by | Feb 25, 2024 | Aggregate
A recent article at the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) highlighted a recent Department of Justice funded grants program at Youngstown State University in Ohio, that targets groups that include conservative website The Gateway Pundit, a discussion board run by supporters of former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, Christians and a wide range of communities on Telegram and Reddit.
Foundation For Freedom Online (FFO) is a free speech watchdog dedicated to restoring the promise of a free and open Internet.
Mike Benz is the Executive Director at the Foundation for Freedom Online.
According to FFO, the Youngstown State University project funded by the Department of Justice, called “A Frame Analysis of Violence and Accelerationism in Cognitive Radicalization,” received over $440,000 in taxpayer funding from the DOJ for research that will incorporate an existing data project led by Youngstown State University professor Richard Lee Rogers, “Frames of Misinformation, Extremism, and Conspiracism” (FOMEC).
Contributors to the big-data focused project admit to collecting tens of millions of posts from Americans, which they group under a wide range of broad-brush labels including the “Christian Radical Right,” “QAnon,” “accelerationism,” and “extremism.”
According to FFO, the project has received $449,897 in DOJ Funding, part of a wider DOJ grants program on “Domestic Radicalization and Violent Extremism” that has paid out nearly $1.5 million in grants to the censorship industry.
The DOJ-funded project lumps The Gateway Pundit in with neo-Nazi groups.
Although Youngstown claims their research is focused on “extremists,” the project’s own publications show it is lumping mainstream conservatives in with open neo-Nazis. For example, the project’s most recent monthly report shows that a Ron Paul discussion board, as well as conservative news sites World Net Daily and the Gateway Pundit, are being monitored alongside neo-Nazi websites Stormfront and the Daily Stormer.
The FFO report continues, The Trump movement and religious groups are also targeted. One of the papers listed under the FOMEC project titled “COVID-19 Information Sources and Misinformation by Faith Community,” authored by Rogers himself, accuses Donald Trump of amplifying misinformation about COVID-19 and identified faith communities, especially White evangelicals, White nonevangelical Protestants and non-Hispanic Roman Catholics for spreading misinformation that originated with Trump. The DOJ funding a project that targets religious groups may pose problems for the agency, given that the DOJ’s FBI was recently exposed for targeting Catholics.
No prominent media outlet has been more censored for posting information from Hunter Biden’s laptop than The Gateway Pundit.
John Solomon of JustTheNews.com reported in October 2022 on an official US government “enemies list” maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. The US government uses the list to fund private organizations to harass, suppress, and suspend First Amendment rights to US citizens.
The Gateway Pundit topped the list with an impressive nearly doubling its closest competitor with a 46 “incidents” on election integrity next to 26 incidents by our friends at Breitbart.com.
This latest DOJ-funded report coincides with the Missouri-Louisiana vs. Biden free speech lawsuit that will be heard by the US Supreme Court on March 18, 2024.
Gateway Pundit is suing the federal government together with the Attorney Generals of Missouri and Louisiana, the Covid experts Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford and Dr. Martin Kulldorff from Harvard, authors of The Great Barrington Declaration, and two others for violation of the First Amendment rights.
On the 4th of July, 2023, Louisiana US District Judge Terry Doughty granted the Missouri-Louisiana plaintiffs’ request for an injunction against the Biden Regime’s censorship machine, stating that “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history. In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.”
The case will be argued in front of the US Supreme Court in March.
There is no telling how many government funded censorship projects are being farmed out to universities and colleges at the present time. We suspect the funding is in the millions for the unconstitutional government-funded studies.
The post DOJ-Funded Database at Youngstown State University Targets The Gateway Pundit, Christians and Ron Paul Forums appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
by | Feb 25, 2024 | Aggregate
Sen. Lindsey Graham was brutally booed at former President Trump’s victory speech in South Carolina on Saturday night.
