Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior…
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More Legal Shenanigans from the Biden Administration’s Department of Education

Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior of federal administrative agencies, whose vast armies of overpaid bureaucrats remain unaccountable for their excesses.

Among the most familiar examples of that bureaucratic abuse is the Department of Education (DOE).  Recall, for instance, the United States Supreme Court’s humiliating rebuke last year of the Biden DOE’s effort to shift hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt from the people who actually owed them onto the backs of American taxpayers.

Even now, despite that rebuke, the Biden DOE launched an alternative scheme last month in an end-around effort to achieve that same result.

Well, the Biden DOE is now attempting to shift tens of millions of dollars of…[more]

March 18, 2024 • 03:11 PM

Liberty Update

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Elon Musk Threatens the Censorship-Industrial Complex Print
By Timothy H. Lee
Thursday, November 03 2022
This is all Orwellian, and it’s outrageous. The left simply cannot tolerate free speech or alternative viewpoints.

Americans overwhelmingly believe that media censorship swung the 2020 election, and now panic has beset the political left as Elon Musk threatens their ability to steer future campaigns.  

According to an extraordinary recent survey from Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics (TIPP), 8 in 10 Americans now believe that the media coverup of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop revelations changed the 2020 presidential election:   

Seventy-nine percent of Americans say that President Trump likely would have won re-election if voters had known the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop.  “Terming the laptop ‘disinformation’ by the FBI, intelligence community, Congress, and the Biden campaign, along with Big Tech, impacted voters,” TIPP President Raghavan Mayur said.  “A significant majority – 78% - believe that access to the correct information could have been critical to their decision at the polls.”  

According to a separate McLaughlin & Associates survey, 4.6% of Biden voters themselves state that they would’ve changed their vote had they known the accuracy of the revelations.  

That’s a remarkable number considering the narrow margin of the 2020 election.  A change of just 43,000 votes in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona would’ve swung the presidential election to Donald Trump.  

Accordingly, had media giants not baselessly censored the laptop revelations as “Russian disinformation,” the result might’ve been very different.  

Creating additional cause for alarm, Meta (previously Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg later admitted that federal authorities pressured him to suppress the story:  

The FBI basically came to us and spoke to some folks on our team and was like, “Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert.  We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda on the 2016 election.  We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump similar to that…”  I think it was five to seven days when it was basically being determined whether it was false.  Fewer people saw it than would have otherwise.  

But much like disgraced former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s admission that he fabricated claims during the 2012 presidential campaign that Mitt Romney paid no taxes, the government-media censorship complex shamelessly achieved the desired result and it’s way too late for apologies.  

Now, however, cracks in that vast censorship edifice are appearing.  Elon Musk has completed his takeover of Twitter, asserting that “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy.”  

That sent the political left into full panic mode.  

Perhaps the most amusing caterwauling emanates from The Washington Post.  Owned by leftist billionaire Jeff Bezos, its commentators somehow miss the irony of their jeremiads over a powerful billionaire owning a major source of public information.  

That hypocritical amusement aside, reports suggest that the federal government may be mobilizing to “review” the Musk Twitter takeover:  

Large foreign investors would have access to confidential information about Twitter’s finances – and its potential users – under the terms of Elon Musk’s deal to acquire the social media site, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.  That revelation comes as Treasury Department officials begin looking into whether they have the legal authority to start an investigation into the purchase because of Musk’s ties to foreign governments and investors, people familiar with those discussions said…  

On Monday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D – Conn.) said on Twitter that the federal government should investigate national security concerns connected to Saudi Arabian entities’ investments in the social media platform.  Last week, the American Economic Liberties Project, a left-leaning group, also said in a statement that both CFIUS and the Federal Communications Commission should investigate Musk’s takeover of Twitter given his “potential dependencies on the Chinese government.”  “We should be concerned that the Saudis, who have a clear interest in repressing political speech and impacting U.S. politics, are now the second-largest owner of a major social media platform,” Murphy said on Twitter.  

So Senator Murphy has suddenly discovered the potential peril in “repressing political speech and impacting U.S. politics,” when pre-Musk Twitter was used in 2020 as a tool to do precisely that?  And the left is suddenly concerned about potential foreign conflicts of interest, when that concern was raised by the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop?  It contained a wealth of damning evidence of foreign entanglements and lucrative payments apparently referencing the “big guy” Joe Biden himself.    

Also note from the first paragraph of the report which newspaper the sources of the story approached:  The Washington Post.  

You can’t make this stuff up.  

This is all Orwellian, and it’s outrageous.  The left simply cannot tolerate free speech or alternative viewpoints.  Either you’re a tool of its schemes, as in the 2020 election, or you’re to be silenced.  

As illustrated by recent polling, Americans appear to understand that peril and its consequences.  Now it’s time to stop tolerating it.  

Notable Quote   
 
"It's a rematch.President Biden and former President Trump each hit a key marker last week, clinching enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee of their respective party.The outcome of the general election will come down to a handful of states, as usual.The map maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ lists seven contests as toss-ups."Read the entire article here.…[more]
 
 
— Niall Stanage, The Hill
 
Liberty Poll   

Do you support or oppose a government-imposed U.S. ban of TikTok?