Links - 9th February 2026 (1 - General Wokeness)

Meme - "Liberals all in a few weeks work
I'm done defending Somali Fraud
This week I'll support narco Dictators
I'm done supporting narco Dictators
This week I'll support running over law enforcement"

Meme - Communist: "You think our grandparents had it better because they had affordable housing, high religiosity, low divorce rate, low suicide rates, low obesity rates, could easily find jobs and start a happy family? Then how do you explain my made up meme where I imagine your grandma being a child rape victim and your grandpa a closeted transvestite addicted to morphine?"

Meme - vittorio @lterintellectus: "the regime is whoever you cant criticize without risking your career. if 60% of republican vs 25% of democrat postgrads are worried their views could harm them, you know everything about who actually holds institutional power"
arctotherium @arctotherium42: "More educated conservatives keep their heads down wrt politics to avoid career harm. Both a cause and an effect of leftist institutional dominance of large organizations."
"Political Views Could Get Them Fired or Harm Their Careers. Are you worried about losing your job or missing out on job opportunities if your political opinions became known?
*dose-response relationship where the more educated you are, the more likely you are to worry about your political views harming you at work*
Clearly, the left wing is The Resistance

EU waste on pro-Islam projects: €1.6 million to study the hair of Muslim women : r/europe_sub - "The allegation comes from Silvia Sardone, deputy secretary of the League party: “I discovered that Brussels is throwing away almost two million euros of taxpayers’ money.” A flood of pro-Islam European funding? We are talking about €1.6 million allocated to a research project on the hair of Muslim women. The allegation comes from Silvia Sardone, deputy secretary of the League party: “I discovered that Brussels is throwing away almost two million euros of taxpayers’ money to study ‘hair, identity, beauty and personal identity in the Muslim context: emotional landscapes and evolving femininity beyond the veil’.” The project is reportedly being carried out by Ghent University in Belgium and analyzes how the hair of Muslim women influences everyday life. “This is yet another demonstration of the vast gap between the priorities of European citizens and the ideological obsessions of the European Commission.” But there is more: according to Sardone’s claims, over €3 million would also be allocated to projects with titles such as “Sustainable alliances against anti-Muslim hatred,” “A model towards a non-discriminatory culture,” and “Reporting and documenting anti-Muslim racism.” She adds that “in Italy, a project has even been funded to ‘address the underestimation of hate speech against Muslim women.’ In practice, public money is being given to associations and academic institutions to tell us what we can or cannot say about Islamism and immigration, turning any legitimate criticism into ‘hate’ and putting freedom of expression under accusation. Moreover, nothing is being done about anti-Christian hatred, which is growing worldwide. It is time to say stop to this pro-Islam ideological madness funded with taxpayers’ money. I have been denouncing these wastes for some time: in the past I reported the €10 million allocated to university projects on the so-called ‘European Quran’ and the €17 million for initiatives linked to Islam, sharia, and Islamic culture and traditions.” “Enough with this cultural subservience. The priorities must be support for families, citizens’ security, and the competitiveness of businesses—not projects on hair ‘beyond the veil’ and campaigns to silence those who defend European identity.”"

Steve Sailer: Still noticing after all these years - "Sailer was more than a provocateur; he was a serious thinker. Wrestling with his writings made us more knowledgeable and more aware of important subterranean ideas. (As Sailer has noted, many of these ideas are mainstream in academia if you translate the deceptive nomenclature of journal articles into ordinary language.) Sailer’s influence on me was more profound even than it was on my fellow dissidents because I was so impressed with his candor that I decided to write about race publicly. At first—and I owe Steve an apology for my cowardice—I kept my distance and never cited him. Writing about race was one thing, citing Steve Sailer was another. As Steve himself has written, “…people who don’t know me tend to hate me.” (Conversely, people who know Steve, like him.) I wanted to write honestly about race, but I also wanted to keep my job in academia; and I worried that Sailer was so blunt and alienating that citing him was a guilt-by-association gift to enemies of honesty and open inquiry. As it turned out, I was not wrong. One of the sins I was accused of before getting fired was liking a tweet by Steve Sailer. I explained that I thought that the tweet was interesting and that I believed in the importance of dialogue and debate. Maybe I could encourage debate in a different way my boss responded... I strive for intellectual transparency and honesty. If somebody asks my opinion about something, I will forward it, with appropriate caveats about human fallibility. And in that, Steve Sailer’s influence was enormous, along with Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray...
Noticing that journalists are verbally tilted and think words are like magic: “IQ is off-limits today because people who are verbally facile, such as journalists and academics, tend to assume that reality is largely constructed from words. Thus, if we would all just stop writing about unpleasant facts, they would disappear.”
Noticing that public intellectuals won’t grapple with important topics: “Indeed, trying to figure out how nature and nurture intertwine in modern America is one of the great challenges of the examined life. Public intellectuals should try it. It’s fun.”
Noticing that white intellectuals are hypocritical about IQ: “The typical white intellectual considers himself superior to ordinary white folks for two contradictory reasons. First, he constantly proclaims his belief in human equality, but they don’t. Second, he has a high IQ, but they don’t.”
Noticing that neoconservative ideas about citizenship are not entirely sensible: “If believing in neoconservative theories should make anyone in the world eligible for immigration, what should disbelieving them make thought criminals like you and me? Candidates for deportation? For the guillotine?”
Noticing that blacks fear blacks too: “In other words, the two black men racially profiled each other as dangerous criminals and then violently attacked each other. Why did the two blacks profile each other? Oh, sorry, I forgot: because white people. Wait, my mistake: because people who believe they are white. Occam’s razor suggests that the reason blacks tend to fear violence from one another is because they tend to be violent.”
But the thing that really struck me after reading Noticing is that Sailer cares more about the plight of black Americans than many of the white progressives who denounce him. While they ostentatiously display their commitment to racial justice by chastising anybody who talks honestly about the causes of racial disparities in the West, he writes incisively about the problems that plague black America. At times, his candor can seem harsh: “American blacks had a hard enough time competing with American whites. Putting them up against ever more of the cleverest and most ambitious of four billion Asians is increasingly a wipe-out.” Or “For instance, the fact that African-Americans seem to have a particular tendency toward criminal violence, for whatever combinations of reasons of nature and nurture, suggests that they need law enforcement more, not less, than do the rest of us.”... Sailer is not gratuitously rude. Rather, he is brutally honest. Unsurprisingly, I agree with him, “…the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking.” Exactly. Because well-meaning lies are still lies just as sweetened poison is still poison. And as the post-Floyd homicide spike illustrated, lies about black Americans can lead to dead Americans. If policy makers listened more to Sailer and less to preening white liberals, thousands of black men and women who were killed from 2014-2024 might still be alive today: “As I may have mentioned once or twice over the past year, the media-declared ‘racial reckoning’ following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, has been getting a lot of blacks murdered by other blacks. But I am not being ironic in saying that I am now stunned to find out that motor vehicle fatalities among blacks similarly soared 36% in June-December 2020 versus the same period in 2019, compared with a 9% increase in the rest of the population.” “Well, we’ve since tried telling blacks that they are morally better than whites. How’s that working out for all concerned.”
What is more, Sailer shows real regard for his fellow Americans (of all races), promoting a view that he calls citizenism, which “affirms that true patriots and idealists are willing to make sacrifices for the overall good of their fellow American citizens rather than for the advantage of either six billion foreigners or of the special interests within our own country.”"

eigenrobot on X - "a major lesson of the awokening for me was that a significant number of people on the left hate me and would prefer i not exist and a majority of the country is willing to go along with policies operating toward that end. this was probably an infohazard"

