During the 2020 election, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) partnered with the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a consortium of groups led by the Stanford Internet Observatory, to track and counter what they considered mis- and disinformation.

EIP surveilled hundreds of millions of social media posts and collected from the cooperating government and non-governmental entities that it calls its “stakeholders” potential violations of social media platforms’ policies concerning election speech.

It coordinated its efforts primarily through a digital “ticketing” system. There, one of its as many as 120 analysts or an external partner could highlight a piece of offending social media content or narrative consisting of many offending posts by creating a “ticket” and share it with other relevant participants by “tagging” them. Tagged participants could then communicate with each other, in something of a group chat, about the veracity of the flagged content, concerns about its spread, and what actions they might take to combat it.

For social media companies, this meant removing the content outright, reducing its spread, or “informing” users about dubious posts by slapping corrective or contextualizing labels on them.

During the 2020 election cycle, EIP generated a total of 639 tickets, covering some 4,784 unique URLs – representing content shared millions of times – disproportionately related to the “delegitimization” of election results. Major platforms, including Twitter, Google, and Facebook, responded to tickets in which they were tagged at rates of 75% or higher. The platforms “labeled, removed, or soft blocked” 35% of the URLs shared via EIP.

RealClearInvestigations has obtained data associated with nearly 400 EIP tickets, data produced for the House Homeland Security Committee in connection with its oversight efforts. The tickets come in the form of a series of spreadsheets. Each row represents one ticket. The Stanford group provided no key for the spreadsheets. Much of the information is redacted.

Here are just a few examples of the tickets EIP produced:

Ticket EIP-482 (created October 27, 2020) was originated by the CISA’s Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center (EI-ISAC). It concerns a tweet from then-President Trump indicating “most” states permit one to change one’s original vote after engaging in early voting, which EIP categorized as potential “Procedural Interference.”

The analysts point to fact-checks from, among other sources, Buzzfeed and ABC News challenging the president’s claim. Following two redacted comments on the ticket, an unnamed commenter writes, “Twitter received and is reviewing.” A subsequent comment reads: “We heard back from Twitter through CISA with this response: Our team concluded that the Tweet was not in violation of our Civic Integrity Policy.”

CISA-produced documentation shows the sub-agency’s chief counter-MDM (mis-, dis-, and malinformation) officer, Brian Scully, had also reported the tweet to Twitter, which responded to him directly about it. Therefore, EIP and its stakeholder, an executive agency, both forwarded the chief executive’s speech to a social media platform for potential censorship.

Ticket EIP-257 (Sept. 29), originated by the EI-ISAC, concerns a social media post from an unnamed user, alleging an absentee ballot had been delivered by mail to his dead father. An EIP stakeholder “flagged the post to Facebook for removal and the link is no longer active which means it has either been taken down or made private to the individual’s Facebook.” A subsequent comment notes that “We also received confirmation from Facebook (by way of CISA) that Facebook took action on this case,” again showing EIP and CISA seemingly working as force multipliers in content moderation.

Ticket EIP-301 (Oct. 2), originated by the EI-ISAC, concerns a “tweet regarding voting machines.” An elected official reported that the since-deleted and unavailable tweet “is false. Voting machines work the vast majority of the time. Old machines do have issues, but to phrase it like [this] vastly overstates the scope of the problem.” CISA inquired as to whether Twitter took the tweet down. It did.

Ticket EIP-954 (Nov. 8), the origins of which are not discernible, concerns social media posts sharing an article from The Federalist, where I am a senior contributor, titled “America Won’t Trust Elections Until The Voter Fraud Is Investigated.” According to the ticket, the article “Misconstrues Disinformation as Evidence.” One tagged post comes from Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway. A stakeholder writes to Facebook and Twitter in connection with the ticket that “this seems to be the greatest hits from the past 3 days wrapped up in one article. The article links to several of the gateway pundit links which have received action since Tuesday.” Twitter indicates it was reviewing the tweet, though it appears not to have taken action on it. RCI asked Hemingway for comment on the flagging of her tweet and publication’s work. She replied:

This unconscionable censorship of The Federalist and its reporters is sadly unsurprising. The censorship-industrial complex in this country clearly views free speech as its enemy and will do anything to shut it down, including spreading lies and using intimidation to coerce private companies to censor factual, legal speech on behalf of the regime.

Hemingway concluded with a warning: “The censorship-industrial complex better buckle up because the days of conservatives taking this lying down are over.”