Trump had brought him up on stage after his easy defeat of neoconservative presidential candidate Nikki Haley.
Trump said during his introduction that when he’s in trouble on the left, he calls Graham.
Lindsey Graham BOOED at Trump victory speech after massive win in SC primary.
Deserved! pic.twitter.com/PpXFkPJCE1
— Suburban Black Man (@niceblackdude) February 25, 2024
“He doesn’t do too much television,” Trump said sarcastically. “He happens to be a little bit further left than some of the people on this stage. But I always say when I’m in trouble on the left, I call up Lindsey Graham and he straightens it out.”
Graham got on the mic and was met with massive boos from the audience.
Almost as good as Nicki Haley losing South Carolina by 50% is Sen. Lindsey Graham getting booed at Donald Trump’s victory party! pic.twitter.com/Rb1VtnnfSq
— Gays For Trump (@GaysForTrump24) February 25, 2024
“This is the most qualified man to be president United States,” Graham said. “And let it be said that South Carolina created the biggest political comeback in American history.”
Trump beat Haley by double digits, despite South Carolina being her home state.
Even though she has not managed to beat Trump in a single state, Haley has said that she will not leave the race before Super Tuesday.
The post Graham Met with Chorus of Boos at Trump Victory Speech in South Carolina (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
by | Feb 25, 2024 | Aggregate
During these two years of war in Ukraine, people from all over the world felt compelled – either by ideology, compassion, or expectations of monetary gains – to head for the theatre of hostilities to engage in combat for one of the warring sides.
What’s in a name? If they choose the side we support, we call them ‘volunteers’; if they fight for the enemy, we call them ‘mercenaries’.
One way or another, US citizens are NOT exceptions to the rule and have been recorded to be taking part on both sides of this conflict from the very start.
Going through the Telegram channels covering this war, we find a few recent examples of Americans directly involved in the operations. As you would expect, some of them disguise their identities to avoid retaliation.
An American fighter with the call sign ‘Vil’, who fights on the Russian side defending the Donbas and participated in the conquest of Avdeevka, was filmed planting the US flag as a sign of friendship.
“We’re here to plant the US flag as a sign of friendship and support for all the things that people are enduring here.
And that’s, it’s a small token of… a small task that we can do to show our support. I mean, just we have to end this [war]. I mean, you look around Avdeevka and you see what’s happening, you see the destroyed buildings… you see, these are people’s homes.
We need to support Russia. We have to have friendship.
We have to make sure that all the goals laid out [by Putin] are fulfilled and we just have to stop this and we have to do everything we can to help, and – you know, there’s old glory, the US flag and I hope that people back home see it.
I hope people understand, and look at independent facts, right? Do your own research, do your own homework, find out what’s really going on here.
We have to support these people, we have to help them. We have to stop this.
I feel proud, I feel proud to be here. I’ve met amazing people. I’m standing with amazing people that have done a lot for this [operation] and to help people – and that’s what it’s about.
That’s why I’m here. That’s what I want to do. And these guys that I’m here with, these guys are incredible people. My hats off to them, what they do on a daily basis is just unbelievable.
It’s incredible. And to people back home that are in the military and that have been to war, I’m a veteran from Afghanistan to people that have been through this, they understand it.
And we haven’t seen anything like this. Even in Afghanistan, this is something, I mean, the entire city is rubble.
This is unbelievable. And in, in Afghanistan – I was in the Air Force for 10 years in Afghanistan. I’ve never seen anything like this. This is unbelievable.
The work that’s being done here, it’s just incredible. We have to help these guys.”
US volunteer fighting for Russia raises ‘Old Glory’ in sign of friendship. pic.twitter.com/Ymoj0nXTUg
— Paul Serran (@paul_serran) February 25, 2024
Anecdotal evidence suggests many more Americans have decided to fight for Ukraine. But at this juncture, what we see, understandably, are mostly disillusioned guys giving up.