Thread by @arctotherium42 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Thread with excerpts from the 1976 essay "On Meritocracy and Equality." I want to clear up some misconceptions around the idea of "meritocracy." The word was initially coined as a *pejorative* in 1958 to describe presently-existing Anglo-American society.
What characterized WWII and postwar Anglo-American society that made the word "meritocracy" appropriate? That talent (as measured by heavily genetic IQ) and technical skill, rather than hereditary privilege or some other mechanism, led to status and wealth. But by 1976, this had already been successfully attacked and overthrown by the New Left/Civil Rights state, which replaced talent with hereditary privilege (race, sex) as the ideal arbiter of status. This is fairly close to what had been predicted by the essay that coined the term meritocracy, which foresaw "Populists" rebelling against the principle of merit in favor of equality and helping "each person develop his own diverse capacities" (think multiple intelligences). This successful 1960s attack on meritocracy in the form of affirmative action/Civil Rights *overthrew* the liberal individualist position that someone's place should not be based on their group attributes.
In the 18th century, many institutions, such as the army and the Church and land ownership, required hereditary privilege to access. This principle was replaced with the principle of achievement in the 19th/20th. *And then achievement was replaced again in the 1960s*.
Various New Left attacks on meritocracy:
1) More status because you are better because of genetic gifts is unfair (Rawlsian)
2) Pure meritocracy is impossible
3) Social mobility is basically luck
4) Meritocracy makes society overly competitive
5) Meritocracy creates inequality
The author, Daniel Bell, traces this destruction of democracy to the failure of the mainstream Civil Rights movement, premised on the idea that equality of opportunity would lead to equality of results, a decade earlier with the 1966 Coleman Report. New Lefties re-invented John Calhoun's doctrine of the "concurrent majority," saying blacks shouldn't be counted equally to whites because as a minority they could never get what they wanted that way, and needed special privileges. This is the logic behind the VRA. According to John Rawls, natural advantages (like being smarter or better looking) are as arbitrary as social ones (like being nobility), and the *only* justification for rewarding talent is if doing so helps the non-talented even more.
This represents the end of liberalism. The liberal ideal was to set no prescriptive ends, simply a set of procedural rules, and to let things work out as they may. The New Left overthrew and destroyed this in favor of redress for "disadvantaged groups" as the basis of society. This should be seen, in my view, as a sort of "de-modernization" process. Rather than individuals equal under the law, we've returned to an ancien-regime like system of group representation, rights, and privileges, millets or estates or "communities" rather than citizens.
Why write this thread? You often see attacks on "meritocracy" or "individualism" as too prevalent in 21st century America. This is like criticisms of "white supremacy" or "patriarchy" - all were overthrown 60 years ago by the New Left and attacking them today is playing pretend. NLSY data backs this up. For example, the correlation between income percentile and IQ dropped between NLSY79 cohort (born 1957-64) and the NLSY97 cohort (born 1980-1984), and this is after the destruction of meritocracy/liberalism began.
It drives me mad to see people playacting as though we are still in the 1950s. Here is a link to the 1976 essay I excerpted all of this from; I recommend reading the whole thing (only 40 pages). nationalaffairs.com/storage/app/up…"

arctotherium on X - "1960s New Leftists successfully de-modernized the West, breaking centuries-long trends towards citizens equal under the law in favor of group privileges, and they managed to do all this while inverting the meaning of the word "liberal," which used to mean the opposite."

(PDF) Blue Hair and the Blues: Dying Your Hair Unnatural Colours is Associated with Depression - "A number of lines of evidence, such as studies of religious converts and members of conspicuous subcultures, have found a relationship between holding and expressing a strong counter-cultural identity and mental instability. Here we test whether dying your hair an unnatural colour - something which conspicuously expresses non-conformity - is related to mental instability, using a large dataset of online daters (OKCupid dataset, about n=14k used in this study). We find the expected pattern, which was moderate in size (p = -033 to -0.23, depending on controls). This pattern persisted even when controls for age, race, sex, sexual orientation, body type, intelligence, polyamory, vegetarianism, and political beliefs were included."
Left wingers still claim that it's meant to warn predators and doesn't mean the individual is toxic

Janet Elaine Parks | Facebook - "🇺🇸 THE LEFT DIDN’T JUST CHANGE …IT ABANDONED WHAT LIBERALISM USED TO STAND FOR… Let’s talk about history …and contrast.. Modern progressives like to pretend conservatism “radicalized.” But the uncomfortable truth is this: 👉 The Left walked away from its own principles… And the receipts are everywhere…
WHAT LIBERALISM USED TO DEFEND..
🗣️ Free Speech — Even When It Was Offensive For decades, classical liberals believed free speech only mattered when it protected speech you disliked… The American Civil Liberties Union famously defended the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois (1977)… Not because they agreed… but because they understood that speech rights don’t survive once they become conditional…
Today, many on the Left openly support:
• deplatforming
• speech policing
• censorship in the name of “harm reduction”
Even to the point of assassinating 31 year old man for speech they hated… That is not liberalism…. That is control…
Due Process & Civil Liberties..
From the 1960s through the early 2000s, liberals:
• opposed unchecked federal power
• warned against surveillance states
• defended presumption of innocence
After 9/11, the Left vocally opposed the Patriot Act…arguing that security without liberty is tyranny… Today? The same movement excuses:
• warrantless surveillance
• emergency powers
• selective enforcement
• guilt by association
Due process is now optional …depending on who’s accused…
Skepticism of Government Power..
Even Barack Obama, while campaigning in 2008, criticized:
• executive overreach
• mass surveillance
• erosion of constitutional limits
Yet once in office, many of those programs expanded …and the modern Left largely stopped objecting… Government power stopped being “dangerous” and started being “necessary.”
WHAT THE MODERN LEFT DEFENDS NOW..
Censorship Over Debate.. Disagreement is no longer something to argue against… it’s something to silence… Dissenting views are framed as:
• misinformation and uneducated
• extremism
• violence
• threats to “democracy” a comment we hear time and time again from the left..
This is a direct rejection of liberal pluralism…
Selective Bodily Autonomy..
“My body, my choice” until it conflicts with government mandates… During the Pandemic :
• medical decisions were coerced
• livelihoods were threatened
• exemptions were dismissed
Autonomy became political …not principled…
Law Enforcement …Only When Convenient..
The Left once warned about federal overreach…
Now we see:
• demonization of ICE..
• open hostility toward law enforcement enforcing existing laws..
• growing riots and violence coming from people who don’t agree with ICE..
Yet the same voices demand aggressive enforcement when it aligns ideologically… That isn’t justice….That’s selective morality.
Erosion of Parental Rights..
Classical liberalism defended:
• family autonomy
• parental authority
• limits on state intrusion
Today, parents who object to curricula, medical decisions, or ideology are labeled:
• extremists
• threats
• harmful
The state now knows better…apparently…
THE CORE SHIFT PEOPLE KEEP IGNORING..
Liberalism once assumed: Good people can disagree …and must be allowed to.
The modern Left assumes: Disagreement is dangerous and must be eliminated…
That is not progress….That is radicalization. Conservatives didn’t abandon liberal values… The Left did… and we see evidence of this everyday.
Free speech became conditional. Due process became selective. Government restraint became obsolete. Individual liberty became negotiable. Fascism labels from the very people demonstrating actual fascism… And when a movement abandons its own foundations in the name of “progress,” it doesn’t evolve… It becomes authoritarian.
You don’t have to agree with conservatives. But pretending today’s Left resembles the liberalism of the past is historically dishonest…
Faith. Family. Freedom."

Protests harm Sankofa Square’s ad sales and events business - "Corporate events at Sankofa Square plummeted by nearly 70 per cent last year as U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff regime and frequent protests combined to drain revenue from Toronto's premier public space. The downtown square hosted just 22 commercial events in 2025, down from 71 the previous year, according to city documents released as part of the 2026 budget process. The sharp decline has dealt a financial blow. The city’s revenue from event permits at Sankofa Square fell to $87,000 last year, down from $275,000 in 2024... The square has become a focal point for civic activism, hosting 40 protests and rallies in 2025, according to the city. The demonstrations "have impacted both commercial and community event clients," budget documents state. "A number of commercial clients packed up early and have indicated their reluctance to return with future activations." The combination of protests along with general safety concerns prompted officials to hire a manager of community safety who is tasked with working "alongside the staff team, suppliers and area partners to create a space that is welcoming, safe and builds trust in the public mind.""
Maybe the counter-productive renaming was a factor too

Abandoned by event planners, Sankofa Square bleeding money | Toronto Sun - "shortly after city council approved the name change in late 2023, the square’s management admitted to the Sun that the money set aside for the rebrand could’ve instead been spent on capital improvements to make the space safer. Julian Sleath, then the square’s general manager, told the Sun that $300,000 in Section 37 money, set aside for the public space, could’ve been spent on “security by environmental design” — presumably a one-time expense... More than 70% of respondents to a 2024 poll said they disapprove of the renaming. Even more striking is that Sankofa Square’s own research suggests the people who would put on events aren’t on board with the change either. Buried deep in a report released by Sankofa Square management in January 2025 are survey results that suggest few event producers agree the rebrand would “support and align with” their next event. Of the 39 event specialists polled, six said they were unsatisfied or very unsatisfied with the “current direction of the square,” while nine said they were neither satisfied nor unsatisfied. Six said they were very satisfied and 11 said they were somewhat satisfied. Seven did not answer the question."

Ok on X - "my most woke opinion ever is that heterosexuality is a heavily unbalanced power dynamic that intrinsically hurts women"
Heterophobia is a reactionary myth

Meme - Ultraseven 21 @Cranberryscause: "Is it only me or is all the retarded using fictional characters to agree with political positions feel just like thise drug psa cartoons in the that nobody gaf about?"
Left wingers can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality, which is why they're obsessed with Marvel and Star Wars

Meme - "Hey! How come those small dicked racist inbred gun owner, whom I constantly demonize and lie about, aren't lining up to die while saving me and my friends from the same cops we tried to send to disarm them? I guess it never was ahout tyranny, huh Chuds?"