 

Ben Weingarten | RealClear Wire

 

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Artificial Intelligence apps have begun to proliferate across the internet that allow you to take pictures of clothed girls and women with a smartphone and make them nude. Victims feel humiliated, and the potential for abuse is enormous, but I’m sensing a disturbance in the transgender force.

While the rare and few who actually suffer from gender dysphoria deserve appropriate medical and mental health, there is also a known faction of male abusers who use the culturally accepted feelings of femininity to gain access to vulnerable women in once-private spaces.

When I read about young men using some new idea or bit of technology to creep on girls and women, even when the naked parts don’t truly belong to the person to which they are attached, I am offended but, at the same time, reminded. A boy can let his junk hang out while ogling girls in a locker room if he claims to be one, but no one has a right to feel humiliated by that.

To borrow from one of the victims of the AI App incident at Westfield High School in New Jersey.

 

‘We’re aware that there are creepy guys out there but you’d never think one of your classmates would violate you like this.’

What if these creepy boys announced that they were girls so they could watch you change in front of them or step in and out of a shower in the girl’s locker room? You have zero consent with an understanding that if you complain about the locker room, you are an intolerant bigot.

To be clear, neither of these things is acceptable, but when you invest that much time and energy sexualizing the culture and dehumanizing the meaning or product of intercourse, then build onramps to voyeurism and sexual assault, you’re going to have a hard time justifying any outrage over things we used to just accept as inappropriate or offensive.

Before you get offended, ask yourself: did you enable it, were you forced to enable it, and are you prepared to do whatever is necessary to reel that back in, if that is even possible? And if not, how do you expect to move forward in that world if this isn’t going away?

So many questions.

 

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Thousands of busybodies have descended on Abu Dhabi to forestall what they see as an imminent apocalypse. The twenty-eighth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP28) being held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), is presided over by its president, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and UAE Special Envoy for Climate Change. Al Jaber is also the chief executive officer of Adnoc, the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, as well as the chairman of Masdar, otherwise known as the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, a state-owned renewable energy firm. The irony of an oil executive leading a meeting intended to eliminate fossil fuels from the world economy was not lost on participants.

In fact, the climate conference was rife with controversy and intrigue even before it began. Immediately after Al Jaber’s appointment as president, climate activists decried his presidency as a conflict of interests and an outrage, with one activist complaining, “This appointment goes beyond putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.” COP28 is the first conference to have an industry CEO, let alone an oil industry CEO, placed at the helm of the climate change mitigation agenda. Calls for Al Jaber to step down from his CEO position at Adnoc soon followed his appointment and were promptly ignored.

The controversy only increased as the summit approached. A mere month before the conference began, in an online meeting of a She Changes Climate event, Al Jaber responded angrily to Mary Robinson—an Irish politician, the chair of the Elders group, and a former UN special envoy for climate change—after Robinson challenged Al Jaber to commit to phasing out fossil fuels entirely. Robinson claimed, “We’re in an absolute crisis that is hurting women and children more than anyone.” Making such absurd connections is typical of climate activists, who often roll identity politics into their climate activism, which apparently gives them the sense that they are tackling all the world’s supposed problems in a single effort.

Al Jaber responded by countering:

I accepted to come to this meeting to have a sober and mature conversation. I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C [the temperature increase cap decreed in the Paris Climate Accord]. . . .

. . . Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves. (emphasis mine)

Al Jaber’s remarks have been regarded as verging on, if not explicitly representative of, climate change science “denial,” and he has been savaged for them. Yet, they represent the only rational, evidence-based statements made during this embattled conversation.

Further charges that Al Jaber aims to undermine the climate change agenda came from leaked communications between COP28 and Adnoc staff members, some of whom have been working in both capacities. The leaked documents strongly suggest that Al Jaber planned to use his position as the COP28 president to make oil deals on the side with government officials of participating nations. These revelations caused a frenzy among climate activist groups. One can only hope that these plans are true and that Al Jaber will have succeeded in making some oil deals for Adnoc and its potential customers. Such economic activity is not so much a sign of hypocrisy as it is evidence that economic actors will pursue rational exchanges, despite the obstacles posed by the market interference of interventionists like the United Nations and its political accomplices, including obstacles that are self-imposed by the economic actors themselves.

Other accusations leveled at Al Jaber’s presidency of COP28 include the charge that Adnoc “has the largest net-zero-busting expansion plans of any company in the world.” Adnoc, it is claimed, has been vastly expanding its development of fossil fuels, which would betray efforts to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Given that fossil fuel exports account for approximately 70 percent of the UAE’s merchandise exports, such efforts at expansion only make economic sense.