One of these guys shared his story with Russian media, revealing why he decided to quit and how he believes the Ukrainian crisis can be put to bed.
Sputnik reported:
“According to [him], who went by the call sign Maverick and fought in Ukraine for a total of about 4 months in 2022 and 2023, […] the rivalry between fighters over money and personal jealousies cannot be overstated, and ‘fratricide’ – or the murder of your own men, ‘is a problem in Ukraine’ that ‘few people write about’.
[…] Taking prisoners of war is ‘a luxury’, and putting a bullet in the heads of wounded captured soldiers is seen as acting ‘ethically and pragmatically’.”
The American fighter has serious grievances against the very population he chose to fight for.
“The most rabid ‘Ukrainian patriots’ sit in cafes in Kiev or do well-paid tech jobs in Lvov safely behind the frontlines, while ‘unlucky’ poor ordinary Ukrainian men from godforsaken villages are forced to fight, with the latter’s morale ‘understandably low’.
Maverick left Ukraine after losing ‘trust in many foreign fighters’, suffering a series of injuries, and experiencing outrage at the thought of fighting for Ukrainian ‘patriots’ who don’t seem to care about their own country.”
Another American fresh from the Ukrainian frontlines, Benjamin Reed, took to his social media sharing a story all-too-similar.
As he lounges in pool, he recounts war crimes he witnessed by Kiev’s troops.
His “favorite” order was to gun down everyone in trenches if unsure whether they were Russian or Ukrainian troops , saying ‘those guys are kill-crazy cowboys, nothing more’.
American volunteer reflects on his fighting for Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/YoGQv2wEVB
— Paul Serran (@paul_serran) February 25, 2024
Read more:
Ukrainians Commemorate 2 Years of War With Minor European NATO Leaders and Major Defiance – But Lack of Troops, Equipment and Ammo Mean Defenses May Be About to Crumble
The post Mercenaries or Volunteers? American Citizens Are Fighting for Both Russia and Ukraine appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
by | Feb 25, 2024 | Aggregate
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By John Murawski
Real Clear Wire
In 1986, an upstart public health researcher named Arline Geronimus challenged the conventional wisdom that condemned the alarming rise of inner-city teen pregnancies. While the crisis was decried as a ghetto pathology, Geronimus contended that teenage pregnancy was a rational response to urban poverty where low-income black people have fewer healthy years before the onset of heart problems, diabetes, and other chronic conditions.
Though it got little traction then, the concept that Geronimus pioneered – “weathering” – has become a foundation for the social justice ideology now upending medicine and social policy. The term “weathering,” she says, was intended to evoke the idea of erosion and resilience.
A white professor at the University of Michigan whom The New York Times hailed last year as an “icon,” Geronimus has combined race theory with data and statistics to argue that the chronic stress of living in an oppressive, white-majority society causes damage at the cellular level and results in shorter life expectancies for blacks. In more than 130 published studies, she has expanded the weathering hypothesis into a dystopian sociological worldview that identifies the “American Creed” of hard work as the silent killer of people of color.
“Living life according to the dominant social norms of personal responsibility and virtue is not universally health‑promoting,” she wrote in a Harvard Public Health essay last year. “On the contrary: if you’re Black, working hard and playing by the rules can be part of what kills you.”
The weathering paradox – that “relatively young people can be biologically old” – is now influencing policy decisions at all levels of governance. It has provided the foundation of many of the policy decisions of the White House COVID-19 health equity task force. In New Hampshire, the governor’s COVID-19 Equity Response Team issued a report and recommendations in 2020, citing weathering (and “racial battle fatigue”) as documented and established realities of American life.
The weathering hypothesis medicalizes social relations and politicizes medicine. Weathering prefigured the recent flood of medical research that centers race in public policy and supplies the rationale for such moves as 265 public authorities declaring racism a public health crisis; health officials jettisoning colorblindness and prioritizing people of color for COVID vaccinations and heart treatment; and medical schools training future doctors in social justice activism.