Meme - "Isn't it funny how the "coexist" people-who preach love, inclusion, and tolerance-are always the first to burn shit down, vandalize property, and sling insults like it's their full- time job? Almost like "coexist" really means: Shut up. Comply. Repeat what we tell you-or else."

Meme - @advert1489: "I was alive during the satanic panic, and while it was annoying, it wasn't nearly as bad as progressivism. At least the Christian-right didn't try to take over properties. They did try to cancel things, but they weren't very effective. The thing about the Christian-right is that they were child-focused, so their "influence" is only present in our minds is because it affected us as kids. For adults, the satanic panic was great. Because it caused such a fuss, there was a boom of pro-freedom properties, jokes, and fun. This was the golden age - the other half of the satanic panic. I actually welcome the Christian-right's return. I would rather someone tell their kids they can't play with a toy than some disturbed individual rewrite the lore I grew up on."
Plus, almost all the time, they just wanted their kids staying away from what they considered sinful - they didn't care if everyone else consumed those properties. So claiming the right invented cancel culture is wrong

Meme - "Save the Environment
Burn a Tesla
No Uterus No Opinion
Men can be Women
Nobody is Above the Law
Protect the Illegals
F*ck the Government
Give us Free Food
NO KINGS
Defend the Dictators"

Meme - wanye @wanyeburkett: ""I love America. I think it was stolen, that it's fundamentally legitimate, that it should be handed back to another party. But how dare you question whether I love this country. Of course I love it.""

Pam Grier Shares 'Hanging From Tree' Lynching Claim on The View - "Actress Pam Grier, who famously recalled in her 2010 memoir — "Foxy: My Life in Three Acts" — the time when her doctor asked if Richard Pryor had been dipping his penis in cocaine and then having sex with her, revealed today on ‘The View’ that she witnessed a lynched body hanging from a tree in Columbus, Ohio as a child... The lynching story just magically ends up on live television months after revealing she's in a "cosmic relationship" and she's "horny as f--k." But, there she was today on live TV telling us all about that lynching story she's been holding onto since she was a child. "My mom would go, 'don't look, don't look, don't look,' and she would pull us away because there's someone hanging from a tree," Grier told Whoopi, Sunny and the others. "And they have a memorial for it now where you can see where people were and left. And it triggers me today to see that a voice can be silenced and if a white family supported a black, they're going to get burned down or killed or lynched as well." OutKick reached out to the NAACP to get a reaction to Grier's claim and for any supporting evidence to support the claim. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, there has not been a single lynching documented in the history of Columbus, Ohio. Furthermore, America's Black Holocaust Museum lists the last documented lynching in Ohio as taking place in 1911. What road was Pam Grier on with her family when she saw the person hanging from a tree? Why hasn't she told this story before? And what is this memorial she's talking about? According to OutKick research, we're unable to find any record of a lynching in Columbus, Ohio in the early 1950s. Remember, Pam was born May 26, 1949... Did Sunny Hostin or Whoopi ask her why she never told that story? Of course not... in the book where Pam fails to tell us the lynching story, she tells the story about how she gave Richard Pryor oral sex and that's how cocaine ended up in her system. Via semen."

Meme - *Avatar with Human Fucker Permit*
">unless the aliens are literal mindless monsters humans are always the real villain
I miss when sci-fi games had interesting stories instead of the same MUH colonialism bad shit"

Quinn’s Laws: THE QUICK START GUIDE TO QUINN IN THE MORNING - "QUINNs FIRST LAW: Liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent.
QUINN’S SECOND LAW: Liberals never understand that what they’re doing is wrong, only that they haven’t been allowed to do enough of it yet."
Apparently the third is "Liberalism must always conceal its true purpose"

Links - 8th February 2026 (2 - Iran Uprising)

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on X - "The Iranian government’s violent crackdown on demonstrators is horrific and must stop now. All people have the right to protest their government without fear of violence. I support the Iranians taking to the streets to call for a better future."
Ryan Saavedra on X - "Little history on AOC and Iran:
-She condemned Trump for killing top Iranian regime terrorist Qassem Soleimani
-She condemned Trump for blowing up Iran's nuclear facilities
-She co-sponsored legislation to prevent the U.S. military from taking action against Iran
-She was one of the only House members to not condemn Iran for attacking Israel
-Opposed to sanctions on Iran"
Eliana Goldin on X - "AOC literally went to the Columbia encampments — where they openly supported Hamas and harassed Jewish students such as myself — and thanked them. Don’t buy her BS"

Thread by @Valen10Francois on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "One of the oddest things about the islamic revolution is that Ayatollah Khomeini lived in exile in the cushy Parisian suburb of Neauphle-le-Chateau for years before flying back to Iran  His leftist allies (whom he will later persecute) knew that French elites would love him
Michel Foucault saw in the future revolution "the most modern form of government" and Khomeini "a saint man"  Sartre believed he would lead an "anti colonialist and anti imperialist regime"  French newspaper liberation called it a "Shiite socialism" The one french intellectual who somewhat saw through the BS was Simone de Beauvoir who saw that the regime's will to put every woman behind niqabs was incompatible with her feminist ideals This is where the concept of "islamo-leftism" comes from  For decades you had intellectuals like Ali Shariati (partially educated in France) who worked to tie Islamism and Leftist ideology together
In the end the useful idiots in the West didn't get much comeuppance for their blind ignorance  The useful idiots in Iran however largely paid their mistakes and naivety with their lives He stayed for *months! Not years! Complete brain fart on my end that usually happens when I write threads on my phone"
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry on X - "The global academic left’s support for Khomeini—which has been completely memory-holed—is important because it shows that Islamo-leftism isn’t primarily about immigration and precedes mass immigration. It’s about hatred of the West."

Trusting Khomeini: Old NYT article praising former Supreme Leader surfaces amid Iran protests - "As protests continue to challenge Iran’s clerical establishment, a 1979 opinion article from the New York Times has resurfaced online. Titled Trusting Khomeini, the piece portrayed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as a restrained religious figure unlikely to exercise direct political power... Published days after Khomeini’s return from exile, the article suggested that fears of a theocratic dictatorship were overstated. It argued that Khomeini would act primarily as a moral guide rather than a ruler, that political pluralism would persist, and that his close associates included moderates with records of concern for human rights."g

Dr. Ben Braddock on X - "Leftwing foreign policy establishment during Carter Administration undermined the Shah of Iran as part of overall subversive project that included the dismantling of Rhodesia, giving up the Panama Canal, and granting Most Favored Nation trade status to China. BBC exposed interesting documents in 2016 showing that Carter convinced the Shah to travel abroad from Iran, while backchanneling with Khomeini and arranging for him to return to Iran from exile in France"
Melissa Chen on X - "What you need to understand is that Jimmy Carter, Obama, Keir Starmer and Philippe Sands are all cut from the same cloth. From the Shah's fall to the Chagos surrender, they all embody the same woolly globalist multipolarityMAXXING creed:
> self-loathing under the guise of anti-Western imperialism
> prioritizing "human rights" and international law over national strength
> backchanneling with revolutionaries and appeasing adversaries
> undermining Western allies - whether toppling the Pahlavi regime, inking nuclear deals with mullahs, or handing over strategic islands
It's the ideology of self-sabotage dressed as virtue"

Iran's supreme leader acknowledges thousands killed during recent protests - "Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said thousands had been killed, "some in an inhuman, savage manner", and blamed the US for the deaths.  A violent response to the unrest has claimed 3,090 lives, according to US-based Iranian Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), with some activist groups putting the death toll far higher. An internet blackout has made it extremely difficult to get clear information."
Clearly, the US forced them to shoot their own people

Meme - Centre for British Refugees: "While white liberal women in the west cosplay as muslims "for solidarity" with islamism, Iranian women celebrate their fight for freedom from islamism by showing their hair and burning a photo of Khamenei to light their cigarettes."

Iranian-Canadian refugee's photogenic protest inspires worldwide meme - "a 23-year-old Iranian refugee in Richmond Hill, Ont., has now confirmed to National Post it’s her, and that she was herself inspired by a similar protest a few days earlier.  She says she does not want to be identified out of fear of reprisals. “A lot of spies, a lot of Islamic Republic fans are here,” she said from Richmond Hill, a city north of Toronto. The X account where she posted the picture calls her Morticia Addams, after a character from The Addams Family.  In her X account she also refers to herself as a “radical feminist” and includes a reference to “52Hz,” the nickname of a whale that speaks in a language all its own, as documented in the film The Loneliest Whale.  Morticia, as we’ll call her, grew up in Iran but ran into trouble with the regime when she was a teenager. During the 2019 protests also known as Bloody November, she participated in marches against the regime, and even spent a night in a detention centre after being picked up by police.  Then in 2024, after then-president Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash, Morticia said she was arrested at her parents’ home. “I was taken in for interrogation, actually, and I was subject to severe humiliation and physical abuse,” she said. “And after two days of interrogation, they let me go. I don’t know why they released me. And so I fled to Turkey and then to Canada, because I had my student visa.” She then applied for refugee status in Canada...  The image she shared is a powerful one. A screenshot from a short video, it, shows her, head tilted and a cigarette between her lips, grasping and leaning into a burning photograph of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. The video, Reuters has confirmed, was taken in Richmond Hill, just north of Toronto."