Al Jaber may be the only sane person in attendance at COP28, but he will likely be pressured into acceding to the demands of climate catastrophists. The rest of the participants appear to be in hysterics while under the sway of a mass delusion. Against the facts of science and the benefits of fossil-fuel-enabled technology, they believe that CO2 is “pollution,” that “sustainability” requires imposing an enormous tax on humanity for the respiration and growth of plant life, and that the farming methods of the original Green Revolution—which have increased yields by many factors—must be eliminated and replaced with a new environmentalist Green Revolution. They believe that industrial production must be undertaken using non-fossil-fuel inputs and that myriad industrial products must exclude fossil-fuel-based materials. These demands are as delusional as anything enacted by Chairman Mao Zedong during the Great Leap Forward.

Carbon neutrality by 2050 is an insanely impossible demand. Our industrial civilization and the population it supports depends on the advances made in fossil fuel extraction and use. Even Canadian scientist and polymath Vaclav Smil—a believer in climate change who is an otherwise credible source—agrees. In his book, How the World Really Works, Smil writes:

For those who ignore the energetic and material imperatives of our world, those who prefer mantras of green solutions to understanding how we have come to this point, the prescription is easy: just decarbonize—switch from burning fossil carbon to converting inexhaustible flows of renewable energies. The real wrench in the works: we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.

Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances.

As Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber seemed to suggest, the climate change catastrophists of COP28 would consign humanity to preindustrial conditions—relegating those in poorer regions to misery and hunger—all while tackling a phantom whose existence is dubious at best.

The economics of climate change catastrophism involve global centralized planning and interventionism on a scale hitherto unexampled. It is irrational to the extent that it purposefully forgoes known economic advantages, jettisons tried-and-true methods, and rejects the market-based approach that has proven to maximize inputs for efficient wealth production. It artificially imposes technological change rather than allowing it to develop of its own accord. Furthermore, it aims to curtail economic freedom by supplanting the choices of producers and consumers and overwriting them with the plans of a climate change dictatorship.

The full results of COP28 will become known by December 14. One can only hope that it ends in abject failure. Climate activists have suggested that it already has.

Michael Rectenwald is the author of twelve books, including The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda, Thought Criminal, Beyond Woke, Google Archipelago, and Springtime for Snowflakes. He is a distinguished fellow at Hillsdale College.

Michael Rectenwald | Mises Wire

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The headline is “property taxpayers bear the brunt of costs.” The subject is education funding, which, if you are paying any attention, is a dramedy akin to The Money Pit but with no beautiful anything at the end of the “movie.”

There is no conclusion. Viewers, or in their case, taxpayers, get nothing for the effort except a larger bill every year and a declining return on investment. But the goal here, aped by the Valley News, is to increase taxes by pretending to offset the burden. They argue that programs will be cut without proper funding but never broach at least one very real problem.

Bloated administrative overhead sucks up most of the resources you would otherwise have for those programs.

Instead of addressing the contradiction that more money does not provide better results, they argue that the current funding model is unconstitutional. A cherished opinion backed by robed activists willing to screw taxpayers by giving progressives what they want. To expand the administrative state in Concord and add a metastasizing statewide taxing authority with an always carbon footprint.

They seek to wreck what has made New Hampshire a great place to live, with low poverty, high quality of life, the most economic opportunity, and better growth and freedom than any state in New England and most of North America.

There’s a reason for that: low tax burden and a focus (at least recently) on reducing bureaucratic burden—the opposite of the public education funding model.

Property taxes are an anchor around the neck of expanding government. A tax bill is a visible reminder of costs and obligations. But, the Schoolies, the Education Industrial Complex, effortlessly grinds conscientious objectors into dust. Towns negotiating contracts with national teachers’ union lawyers or reps can’t compete and almost always cave. Anyone daring to challenge an expansion of the money pit is met with a political firestorm.

Sure, 60% of funding comes from property taxes, but 75% of that tax bill is public education, and much of that has nothing to do with providing students with an education.

If property taxes in New Hampshire are too high, then the first question should be, why are we spending so much for public education and getting so little in return? And is it, perhaps, time for the town to consider separating some of the things a public school does that have nothing to do with reading, writing, or arithmetic and getting them out of the budget?

If a school can’t teach more than 4 or 5 kids out of ten to read at grade level, then no one deserves to be rewarded with anything extracurricular.