Some critics are pushing back against what they see as the heavy-handed, COVID-era politicization of healthcare. Boston University public health dean Sandro Galea warns that his profession has veered into overcorrection and revolutionary excess. Galea rebukes public health advocates for favoring political narratives over empirical data, denying the reality of social progress, and fixating on a utopian quest “to create a world free of risk.”
Geronimus did not respond to emails requesting an interview for this article.
It’s amply documented that African Americans of all social classes have worse health outcomes, earlier onset of chronic diseases, and average life expectancies reported as five to six years less than whites. Weathering science, as Geronimus calls it, measures various biomarkers of what is presumed to be psychosocial stress – such as cortisol levels, telomere lengths, cytokine storms, and allostatic loads – to make the case that on average black adults are as much as 10 years older biologically than white people of a comparable chronological age.
But the data is complicated and doesn’t always add up. For example, in a 2021 study, a gerontology scholar at the University of Southern California assessed 13 measures of epigenetic aging. It found that some of the measures indicate accelerated aging among African Americans, while others indicate slower aging for African Americans.
Nevertheless, Geronimus compares the black experience of living and working among white people to the fight-or-flight adrenaline rush of a prehistoric human fleeing a cheetah. She describes American society as a relentless onslaught of “microaggressions,” “othering,” “existential insults,” “daily indignities,” “voice erasure,” “identity threat” and other forms of “cultural oppression” that lead to early death.
The scientific conundrum is that the same biological evidence that supports weathering could also be “consistent with a lot of other things,” Robert Kaestner, a University of Chicago public policy professor who co-authored a weathering study with Geronimus in 2009, said in a phone interview. “It’s always a measurement problem.”
“Weathering is a hypothesis, still in search of definitive evidence,” Kaestner said. “I’ve never seen one [study] – including my own – where it’s a definitive study that this really is a smoking gun that racism or prolonged psychosocial stress causes adverse health outcomes.”
Yet the weathering hypothesis is continuing to gain traction. Geronimus writes that in 2020 she was asked by immigration attorney Kari Hong to submit expert testimony on weathering in support of early-release petitions for immigrant asylum seekers who were being held in detention. Hong argued to federal judges that these foreign-born detainees were “biologically older than their chronological age” and should be released “as senior citizen detainees.”
According to the New York Times, Hong won early release for “all seven detainees,” based on Geronimus’s weathering testimony.
This article was adapted from a RealClearInvestigations article published Feb 13.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy and made available via RealClearWire.
John Murawski reports on the intersection of culture and ideas for RealClearInvestigations. He previously covered artificial intelligence for the Wall Street Journal and spent 15 years as a reporter for the News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) writing about health care, energy and business. At RealClear, Murawski reports on how esoteric academic theories on race and gender have been shaping many areas of public life, from K-12 school curricula to workplace policies to the practice of medicine.
The post Medicine Now Diagnoses the Non-White ‘Oppressed’ With an Oppressive Case of ‘Weathering appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
by | Feb 25, 2024 | Aggregate
Photo courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office, Wikimedia Commons
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Newt Gingrich
Real Clear Wire
It is vital that Americans take nuclear war seriously.
For the last three and a half decades, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Americans have relaxed and behaved as though they were essentially safe from nuclear events.
When President Bill Clinton and I created the Hart-Rudman Commission in 1998, we hoped to create a deep rethinking of American security strategies. The Commission was brilliantly led by Gen. Charles Boyd and produced a remarkable report.
We warned that the greatest threat to the United States was a nuclear attack in an American city – likely by a terrorist group. We proposed a Department of Homeland Security capable of dealing with three simultaneous nuclear events. That would have been a department with the discipline and training we associate with military organizations or first-class fire departments.