Online Communists Come Unglued When Cornel West Endorses Overthrow Of Iranian Government - "Former independent presidential candidate and democratic socialist Cornel West is facing backlash from the left after posting a video in support of Iran’s protest movement.  The video, which drew more than 1 million views Wednesday, called on his “comrades” to be “morally consistent” on repression — and sparked attacks on both his position and character from within his own political sphere.  “Long live the Iranian revolution, the heroic, courageous struggle of precious Iranians in face of overwhelming brutality and cruelty for 46 years,” West said. “And shame on those who would view those precious human beings willing to pay the ultimate cost as if they’re just pawns playing some ideological game.”...   Nick Cruse, cofounder of the Revolutionary Blackout network, a black radical movement, called West’s take “bullshit” and asked him what gives him “the right to erase” the voices of Iranians who support their government. He further accused West of ignoring alleged Mossad “infiltration” of the protests.  “You know exactly what you are doing. You imperialist dog,” Cruse said.   The backlash against West exposes a fault line on the American left — a divide between those who prioritize solidarity with popular uprisings and those who view any movement opposed by U.S. adversaries as a CIA front.  West’s critics represent the “anti-imperialist” wing that has defended governments from Iran to Russia to Syria against what they cast as Western regime-change operations.  Jimmy Dore, a comedian-turned-political commentator, said West had become “out of touch” in “ivory towers” and was functioning as a CIA mouthpiece pushing regime change.   Danny Haiphong, a pro-China and pro-Russia YouTuber who writes for Chinese state media outlet CGTN, dismissed the protests entirely.  “Iranians had their revolution. In 1979,” he said, accusing the CIA and Mossad of killing “100s in these riots” and told West that Iranians “need your lecturing as much as they need US bombs: not at all.”  The Marx Engels Lenin Stalin Mao Institute, a communist organization, called West “yet another imperialist clown” and “a disgrace.”"

Iran protests: Progressive left hypocritically silent on the killing of thousands of demonstrators (aka "Why the ‘Free Palestine’ crowd goes silent on Iran") - "Yasmine Mohammed, a Canadian author of Egyptian and Palestinian background who at 19 was forced into marriage with an Al-Qaeda operative, says progressives’ silence on Iran is a case of mutual convenience. “They see Iran as anti-Israel and anti-Trump, so it’s like the enemy of my enemy [is my friend],” she says. “This is extra vicious and inhumane, as they can see how brutally the regime is murdering people, and they shrug.” “They don’t care about Iranian lives. They don’t care about Yemeni lives. They don’t care about Nigerian lives. They only care if they can blame America or Israel. Their allegiance is to whoever is against them, not to supporting innocent people being killed.” Mohammad, who describes herself as a campaigner against Islamic fundamentalism and antisemitism, believes many pro-Palestinian protesters never knew what they were protesting. “They scream about anti-colonialism and then support the ideology that colonised a quarter of the planet. It’s absurd,” Mohammad tells The Australian Financial Review. “What about the fact that Iranian people were colonised by this regime? That Iranian people are fighting to decolonise their country? They are inconsistent with every assertion. “They scream about queers for Palestine, not realising homosexuality is punishable by death under sharia. They are even happy to support sharia, clearly, as they chant support for Hamas and the Islamic regime in Iran. “The only consistency they have is to always be on whatever side is anti-West, anti-America, anti-Israel. They will never condemn a regime that kills thousands of its citizens in a matter of days if that same regime also chants ‘Death to America, Death to Israel’.” Alastair Campbell, the former spin doctor to Tony Blair and now co-host of the popular The Rest is Politics podcast, makes a similar point about the reluctance of the left of politics to denounce Iran. “I’m a progressive. I think that because Israel and Trump are so voluble about Iran, I think sometimes my side of the political fence finds it hard to come and actually [say]: ‘This is a truly awful regime, and we should be standing up for the people of Iran,’ ” says Campbell. “There are people on the left that kind of … you know, basically, you sometimes feel they’re standing up for the regime in Iran rather than the people... Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist who has been targeted by the regime’s assassins, argues that the suffering of everyday Iranians does not fit the narrative of the left. “The silence of the left and liberals in America, in Europe, is not an accidental silence,” she said in a US media interview this week. “It is an ideological silence because they believe the suffering of Iranian women, Iranian men, thousands of people being killed or injured, it is not something they can talk about because it will expose their hypocrisy, it will expose how they sympathise with our killers, Islamist terrorists.” Casey Babb, a Canadian security and antisemitism expert, is blunt. “It was over six weeks into Israel’s war with Hamas that the death toll in Gaza reached 12,000 – of which thousands were terrorists,” he says. “It’s taken the Iranian regime 16 days to kill that many people – all of whom were civilians. Where’s the genocide crowd now?” Even when the killing gets too much for even the most ardent leftist to ignore, the criticism of Iran degenerates to both-sides-isms. Jeremy Corbyn, the former UK Labour leader, said while he was appalled by the killings in Iran, interference by external powers must also be resisted... But the lack of condemnation from the left on Iran cannot be wholly tied to events in Gaza. Left-wing activists and politicians have long given Iran a leave pass from criticism, despite its abysmal record on human rights since the mullahs seized power in the 1979 Islamic revolution. In a column for the UK Daily Telegraph this week, English author and journalist Jake Wallis Simons pointed to the support prominent that left-wing intellectuals Michel Foucault and Edward Said gave at the time to the revolution, which deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and ended Iran’s monarchy. Said framed the revolution as a product of postcolonialism, the theory he devised in which the Euro- and US-centric West had exploited and suppressed the Middle Eastern, African and Asian East countries that had been colonies or vassal states. “If Iranian workers, Egyptian students, Palestinian farmers resent the West or the US, it is a concrete response to the specific policy injuring them as human beings,” Said wrote in Time magazine in April 1979, several months after the revolution. The shah was seen as a juicy target for the Iranians’ ire. He was pro-American and regarded as heading a corrupt regime that ruled with a repressive secret police force, the SAVAK. But Said’s thesis ignores the religious dimension to the shah’s overthrow. The events of 1979 are recorded in the history books as the Islamic Revolution just as much as the Iranian Revolution... While the left-wingers may be keeping mum on Iran’s abuses, what is also telling is the lack of support for Tehran from other countries. Durham University Middle East expert, Professor Anoush Ehteshami, says Iran has not made many allies outside the Shia Muslim world, and even Shia-majority countries such as Azerbaijan have little solidarity with Tehran."

Asuka Groyper 🚬 on X - "No Muslim no matter how upset they were with the government would burn down a mosque. Another ‘organic’ rebellion the serves Israel’s interests. Go figure."
Yashar Ali 🐘 on X - "You don’t understand how much young Iranians resent Islam. And this is assuming that it was protesters who did it, and not the regime. Don’t forget: Khomeini’s supporters were willing to set a cinema on fire and murder 400 innocent Iranians in 1978 in order to achieve their political objectives.  There’s no limit for them."

