appointed themselves the Gods of who gets to say what and where.

The battle against the totalitarian mindset that is increasingly, vividly targeting conservatives with social media to unperson and de-platform them has now reached out to get Michelle Malkin.

Read the rest here.

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Blatant: Google’s censorship

The other day, this blog linked to a report about Google’s dishonest and ham-handed censorship of Kay Cole James, Heritage Foundation President. Now there’s this by Jeffrey Lord at American Spectator:

As we now learn from the Daily Caller, The American Spectator has been blacklisted by Google. The DC’s headline, in a post by J. Arthur Bloom, is this:

Exclusive: Documents Detailing Google’s ‘News Blacklist’ Show Manual Manipulation Of Special Search Results

. . .

[American Spectator founder R. Emmett] Tyrrell drew the analogy of Communists taking over an old-fashioned pre-computer-age public library — and then methodically going through the card catalogue to remove the cards listing conservative books and authors. “Google can make all kinds of excuses,” he added, “but this is censorship, the most blatant censorship imaginable.”

Indeed it is.

. . .

(Google CEO) Sundar Pichai . . . looked a congressional committee in the eye and insisted that “we don’t manually intervene on any particular search result” — while the Daily Caller revelations revealed that “Google does manipulate its search results manually, contrary to the company’s official denials, documents obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller indicate.”

There is a name for doing that. It’s called lying to Congress. A federal crime with jail time attached.

. . .

This time around, the target is The American Spectator. This time around the iron fist belongs to Google.

The question has reached the point that conservatives need to have a serious conversation among themselves. Is it time for government regulation of these tech giants? Or is it — my preference — time for free-market competition that provides serious and successful competition to these companies?

Full report is here.

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How we are losing our Freedom of Speech

Jeffrey Lord has an article titled “Google Bigots and the High-Tech Lynching of Kay James” at The Spectator. The opener:

Kay Cole James, the president of the Heritage Foundation, steps to the podium of the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference in suburban Harrisburg and gives the startling update.

Ms. James, at a laughing, self-admitted 70 and famously one of the best known, longtime conservative leaders in the country, announces to the PLC crowd (the PLC is the Pennsylvania version of CPAC and was celebrating its 30th anniversary) that this was her first public comment since she had learned only hours earlier that she had been removed as a recent appointee to Google’s Advanced Technology External Advisory Council. The board, on which she would have served without salary, was designed to review artificial intelligence ethics.

Among other things the outrage mob of over 2000 Google employees accused Kay James of being a “white supremacist.” Kay is an African-American. With a gay son. But Google quickly caved to the mob, dismissing Kay and then dissolving the board entirely.

And Mr. Lord concludes: 

In sum what we are witnessing in Google culture and on too many college campuses is what Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the then-new Soviet Union’s secret police known as the Cheka, described this way: “We represent in ourselves organized terror — this must be said very clearly.” And that “organized terror,” Dzerzhinsky emphasized, involved “the terrorization, arrests, and extermination of enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation or of their pre-revolutionary roles.” Or, as in the case of Kay James, the mother of an openly gay son [and] her race.

Kay James just had an up-close and personal encounter with this totalitarian mindset — from a major American high-tech company. The organized terror of a Google lynch mob came for her. The quite deliberate message for the rest of America from Google is: Watch out. The next time it could be you.

Full article is here. Alternative search engines to Google include DuckDuckGo and StartPage.

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Tucker Carlson’s Ship of Fools

image from Amazon

Jeffrey Lord may have been fired from CNN for no good reason, but he continues to publish on various websites, including American Spectator. Yesterday, he posted his review of Tucker Carlson’s bestselling Ship of Fools. It’s a rave, and I am posting a few paragraphs, either for those who are interested in reading the book or those who want a short précis instead:  

A serious look at a serious American problem by a serious thinker

A truer examination of a serious American problem could not be had.

In his new book,  Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, Tucker Carlson gets to the heart of the seriously bad situation that confronts America.

Ship of Fools is, says the opening flap of the book, “the story of the new American elites, a group whose power and wealth has grown beyond imagination even as the rest of the country has withered. The people who run America now barely interact with it. They fly on their own planes, ski on their own mountains, watch sporting events from the stands in skyboxes. They have total contempt for you.”

In thumbnail, that could not possibly be a more accurate description of American elites, not to mention the reaction they produced: the election of Donald Trump. As someone who long ago left the precincts of Inside the Beltway Washington, D.C. to come home to the wilds of Central Pennsylvania, it was plain what was coming down the pike in November of 2016. This area was awash in Trump signs. They were everywhere, even hand-painted on the sides of barns. As it were, this was a sure sign of what Tucker describes this way:

Trump’s election wasn’t about Trump. It was a throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class. It was a gesture of contempt, a howl of rage, the end result of decades of selfish and unwise decisions made by selfish and unwise leaders. Happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do.

Bingo.

Read the full review here.

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Media Mission: Destroy Donald Trump

art credit: pinterest

Jeffrey Lord is a regular contributor to The American Spectator blog, but more Tea Party people may recognize him as a regular panelist – often the only conservative – on CNN prime time news. He attended a recent Trump rally and published a piece exposing the utter dishonesty in the mainstream media. The following is an extract from NewsBusters:

The other night I spent some time with Donald Trump. He had come to Cumberland Valley High School in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, a mere five or so miles up the road from my house.