As a sign of how little people understood the danger of nuclear weapons, the department degenerated into a bureaucratic mess of enormous incompetence. Today, it cannot cope with unarmed civilians at the border. It would likely be totally incapable of dealing with one (let alone three simultaneous) nuclear events.
Yet, nuclear war is becoming increasingly possible. When dealing with the Soviet Union, it was conceivable that a strategy of mutual assured destruction could sustain a balance of deterrence to keep nuclear war at bay. Neither country would launch a nuclear weapon, because there was a virtual certainty of annihilation. In many ways, mutual assured destruction resembled Abraham Lincoln’s response to a duel challenge. Lincoln chose shotguns at three feet, and the other guy backed down.
Now, however, we have countries getting nuclear weapons that may not care if we retaliate.
It is possible that the Iranian theocratic dictatorship would accept the exchange of Tehran for Tel Aviv as a net plus on ideological grounds.
We have no understanding of the values and thought processes of Kim Jung Un and his leadership (including his sister who is supposedly more hard line than he is). Faced with the growing economic, technological, and quality of life achievements of South Korea, it’s possible the North Korean regime might be willing to risk a nuclear attack as the only element in which it has an advantage.
Pakistan is unstable, and its long-time opponent India is steadily growing. This could lead to a nuclear conflict if Pakistan becomes threatened by India’s size – or if India aggressively responds to a perceived Pakistani threat. Ultimately, a nuclear conflict could occur in the region from pure misunderstanding.
The Russian dictatorship is a dangerous combination of Soviet training (Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer and is still deeply loyal to the spirit of the Soviet Union) and Great Russian Nationalism. Furthermore, the depth of Putin and his allies’ corruption – and the intensity and savagery of his response to domestic opponents – create a psychological environment in which the use of nuclear weapons as an alternative to defeat becomes increasingly possible. Putin himself has suggested the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Recently a close ally of his suggested nuclear weapons would be used on London and Washington if Russia was forced to give back any land in Ukraine.
Finally, the most rational and stable of our opponents with nuclear capability is Communist China (this alone should tell us how unstable the world is becoming). It is possible that with a declining population, a rapidly decaying economy, and a growing sense of frustration and global isolation, General Secretary Xi Jinping could decide to risk invading Taiwan or forcing a crisis in the South China Sea. Conflict could spiral out of control with remarkable speed.
Faced with this reality, we need to revisit Herman Kahn’s Classic study “Thinking About the Unthinkable.” To understand how dangerous a nuclear attack would be, it is helpful to also go back 70 years to Philip Wylie’s astonishing novel “Tomorrow.” It is the story of a nuclear attack on a single city and the power of a nuclear weapon to destroy life and civilization. This was the book which convinced me as a high school student that we had to do virtually everything to avoid nuclear war – and survive it if it came.
I recently reread Stephen Hunter’s 1989 novel “The Day Before Midnight,” in which a Russian nationalist remarkably like Putin seizes an American ICBM silo in an effort to start a nuclear war.
If we took nuclear war seriously, we would do three things immediately:
First, we would build an Israeli quality missile defense system at every level. It would take out missiles as they leave their silos, through their time in space to reentry, and finally at a point of defense. President Ronald Reagan proposed a Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. It was ridiculed as Star Wars. Its technological heirs have saved tens of thousands of Israeli lives. A global version could save hundreds of millions of lives.
Second, we would develop the domestic survival system capable of responding to three or more nuclear events – with hospitals, security, construction workers, and whatever else it took to minimize loss of life. This would involve stockpiling radiation survival medicine, food, water, etc.
Third, we would have a crash program to harden our entire system against a potential electromagnetic pulse attack. As Bill Forstchen wrote in his remarkable book, “One Second After,” an EMP attack would be devastating and civilization destroying.
We were surprised at Pearl Harbor. We were surprised on Sept. 11, 2001. We cannot afford to be surprised by a nuclear attack.
For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com. Also, subscribe to the Newt’s World podcast.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy and made available via RealClearWire.
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