The West’s silence on Iran is the latest warning of Islamists’ growing power - "Islamism is an artificial, man-made 20th century totalitarian ideology that steals the language and metaphors of my religion – Islam – but distorts them for other ends, holding at its core a cosmic enmity towards Judaism, Zionism and Israel. These themes have defined the Iranian regime as a theocratic pseudo-democracy, an Islamist dictatorship masquerading as an Islamic republic. Under the country’s constitution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is mandated to export jihad, and it does so through the aggression of Iran’s proxies and via Islamist terrorism globally.  Time after time, the Iranian people have shown that they do not support the regime. In 2009, the Green Movement protests saw Iranians revolt against the theft of an election, a movement that was crushed pitilessly. In September 2022, the Women Life Freedom movement — “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” — was ignited following the barbaric killing of 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini for her refusal to wear a veil. It was similarly put down... Iranians seem to have been targeted by snipers, shot in the face and genitals, murdered and imprisoned by the tens of thousands. Reports have circulated of the state denying the release of bodies unless the family is filmed with a fake identity card claiming their loved one was a police or security officer murdered not by the state but by protestors.  An eerie quiet now seems to have descended on Iran, but the nature of the protests showed the true feelings of the Iranian people. The Iranian foreign minister stated that 350 mosques nationwide were torched, a clear indication of the people’s fury towards the Islamist regime. Iranians saw the possibility of a historic break from the shackles of their rulers, glimpsing a future without the tyranny which has for decades dehumanised, disappeared and murdered its own people... Where were the outpourings of protest in solidarity with the Iranians defying their regime? Instead, the US and Europe had empty streets; it was business as usual on our otherwise politically militant university campuses; there were few if any demonstrations, and Iranian consulates and embassies were largely left unmolested by anti-regime protests.  In New York City, the lack of reaction was particularly noteworthy given we have just elected our first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani. As a state assemblyman, and himself a Shia Muslim, Mamdani protested so vigorously for the Palestinians that he was once arrested for blocking traffic. He refused to condemn rankly Islamist calls to “globalise the Intifada”. Yet on Iran, he was silent until he issued a tepid statement almost a month into the brutal protests. Why are Iranians apparently so undeserving? Why the stark difference between the massive protest movement that mobilised immediately after October 7 (and in some cases before Israel’s war in Gaza began) and the silence over Iranians – a majority of whom are Muslim – dying for their freedom and liberty?  Perhaps protests in the West have been throttled by the stranglehold of Islamophobia – an artificial construct that became mainstream after Ayatollah Khomeini issued his 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie. (That edict globalised calls for Rushdie’s execution for blasphemy due to the publication of The Satanic Verses). Since then, criticism of Islam or its institutions has been effectively deterred, even when the critics themselves are practising Muslims.  The fact that the Iranian regime calls itself Islamic is awkward for Western progressives, especially if they are unable (or unwilling) to distinguish between Islam and Islamism. Never mind that the main victims of Tehran’s terror are vulnerable Muslims. The fear of Islamophobia instils a silence that only serves to protect the Ayatollah and his dictatorship. Western progressives are similarly compromised by critical race theory – indoctrination integral to woke ideology. Palestinian victimhood is lionised above all other struggles, partly because their so-called “oppressors” (Israelis) are erroneously deemed to be white. Thus, Islamist anti-Semitism merges seamlessly with virulent far-Left anti-Semitism under the banner of “anti-Zionist anti-racism”. When Islamists murder Muslims in Iran, Iranians are not accorded such “prestige” victimhood. There is also the small matter of money. There is a growing body of evidence that many pro-Palestinian protests were not spontaneous outpourings of support for the cause, but systematically organised and richly financed. Research from data analysts at the Network Contagion Research Institute, affiliated to Rutgers University, found evidence of Chinese links to certain groups, and concluded: “While nominally focused on Israel, the current protests [organised by these groups] can be better understood as a well-funded initiative driving a revolutionary, anti-government, and anti-capitalist agenda, with the leading organisations serving as versatile tools for foreign entities hostile to the US”. With Iran, the money in the West appears to be on the regime’s side. Extraordinary investigative research by journalist Asra Nomani for the Pearl Project has identified a network of allegedly pro-Iranian groups, encompassing “socialist revolutionaries, Islamist activists, foreign-influenced nonprofits and even political operatives from Democratic groups”, what she has dubbed the “woke army”.  Nomani also describes this as the Red-Green alliance – a merging of socialism, even communism, with Islamism, seeking to pull apart the fabric of American society. She testified to the US Senate judiciary committee on March 5 2025, urging these organisations to be registered as foreign agents because many of them promote the propaganda of foreign regimes. I can’t be alone in thinking that any protest in the US in support of the Ayatollah should automatically be considered suspect... Iranians are forced to endure a double tragedy. The first is that their country, once a shining example of civilisation in the Islamic world, continues to struggle under the yoke of Islamist tyrants bent on exporting their twisted ideology everywhere. The second is that the very people in the West who claim to care most about the oppressed of the world have nothing to say about the brave people of Iran.  We should all hope that the Iranian regime can be brought to its knees. But even then, we will still be left with the hypocrisy and corruption of our own societies."

Medicine's Getting Major Injections of Woke Ideology (1/2)

From 2021:

Medicine's Getting Major Injections of Woke Ideology (Two-Part Series)

"The national racial reckoning over reparations and critical race theory is taking over the world of medicine and health care. Prestigious medical journals, top medical schools and elite medical centers are adopting the language of social justice activism and vowing to confront “systemic racism,” dismantle “structural violence” and disrupt “white supremacy” in their institutional cultures.

Some activist physicians describe the present-day health care system with such ominous terms as a “medical caste system” or “medical apartheid”...

Rare is the doctor who is willing to publicly question claims of white privilege and implicit bias in the healthcare system, and already several doctors who have publicly pushed back have been demoted and have filed legal actions alleging retaliation. This year the medical profession received an unequivocal message when two editors of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association resigned under pressure over a podcast that aired opinions expressing skepticism that the United States is plagued by systemic racism.

While racialized politics has infused every corner of American life, the moral stakes in the health care arena go far beyond, say, the perceived slights called microaggressions. The medical literature, lately drawing on critical race theory, depicts the health care industry itself as a historical source of illness in — and even killing of — black and brown bodies. That would make medicine analogous to policing and criminal justice, the other social institutions directly blamed for maiming and murdering black people...

The movement is just beginning reshape the practice of medicine, but a primary assumption is that white doctors and institutions are pervaded with unconscious bias, and that black doctors, who are significantly underrepresented in the profession, would provide better care to black patients. But because black students typically get lower scores and lower grades, increasing the ranks of African American and other minority practitioners would likely require moving away from a reliance on conventional measures of academic qualification, such as undergraduate grades and standardized test scores...

Efforts to improve health outcomes for black patients are advancing on many fronts. They include a Boston hospital pilot project to offer preferential admissions to non-white patients for heart care; prioritizing non-whites for COVID-19 vaccinations; and the changing of a United States Medical Licensing Examination test from a graded score to pass/fail to help minority students succeed. 

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education is adding a diversity requirement for accrediting U.S. residency and fellowship programs for newly minted doctors; and Northwestern University and its Feinberg School of Medicine are seeking to improve diversity by eliminating a six-decade-old Honors Program in Medical Education.

Medical schools are adding units on critical race theory, intersectionality, implicit bias, identity, oppression, allyship, power and privilege to their curricula. Medical students are learning about medical exploitation and medical experimentation on enslaved blacks, black prisoners and other unwitting subjects. And staple reading assignments in med schools feature such non-medical polemics as Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” and Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist.”  

This year alone, six state medical boards have added a requirement for training in “antiracism,” implicit bias or cultural competency for doctors in some practice areas to be eligible for a medical license, raising the total to 13 jurisdictions that require such training; eight other board are reviewing such proposals, according to the Federation of State Medical Boards.

All of this comes at a time when medical schools are experiencing dramatic changes on the gender front as well, where it is becoming customary for medical professionals to announce their gender pronouns as a matter of standard etiquette, and some medical schools are replacing the phrase “pregnant women” with “birthing people” in the interest of inclusiveness. Indeed, the issues of race and gender are intersectionally linked in the world of social justice advocacy, and some anti-racist and equity manifestos include a sex and gender platform, such as adding more chest binders and gender-affirming practices, reducing heteronormative bias, and advocating for “LGBTQIA2S+” causes...

Such developments trouble skeptics worried about the repercussions for patient care and for the training of physicians. They say the moral fervor reduces complex policy to simplistic slogans and indiscriminately blames all racial disparities on a nebulous menace – white supremacy or systemic racism – while discounting the influence of cultural differences and individual initiative. It then attacks the perceived problem through blunt weapons as such racial preferences, ideological conformity and emotional blackmail.

“The fundamental problem with social justice in public health is that there are no limiting principles to it,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow and author Sally Satel wrote in the journal Liberties this year...

Satel is among those who doubt equity is attainable, given the complex underlying factors that shape human health. But some medical ethics experts are pushing in the other direction and going so far as to argue that equalizing group outcomes between blacks and whites may necessitate tolerating a greater loss of life...

“It’s a very ideological approach to things: ‘People are going to die, so you have to agree with everything I say. And if you disagree with it, you want people to die apparently,’ ” said William Jacobson, clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School and president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, which runs the conservative websites legalinsurrection.com and criticalrace.org.

“And it also is extremely lucrative for consultants and administrators who have a vested interested in perpetuating the problem and these efforts,” said Jacobson, who is involved in litigation against SUNY Upstate Medical University for internal communications related to the school’s planned equity strategy.  

Lurking just under the surface of this debate is the sensitive question no one wants to discuss on the record: the quality of med students and doctors who have lower test scores and worse grades, and presumably would not have been admitted if not for affirmative action. That’s an issue broached by Norman Wang, a University of Pittsburgh cardiologist whose peer-reviewed article questioning the legality of racial preferences was, four months after publication, retracted, leading to Wang’s demotion and public denunciation by his employer and by the journal that initially saw fit to run his article...