The Trump rally was filled - completely - with thousands inside and outside thousands more waiting (in vain) to get in the door. Here’s what interested.

Never once - not once - did I hear Donald Trump mention the Khans, the now famous parents of a son killed in battle in Iraq. Even more to the point? In talking with many people in the audience before and after the rally, no one - say again not a single soul - mentioned the Khans. What I did hear from Trump was talk about jobs, trade, the economy, ISIS and more. Which was the talk from members of the audience when I spoke to many of them before and after the rally. They volunteered directly to me, conversation after another, their thoughts about ObamaCare, a sick child, jobs, trade ,pride in America, Hillary and so on.

And yet? Mysteriously when I returned home and turned on the television or checked on-line it seemed to be all-Khan all-the-time. As if Trump had spent the evening re-hashing the whole subject yet again. Which he had not.

In my conversation with Donald Trump himself he was upbeat, every bit as enthusiastic as his audience. Yet what was the media take on the Trump campaign this week? Here’s ABC’s Jon Karl:

“I am told that senior officials at the party are actively exploring what would happen if Trump dropped out. How to replace him on the ballot.  They can’t force him out, he would have to go out voluntarily. And then it would be the 168 members of the RNC through a complicated process they would pick a new candidate.” 

Over here at Politico was this headline:

Insiders to Trump: Drop out

'I’d rather take our chances with nearly anyone else than continue with this certain loser who will likely cost the Senate and much more,' said a New Hampshire Republican.

This media jewel began this way:

“Amid widespread chatter that Donald Trump could drop out of the presidential race before Election Day, Republican insiders in key battleground states have a message for The Donald: Get out.”

And over here at The Washington Post was this: 

GOP reaches ‘new level of panic’ over Trump’s candidacy

“Turmoil in the Republican Party escalated Wednesday as party leaders, strategists and donors voiced increased alarm about the flailing state of Donald Trump’s candidacy and fears that the presidential nominee was damaging the party with an extraordinary week of self-inflicted mistakes, gratuitous attacks and missed opportunities.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus was described as “very frustrated” with and deeply disturbed by Trump’s behavior over the past week, having run out of excuses to make on the nominee’s behalf to donors and other party leaders, according to multiple people familiar with the events.

Meanwhile, Trump’s top campaign advisers are struggling once again to instill discipline in their candidate, who has spent recent days lurching from one controversy to another while seemingly skipping chances to go on the offensive against his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

“A new level of panic hit the street,” said longtime operative Scott Reed, chief strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “It’s time for a serious reset.”       Hours later Politico took note of the Trump announcement of his economic team - a team filled with seriously competent businessmen  with considerable experience in making the American economy work.  What did Politicosay? This: 

Trump unveils all-male economic advisory team

“Donald Trump's campaign on Friday announced more than a dozen members of the Republican nominee's all-male economic advisory team, including several prominent real-estate investors, hedge-fund managers and bankers.”

Then there was this from the Media Research Center: 

CNN's 'New Day' Airs Nearly 200 Times More Coverage On Trump Controversies Than Iran

“CNN set aside nearly half of its air time on Wednesday's New Day to various recent controversies involving the Trump campaign — 1 hour, 24 minutes, and 18 seconds over three hours. By contrast, the program clearly didn't think much of the Wall Street Journal's Tuesday revelation that the Obama administration secretly airlifted $400 million in cash to Iran. John Berman gave a 27-second news brief to the report, but didn't mention that the payment was sent on "an unmarked cargo plane" New Day, therefore, devoted over 187 times more coverage to Trump than to the millions to Iran.”

. . .

To the larger point.

Monday night at that Trump rally here in Pennsylvania, a rally I have described here in The American Spectator, Trump drew what was unarguably his most sustained applause when he said of his campaign: “the biggest problem is the media.” The audience erupted, applauding and cheering, with many turning - unasked by Trump - to the back of the room where the television cameras were perched on risers and booing repeatedly. Trump went on to say this:

These are among the most dishonest people you will ever, ever meet. These people — you know, I’ve had days where I have said, ‘Boy, this was a great day. I’ll look forward to seeing it tonight or tomorrow and it’s brutal.’ And I say, ‘What happened?’

We are going to punch through the media. We have to! The New York Times is totally dishonest. Totally dishonest. The Washington Post has been a little bit better lately but not good. By the way The New York Times, which is failing badly. I call it ‘The Failing New York Times.’ Every story that they write is a hit job. I could do the greatest thing in the history of the world. I could come up with a cure for the most horrible disease in the world and they give me a front-page horrible, horrible story. The New York Times is very dishonest but it will be out of business soon. I hope. It will be out of business. It will. Really dishonest reporters. Not all of them, but most of them.

There was more, with another attack on CNN. 

But the point here is very simple. Out and abroad in the land there are millions of Americans who feel intensely that “the media” - fill in an outlet of your choice in print, TV, radio and now the Internet - are out there with the sole object of destroying Donald Trump [emphasis added]. That the slightest misstep of Trump’s will be magnified and replayed over and over endlessly - while major events like the clear case of the Obama administration’s payment of $400 million in cash to ransom Iranian hostages are simply downplayed.

. . .

Buckle in. It is a long way to November. And everything including the kitchen sink is coming in Trump’s direction courtesy of the media.

Read more here.

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