Alternatively, a town could probably hire a third-party vendor to run their schools and get better results, with more accountability to taxpayers, parents, and town officials at a fraction of the cost. And guess what? If they start to suck, you can replace them, and all you are doing is changing one lean management team for another.

The Valley News is more interested in pandering to the growing government education industrial complex than saving taxpayers money or educating kids.

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Over the weekend, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin explained to the American people what’s really wrong with US foreign policy. Some might find his conclusions surprising.

The US standing in the world is damaged not because we spent 20 years fighting an Afghan government that had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11. The problem has nothing to do with neocon lies about Iraq’s WMDs that led to untold civilian deaths in another failed “democratization” mission. It’s not because, over the past nearly two years, Washington has taken more than $150 billion from the American people to fight a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine.

It’s not the military-industrial complex or its massive lobbying power that extends throughout Congress, the think tanks, and the media.

Speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California’s Simi Valley, Austin finally explained the real danger to the US global military empire.

It’s us.

According to Secretary Austin, non-interventionists who advocate “an American retreat from responsibility” are the ones destabilizing the world, not endless neocon wars.

Austin said the US must continue to play the role of global military hegemon – policeman of the world – because “the world will only become more dangerous if tyrants and terrorists believe that they can get away with wholesale aggression and mass slaughter.”

How’s that for reason and logic? Austin and the interventionist elites have fact-checked 30 years of foreign policy failures and concluded, “Well, it would have been far worse if the non-interventionists were in charge.”

This is one of the biggest problems with the neocons. They are incapable of self-reflection. Each time the US government follows their advice into another catastrophe, it’s always someone else’s fault. In this case, as Austin tells us, those at fault for US foreign policy misadventures are the people who say, “Don’t do it.”

What would have happened if the people who said “don’t do it” were in charge of President Obama’s decision to prop up al-Qaeda to overthrow Syria’s secular leader Assad? How about if the “don’t do it” people were in charge when the neocons manufactured a “human rights” justification to destroy Libya? What if the “don’t do it” people were in charge when Obama’s neocons thought it would be a great idea to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected government?

Would tyrants and terrorists have gained power if Washington did NOT get involved? No. Tyrants and terrorists got the upper hand BECAUSE Washington intervened in these crises.

As Austin further explained, part of the problem with the US is democracy itself. “Our competitors don’t have to operate under continuing resolutions,” he complained. What a burden it is for him that the people, through their representatives, are in charge of war spending.

In Congress, “America first” foreign policy sentiment is on the rise among conservatives, and that infuriates Austin and his ilk. He wants more billions for wars in Ukraine and Israel, and he wants it now!

And our economic problems? That is our fault, too. Those who “try to pull up the drawbridge,” Austin said, undermine the security that has led to decades of prosperity. Prosperity? Has he looked at the national debt? Inflation? Destruction of the dollar?

There is a silver lining here. The fact that Austin and the neocons are attacking us non-interventionists means that we are gaining ground. They are worried about us. This is our chance to really raise our voices!

 

 

Ron Paul | Ron Paul Institute

Copyright © 2023 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.

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Progressives have been working hard to conquer the problem of Christmas. Undermine might be a better word. Erase it would be a likely goal. And this story about a #woke black female Santa has me pondering whether they ever wanted her to appear.

The story.

 

A city in Belgium has cancelled a scheduled Christmas event in which a black female ‘Santa Claus’ was set to reeducate attendees about “colonial ideology” and how “generations of Flemish people are racists.”

The Telegraph reports that people in Ghent have pressured the mayor to call off the appearance of one Queen Nikkolah, a character created by artist Laura Nsengiyumva, who would have ‘reworked’ Christmas fables about Santa for children at the event.

The report claims that the character was set to be dressed in the colours of the Palestinian flag (for some reason) while handing out gifts to children.

 

Was the point of featuring Queen Nikkolah (and to be honest, wouldn’t it have been better if she was a Drag Queen) to have her do her thing, or was it to get people so outraged they’d just cancel Christmas – or in this case, the Christmas event?

I’ve no issue with a black Santa or one of any other color. The message of individuals giving of their own free will is far too important to get muddled in minute details, especially since Jesus was most certainly not a pale white guy with Fabio’s hair. But how far from the template was this, and to what end?

Belgium is not known for its conservatism, but Europeans have begun to push back against the #woke cultural mandates of the EU, especially with regard to immigration and climate policy. So, was the choice of Queen Nikkolah to further bend and then overwrite the culture or to get it to cancel itself?

Who won?

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