Among the 164-page task force report’s charges: “Health care professionals must explicitly acknowledge that race and racism are at the root of these health disparities.” All students and staff are to receive training in “bystander intervention” for bias, all new faculty hires would be required to sign a written pledge affirming a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, and staff with advanced training in anti-racism would be identified by wearable buttons. Medical school applications would add questions about the applicant’s commitment to social justice, and include “a statement that if the student does not have this desire they may not want to consider [SUNY] Upstate.” 

WhiteCoats4BlackLives, a medical student organization that has grown to some 75 chapters out of the National White Coat Die-In demonstrations in 2014, represents up-and-coming leaders in the medical profession. The organization supports the Palestinian liberation movement, advocates the “abolition of police forces,” and urges medical schools to research the backgrounds of their founders and leaders for racist and oppressive pasts. WC4BL’s 289-page report from 2019 says the med school curriculum must explicitly teach that “it is the dominant groups’ pursuit of power that contributes to illness.” Among the group’s policy proposals: Medical schools must eliminate racial grading disparities, compensate “community advocates and people of color” for anti-racist activism, and equip physicians-in-training with tools to dismantle systemic racism, including “training in activism and organizing.”...

A 2019 study, referencing more than 300 papers on racial health disparities, noted that the racial outcomes are impervious to social class: “At every level of education and income, African Americans have a lower life expectancy at age 25 than do whites and Hispanics (or Latinos), and blacks with a college degree or more education have a lower life expectancy than do whites and Hispanics who graduated from high school.”

For the past quarter-century, public health experts had accepted a general explanation for these disparities – attributing them to “social determinants of health” – a term that covers living conditions and socioeconomic factors that ultimately determine one’s life expectancy. But these social determinants existed somewhere out in the world, beyond the scope of doctors, and the medical solutions seemed speculative, unknown or ultimately unknowable.

Over time, public health researchers began attributing the racial disparities with growing insistence to an anterior cause – an invisible force operating within American society, ranging from unconscious bias to policing patterns and even to the practice of medicine itself. In other words: systemic racism. Framing the disparities as the result of social determinants of health left the medical profession powerless – for how can a health care provider treat a patient suffering from social conditions? But zeroing in on systemic racism has thrown open the doors to a whole new set of interventions, which translate into the anti-racism movement now sweeping through the medical profession.

“It’s the thing that causes the adverse impact of social determinants of health on specific communities,” said Matthew Wynia, a University of Colorado professor of medicine and director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities. “To just say it’s because ‘they live in bad neighborhoods,’ that is not a full explanation. This is all about 400 years of history.”

Wynia said there are only a handful of possible explanations for why black people have consistently worse health outcomes: bad genetics, irresponsible behavior, individual racism on the part of whites, or social structures. Wynia said the first two explanations – bad genes and bad choices – are the very definitions of racism, and individual white racists do exist but within the context of a larger problem: “Societal factors have got to be the favorite there.”...

One advocate suggests a redefinition of a physician’s scope of practice: Doctors have a moral obligation to become politically active so they can work to dismantle the social structures that harm their patients’ health...

The critics say that applying critical race theory to medicine too often devolves into an exercise in confirmational bias that seeks only the evidence that confirms the theory of systemic racism, ignores or disallows contradictory evidence, and imposes forced interpretations on complex data.

“They start with the conclusion. And there can be no deviation from the conclusion,” said Jacobson, the conservative law professor at Cornell. “You cannot question the conclusion because the conclusion of systemic racism is the starting point. It stifles dissenting views. It stifles open inquiry.”

Other scholars express similar frustrations. Satel’s article in the Liberties journal, titled “Do No Harm: Critical Race Theory and Medicine,” cites an anonymous colleague who related participating in a group discussion about stress and suicide among black youth. “The tacit rule was that only fear of police aggression and subjection to discrimination were allowable explanations,” the anonymous doctor recalled, “not the psychological torture of bullying by classmates or the quotidian terror of neighborhood gun violence.”"

Clearly when you a priori rule out answers you don't like, you can only get the answers you want - "societal factors", aka racism/opression, are always to blame.

Part 2 (live 12 February)

Links - 8th February 2026 (1 - Big Tech Censorship)

Meet your (Chinese) Facebook censors - "China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for Facebook to recruit social media censors?... The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching “computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,” as the techy website DeepAI.org puts it. When it comes to censorship on social media, that means “teaching” the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm’s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last.” Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty’s dealings with Chinese companies... Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call “borderline content.” It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”... What’s to stop Facebook’s Chinese engineers from delivering their Facebook expertise to Xi Jinping? Globalists thought that engaging with China would make that country more open; I fear it’s making us more restrictive... Yet, as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) put it in an email to me, these revelations are yet “another indication that Big Tech is no longer deserving” of statutory protections that render it immune to a publisher’s liabilities. Big Tech critic Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), meanwhile, said “this is all the more reason for the Senate to demand that Mark Zuckerberg — under oath and before the election — give an account of what Facebook has been up to.”"
From 2020

Facebook workers ‘ashamed’ by tech giant’s censorship of Post’s reporting - "“Facebook is almost an arm of the Democratic Party — an arm of the far-left wing of the Democratic Party.” So said the former Facebook insider as we sat down for an interview at a Midtown restaurant Friday afternoon. A gloomy rain had left the joint deserted, yet the man across the table from me spoke in hushed tones and looked over his shoulder in between remarks for fear of retaliation. Yet he felt he had to speak out, because staffers are “intentionally trying to swing people further to the left”... To gain access to the Facebook network on Blind, a user must sign up using his or her Facebook work e-mail address. The posters, in other words, are verified Facebook employees (and ex-employees in a few cases). So what do Facebook workers think about the company’s handling of our story? The comments speak for themselves: “[Facebook] employees want Trump to lose,” wrote one user. “If that means rigging [the platform] against him, they don’t care.” The post garnered 29 “likes” from other employees. “I was shocked that Facebook did this,” said another. “We kinda called [brought] this on ourselves. So much for ‘we are not the arbiters of truth.’ ” That comment garnered 15 “likes.” Still other comments: “Facebook bets that Biden wins the election. So an effort to jump on the bandwagon.” “Yeah this one is unconscionable. I’m ashamed.” “Imagine if we censored some leaked Trump stuff. It would be the #1 upvoted question tomorrow for Mark [Zuckerberg company-wide]’s Q&A.” Another employee wrote a detailed critique: “Why do people hate Facebook everywhere? Here’s one reason. Freaking one-sided decision. The comms Twitter account [Andy Stone’s] was definitely left-leaning, and it’s a talking point, as well. No proper response to comms feedback. Don’t want to be the what-if person. But we didn’t have problems circulating leaked Trump tax or any other s–t surrounding Trump or COVID.” “If Trump loses his supporters won’t totally blame the obvious censorship that is happening right now,” wrote one sarcastic employee. “If Biden wins, all those questions will go away? Hell no. In fact, he is better off losing, if he doesn’t want more scrutiny into his son’s ill-gotten gains.” Still another employee predicted starkly: “We’re now begging to be regulated.” Facebook didn’t reply to my request for comment. So could these voices of reason prevail inside the company? The Facebook insider, who shared the Blind comments with me, was pessimistic. “The whole thing,” he said, “is run by super-woke millennials and gen-Xers. This overwhelming majority of people make sure there’s no chance of breaking through the ideological barrier.” As a Facebook employee, the insider told me, “if you’re left-wing, you can say what you want. But if you’re conservative — or even just apolitical — you have to go on this anonymous app” to speak your mind."
From 2020

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "When you're using a search engine that censors politically-inconvenient information or buries it on page 17 of its search results, you should not be surprised that when you type "why censorship is" into a search field you get this Orwellian list of suggestions:"
The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole84: "When you type "why censorship is" into Google search, the majority of suggestions are pro-censorship"
"why censorship is
why censorship is important
why censorship is important in social media
why censorship is
why censorship is required
why censorship is important in schools
why censorship is good in schools
why censorship is not justified
why censorship is important for media"

Cenk Uygur on X - "Hillary Clinton just said on CNN, “we lose total control” if social media content is not more regulated. Exactly! She's accidentally admitting the whole point of their attack on social media. Social media can't be contained and they're losing their grip on power. They hate it!"

BREAKING: Facebook deletes #WalkAway campaign of 500,000 people as social media purge of conservatives continues - "Facebook has banned conservative leader Brandon Straka and removed his #WalkAway campaign on the site, an initiative consisting of over half a million users. Now hundreds of thousands of testimonials related to the movement are gone... Former Democrat and campaign member Karlyn Borysenko tweeted that Instagram just deleted her pictures as well and threatened to delete her account. She was told that several of her posts from Dec. 30 to Jan. 6 violated Instagram's Community Guidelines on violence or dangerous organization."
From 2021

Social media platforms could face fines in Poland for censoring free speech
Poland’s new social media law puts freedom of expression at risk, RSF warns
From 2021. I like how banning censorship threatens freedom of speech. This is like ending voting to save democracy

Rose McGowan calls on big tech companies to ‘stop the censorship’
From 2021

How Big Tech took over - "‘We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.’ These are the words of cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow in his ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, penned in 1996. This bombastic document articulates much of the promise idealists once saw in the internet. Above all, it was supposed to unleash free speech and self-expression beyond anything previously imagined. So central was free speech to the mythos of the online world that when the tech giants we know and fear today began to emerge, turning a once anarchic space into hugely profitable businesses, they often appealed to that very principle. Free speech, for these would-be oligarchs, provided them with some semblance of deeper purpose. In 2012, Twitter’s UK general manager, Tony Wang, famously dubbed the social network ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party’. ‘Giving people a voice’ is the somewhat more bloodless formulation preferred by one Mark Zuckerberg when describing the moral mission of his social-media behemoth, Facebook... In its rationale for suspending Trump, Twitter cited a tweet in which he confirmed he would not be attending the inauguration of Joe Biden, saying it could be interpreted as a coded invitation to attack it... The political leanings of Silicon Valley are at this point beyond doubt. An analysis by Wired ahead of the November election found that 95 per cent of donations by employees at the six big tech firms – Alphabet (parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Oracle – went to Joe Biden... From 2016 onwards, a succession of hard-right figures were banned by the big platforms over alleged hate speech, from alt-lite troll Milo Yiannopoulos to anti-Islam thug Tommy Robinson to comical conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. The old liberal arguments against censoring bigots – that the answer to bad speech is more speech, that censorship only drives hate underground – were dismissed, if indeed they were ever made. Commentators and politicians demanded scalp after scalp. The taste for censorship was insatiable. And as hate-speech policies widened, more respectable voices were caught up in them. One was gender-critical feminist Meghan Murphy, permanently banned from Twitter for the crime of ‘misgendering’ an alleged sex offender. Even amid all this, Big Tech tried to hold to a series of increasingly sketchy lines. In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg said, on record and unprompted, that it wasn’t Facebook’s job to censor Holocaust denial, however offensive he as a Jewish man found it. He did not want to rule on what is and isn’t true. When Alex Jones was booted off Facebook that same year, a spokesperson was at pains to say this was over Jones’ alleged ‘hate speech’ and ‘glorification of violence’ – not his madcap claims that the Sandy Hook massacre was a ‘false flag’ or 9/11 was an inside job. But the logic of censorship is always towards more censorship. And Silicon Valley came under increasing political pressure to clamp down on online hate and misinformation, which leading Democrats in the US believe was instrumental to Trump’s election in 2016 – baffled as they are by the prospect that some voters might have simply preferred him to Hillary Clinton... Politicians hauled Zuckerberg et al before Congressional hearings, demanding that they do more to fact-check and censor, under the looming threat of their businesses being regulated or broken up. But time and again Democrats seemed less concerned about these firms’ monopolistic power and more about their apparent hesitance to wield it to the ends of censorship. 2020 was the year this all came to a head. First, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the big platforms abandoned any prior concerns they might have had about becoming the Ministry of Truth... Then came the US presidential election... at each turn, these corporate giants have had this role foisted upon them by a liberal establishment rattled by the Trump revolt and increasingly given to hysteria... liberals and leftists are already starting to wake up to the danger Trump’s social-media bans pose, and the shadow they could cast over politics in the future. In a recent New York Times column, Michelle Goldberg sums up the now common doublethink: ‘I find myself both agreeing with how technology giants have used their power in this case, and disturbed by just how awesome their power is.’ Other world leaders have, as you might imagine, found it all unsettling. A spokesman for German chancellor Angela Merkel – no free-speech advocate herself – said the social-media clampdown was ‘problematic’. Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador went further, likening it to the Inquisition... When John Perry Barlow wrote his declaration 25 years ago, his aim was fixed squarely on the state. ‘Governments of the Industrial World’, he thundered, ‘I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.’ But in Western democracies today, at least, the primary threat to online free speech comes not from national governments, but from a Silicon Valley oligarchy that was elected by precisely no one."
From 2021

Cenk Uygur on X - "Hillary Clinton just said on CNN, “we lose total control” if social media content is not more regulated. Exactly! She's accidentally admitting the whole point of their attack on social media. Social media can't be contained and they're losing their grip on power. They hate it!"

Our 'experts' justify censorship of actual news with fake science to help Democrats - "Our “disinformation experts” are at it again, this time churning out a whole passel of pseudoscience under the aegis of once-respected Nature magazine to prove that icky, stupid right-wingers are dumb dumb dummies and that they deserve to be banned from X! Not like the supergeniuses of the modern left, who always get everything right and never tell lies. A new study — presumably peer reviewed — purports to show that Trump supporters and conservatives shared “low quality” news more often than their more enlightened counterparts and thus deserved the “politically asymmetric” sanctions. This study is another case of “garbage in, garbage out”: A huge part of its definition of “low quality” seems to mean sources that don’t rely on “fact checking” — which as the past eight years have shown has become a spurious and utterly partisan endeavor. Curious about what misinformation these “low quality” sites are spreading? Here’s a sample: the “unambiguously false” claim (per a paper cited in the Nature study) that “COVID-19 was created in a lab.” Trouble is, this “unambiguous” falsehood is (per the US federal government) true. Unsurprisingly, the No. 1 “high quality” news source shared by lefty users in the study was The New York Times. Right-leaning users shared Fox most often. Quickly: Which of those sources on balance has been more correct since 2016? The Times was wrong about Russiagate, writing story after story on Donald Trump’s alleged collusion based on obviously fake documents and never once apologizing for its journalistic malpractice. It was wrong about COVID on pretty much every aspect of the pandemic, from the efficacy of blue-state responses to the risk the virus presented to kids to the lab-leak theory and on and on and on. The Gray Lady helped lead the charge in trying to discredit The Post’s 100% accurate reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Hah: The very folks accusing us of spreading “disinformation” were actually doing so themselves. The Times also nakedly, openly lied about Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental fitness for years in order to bolster his electoral prospects, then turned on a dime to admit he’s going gaga. And all of that somehow got through the industrial fact-checking complex. Wonder why? The answer’s simple: It helped Democrats politically, which is the purpose of “fact checking.” Keep in mind, no one is actually fooled by this. A look at the data tables provided by the study’s authors proves that. Consider CNN.com, ranked very highly by “fact checkers” at .84 out of a possible 1. When rated by “politically balanced laypeople,” it gets a .47. Sounds about right to us: CNN was the biggest, fakest voice on TV for the entirety of the Trump administration, blaring Russigate lies in primetime. Modern-day Pravda MSNBC gets a .66 from the fact-checkers but a .44 from the normies. And the Times itself, the holy grail of “false but true” lib journalism, ranks at .91 from fact checkers and .45 otherwise. What’s most obscene about all this, of course, is that despite the endless, humiliating public failure of “fact checking,” this paper was clearly written in service of the larger progressive goal of suppressing speech."
"Fact checkers" just exist to push the left wing agenda

Meme - *Mark Zuckerberg at beach* "Join my OnlyBans*"

Park MacDougald on X - "Lots of earnest “how did we lose Joe Rogan?” takes from Democrats seemingly unaware that their party’s NGO minions (Media Matters / CCDH) AstroTurfed a pressure campaign against Spotify to deplatform or censor Rogan that was then endorsed by the Surgeon General and White House press secretary"
David on X - "Yeah, as a part of that, Dana White said Disney (who owns ESPN, which has UFC rights) wanted UFC to fire Joe Rogan when all that Covid/Neil Young stuff was going on. A pile on happened. Dana refused to fire Joe, saying; 'If he is gone, I am gone'."

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "An instantaneous suspension for using the word "man" in this context would have happened 100% of the time under the old Twitter regime. Now you can tell the truth and the possibility of a suspension doesn't even occur to you when you press the "post" button."
Paula Scanlan @PaulaYScanlan: "Hey Jo, This man was literally in my locker room 18 times a week. Care to explain and defend this?"
Jo @JoJoFromJerz: "Hey MAGA, Men aren't "in girl's bathrooms." But Donald Trump has bragged about being in girl's dressing rooms."
The cope is that all people who claim to be transwomen aren't men (even if they are found to be pretending)

New Update To Riot Games' Terms Of Service Gives 'League Of Legends' Dev The Right To Respond To Players' "Off-Platform Conduct" With "Penalties In-Game"

Meme - Hank from King of the Hill: "You know what's not cool, Bobby? My memes are being fact checked by people who think men can get pregnant."

Meta is ending its fact-checking program - "Meta is ending its fact-checking program and lifting restrictions on speech to "restore free expression" across Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms, admitting its current content moderation practices have "gone too far."... Meta’s third-party fact-checking program was put in place after the 2016 election and had been used to "manage content" and misinformation on its platforms, largely due to "political pressure," executives said... Meta is changing some of its own content moderation rules, especially those that they feel are "too restrictive and not allowing enough discourse around sensitive topics like immigration, trans issues and gender." "We want to make sure that discourse can happen freely on the platform without fear of censorship," Kaplan told Fox News Digital. "We have the power to change the rules and make them more supportive of free expression. And we’re not just changing the rules, we are actually changing how we enforce the rules." Kaplan said Meta currently uses automated systems, which he said make "too many mistakes" and removes content "that doesn’t even violate our standards." He also said there are certain things Meta will continue to moderate, like posts relating to terrorism, illegal drugs and child sexual exploitation... "We have a new administration coming in that is far from pressuring companies to censor and [is more] a huge supporter of free expression," Kaplan said, referring to the incoming Trump administration. "It gets us back to the values that Mark founded the company on." Last year, Zuckerberg sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in which he admitted that he felt pressure from the Biden administration, particularly with regard to COVID content, and even items like satire and humor. "The thing is, as American companies, when other governments around the world that don’t have our tradition or our First Amendment, when they see the United States government pressuring U.S. companies to take down content, it is just open season then for those governments to put more pressure [on their companies]," Kaplan explained. "We do think it is a real opportunity to work with the Trump administration and to work on free expression at home.""
The left hates democracy and free expression and loves censorship, so they are upset

Scott Adams on X - "I don't think this is a mystery. Zuckerberg is insanely smart and capable. (I could end the analysis here.) He's reading the room. He's a patriot. Apparently, he likes free speech as much as you do and sees the same issues you see. Business-wise, he needs the US government to pressure other nations to stop censoring. No other way. Facebook has been crippled by their own biased fact-checkers. Community Notes works, so he's a fast-follower. Summary: Smart, perfectly timed, on point."

Guy Who Said Facebook Was Not Suppressing Free Speech Announces Facebook Will Stop Suppressing Free Speech | Babylon Bee

Defiant L’s on X - "Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that the Facebook fact check program went out of control: “It’s like something out of 1984.” You don't say?"

Biden calls Meta’s decision to drop factchecking ‘really shameful’ - "“The whole idea of walking away from factchecking as well as not reporting anything having to do with discrimination regarding … I find it to be contrary to American justice,” the outgoing president told reporters during a press call on Friday. “Telling the truth matters.” Zuckerberg said last week that the decision to end the factchecking practice on Facebook, Instagram and Threads was made because Facebook’s factchecking, brought in December 2016, had done more harm than good in terms of public trust. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said. “So we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”... Zuckerberg claimed during an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience released on Friday that Biden administration officials had pressured Facebook to remove certain content from the social media platform. In a letter last year to Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the US House judiciary committee, Zuckerberg said that the White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to remove “certain Covid-19 content including humor and satire”. In his conversation with Rogan, Zuckerberg said: “Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse. It just got to this point where we were like, ‘No, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous.’” Zuckerberg said he was not against vaccines per se. But he said that while the Biden administration was “trying to push” the Covid-19 vaccination program, “they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it”. He said that Facebook had “at times” bended to the administration’s bidding and made decisions that “with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today”."
American justice is politically motivated censorship. No wonder Biden is such a failure

Meme - Happy Merry and Pippin: "2021: Lol, cry harder conservatives. Private social media companies can do whatever they want."
Agonised Merry and Pippin: "2025:"

End Wokeness on X - "Amazon Web Services took Parler offline after January 6th because some of the trespassers posted on there. Reddit is literally a hotbed of domestic terror, including attacks on Tesla and copycat Luigi Mangione plots. AWS hosts Reddit."
Reddit Lies on X - ">Image of mildly vandalized Tesla posted to r/Seattle
>Post includes the Tesla's exact location
>Tesla is vandalized beyond repair in under 5 hours
It appears Reddit is being used to facilitate domestic terrorism."

Facebook moderation in Taiwan - "YouTuber Chen Yen-chang (陳延昶) posted a message on the Taiwan New Constitution Foundation’s Facebook page, saying: “Dear all, I support Taiwanese independence. Taiwan already is an independent country. I am a Taiwanese. I am not Chinese.” He later said that his Facebook access had been restricted for 30 days. The revelation prompted numerous complaints from commenters describing how they had been blocked or had their accounts deleted with no reason provided... Taiwan AI Labs founder Ethan Tu (杜奕瑾) shared my article and commented: “Welcome to Project Lutein,” referring to Taiwan AI Labs’ open-source analysis of social media neutrality. He was also given 30 days of restricted access to Facebook. Even though I was not banned from the platform, I was unable to sign in to Facebook for several hours. Moreover, posts by others on the issue were mysteriously removed... Facebook’s Chinese-language content moderators are mostly Chinese nationals, so it is difficult to prevent their influence on political content, and their tendency to seek control over the speech of Taiwanese and to infiltrate their lives."
From 2021

After Review, Facebook Says ‘Misgendering’ Doesn’t Violate Its Hate Speech Policy - "Facebook’s parent company Meta said that two posts that included “misgendering” were not a violation of its policies, in a case that appears to have involved content from The Daily Wire. The social media giant’s Oversight Board ruled that two posts about trans-identifying males do not violate the company’s hate speech rules... Rulings by the Oversight Board on specific posts are considered binding for the company... The move is the latest victory for conservative users as Meta says it is working to dial back censorship, including on gender identity."

Harrison H. Smith ✞ on X - "WTF? Just got an alert that a video on my Google Drive "Violates the Terms of Service." It's a Pro-White video on my private Drive. They say it has "gore" because it shows one still frame from the aftermath of a terror attack in France. This is the future of censorship."
Into the Memory Hole on X - ">you save an image to your phone
>the opinion it expresses has been deemed harmful and mean
>you are now banned and lose your email with everything tied to it
Boy that isn't radicalizing at all"

Musk's X says it won't cooperate with 'politically motivated' French probe - "Elon Musk's X on Monday accused French prosecutors of launching a "politically-motivated criminal investigation" that threatens its users' free speech, denying all allegations against it and saying it would not cooperate with the probe. Earlier this month, Paris prosecutors stepped up a preliminary probe into the social media platform for suspected algorithmic bias and fraudulent data extraction, authorising police to conduct searches, wiretaps and surveillance against Musk and X executives, or summon them to testify. If they do not comply, a judge could issue an arrest warrant... X said Paris prosecutors had requested it hand over data on all user posts for analysis by researchers David Chavalarias and Maziyar Panahi, who it said had both exhibited "open hostility towards X". Chavalarias did not respond to a request for comment. Panahi denied any involvement in the investigation... X also criticised the fact that it was being investigated under organised crime charges, which could allow police to wiretap its employees' personal devices."
Weird how when the left imposed its blatant bias on Twitter, they didn't do anything, and it was only after the left wing censorship was removed that they got investigated. The left just loves control

Mark Zuckerberg says Biden officials would 'scream' and 'curse' when seeking removal of Facebook content - ""Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse," Zuckerberg told podcast host and comedian Joe Rogan. "It just got to this point where we were like, 'No, we're not gonna, we're not gonna take down things that are true. That's ridiculous.'"... In a letter last year to Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to remove “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire.”"
Clearly, there was nothing wrong here and this wasn't a violation of the First Amendment. But ABC affiliates refusing to show Jimmy Kimmel because of his mocking a political assassination was the biggest threat to free speech this millennium

Liberal billionaire George Soros has spent $80 million to 'silence' Americans, Media Research Center says - "Free Press, a media group financed by liberal billionaire George Soros, "is looking to incorporate global pressure to push Big Tech platforms to juice their censorship operations before the 2024 U.S. presidential election," according to the Media Research Center (MRC)... Free Press boasted about a letter urging executives at Discord, Google, Instagram, Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, Rumble, Snap, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter and YouTube to keep online platforms "safe and healthy" in 2024 through six specific "interventions." The letter was signed by "200 civil-society organizations, researchers and journalists," according to Free Press. The MRC found that "at least 45 of the signatories have had their coffers packed with Soros cash to the tune of a whopping $80,757,329 between 2016 and 2022 alone."... Vazquez wrote that the "explicit push for speech controls is especially disturbing in light of the stated vision of one of Free Press’s founders," noting that Free Press co-founder Robert W. McChesney once wrote in 2000, "Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism."... "The leftist group was recently exposed in a House Judiciary Committee investigation for co-authoring a ‘hate groups’ blacklist with the Soros-funded Global Disinformation Index (GDI) targeting ‘conservative’ and faith-based organizations. This list was later disseminated by law enforcement to several financial institutions," Vazquez wrote... The MRC noted that Free Press previously "celebrated how it was also responsible for influencing the Obama-era FCC into adopting draconian ‘Net Neutrality’ rules that arbitrarily sanctioned massive government regulation of the internet," and "praised how the FCC reportedly cited the Soros-funded organization ‘close to 70 times’ in its final order on the matter.""
From 2024