Democrats didn’t expect it to be this bad…
Weeks after Joe Biden announced his re-election campaign and pollsters are already showing massive red flags.]
Watch Amanda explain the situation below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
It’s difficult for Joe Biden to see down from his ivory tower.
Biden found himself the target of criticism from both sides of the aisle after a major environmental faux pas…
Watch Amanda explain the controversy below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – In an unexpected, but long overdue move, the Pentagon has stated it will no longer work with directors if their movies will be censored by Beijing. This follows directly on the heels of Vietnam banning the movie ‘Barbie’ over its inclusion of a China-friendly map of the South China Sea.
That movie’s producers apparently caved to Chinese pressure and included the map showing China essentially owning the South China Sea, which it does not, despite its claims. And Vietnam wasn’t happy.
But, as I previously wrote, this Chinese censorship problem really exploded with last year’s release of Tom Cruise’s blockbuster “Top Gun: Maverick.”
And now the Pentagon, thanks to GOP Senator Ted Cruz, has made it clear it now bans any military assistance to directors who plan to comply (or will likely comply) with censorship demands from the Chinese regime in order to distribute their movie in China.
In trailers for the ‘Maverick’ film shown in 2019, the flags of Taiwan and Japan had been removed from Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell’s flight jacket worn by Cruise in the 1986 original “Top Gun” movie.
The flags were part of a Far East Cruise patch commemorating the 1963-64 deployment by the USS Galveston off Japan and Taiwan. In the preview clip for the movie in 2019, those two historically accurate flags were replaced by generic nonsensical symbols.
This shameless kowtowing was an apparent attempt to appease Chinese investor Tencent. But after serious blowback in the U.S. — and after Tencent reportedly dropped its investment in the film – the flags were restored in the final version of the film.
In another example, Chinese government censors actually pushed the producers of “Spider-man: No Way Home” to remove the Statue of Liberty, according to Puck. This, likely due to its association with the Tiananmen Square protests.
Thankfully, the studio did not comply, and that movie wasn’t shown in China.
The Defense Department updated its rules for working with movie studios after Cruz (R-Texas) inserted language, known as the SCRIPT Act. into the fiscal 2023 defense policy bill.
Cruz has strongly condemned Beijing’s censorship of Hollywood films.
“What does it say to the world when Maverick is scared of the Chinese communists?” he said at the time.
The latest Top Gun movie also reportedly showed us a peek at what might be the SR-72 – the super-secret experimental hypersonic spy plane under development by Lockheed Martin. It was called the ‘Darkstar’ in the film.
Providing more context, Politico reported:
According to a new Defense Department document obtained by POLITICO, filmmakers who want the U.S. military to help with their projects must now pledge that they won’t let Beijing alter those films.
The DOD “will not provide production assistance when there is demonstrable evidence that the production has complied or is likely to comply with a demand from the Government of the People’s Republic of China … to censor the content of the project in a material manner to advance the national interest of the People’s Republic of China,” the document reads.
Hollywood and the Defense Department have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship for decades. The Pentagon has allowed filmmakers to shoot their projects on military bases, Navy ships, or other locations, and weighs in on filmmaking processes. The military benefits from positive portrayals of service members, and moviemakers benefit from authentic settings and technical expertise.
But as China’s ruling Communist Party has developed increasingly advanced censorship and surveillance tools, countless American companies — including Hollywood studios — have sought to comply with Beijing’s demands while attempting to dodge stateside pushback.
However, from now on, producers of films greenlighted by the Defense Department must notify the Pentagon “in writing of such a censorship demand, including the terms of such demand, and whether the project has complied or is likely to comply with a demand for such censorship.”
But not just that. DoD will also weigh any “verifiable information” from people not involved in the production who indicate that producers could comply with a censorship demand.
So, hopefully Hollywood will stop caving to China’s blackmail, or risk losing access to their much-loved Pentagon collaboration.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) event, Daily Wire host Michael Knowles argued that conservatives should not compromise with the left on certain core issues, such as radical transgender ideology, but should reject these leftist ideologies completely.
And this is something I would support wholeheartedly.
Unfortunately, the wording of Knowles’ statements, made while discussing marriage and gender issues, gave the left an opening to hysterically, and falsely, claim he wants to get rid of all transgender people, which he clearly never said, nor intimated.
And what was the statement that created the contrived firestorm of leftist hysteria?
Knowles’ said: “For the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.”
The Daily Wire Host was clearly referring to the bizarre and dangerous new leftist ideology that insists gender and therefore sex can be changed at will, even among children, usually only with a self-diagnosis under pressure from activist counselors, teachers, and the media.
The truth about his remarks, however, didn’t keep left-leaning media outlets such as the Daily Beast, the Huffington Post, and Rolling Stone from falsely reporting that Knowles had called for the genocidal eradication of all trans people.
Adam Vary, at Variety, tweeted, “Pay attention. This is genocidal. That is not hyperbole or alarmist; this rhetoric is calling for the eradication of a group of people for who they are.”
John Knefel of Media Matters called the speech “[e]liminationist, genocidal rhetoric.”
His remarks were clearly none of these things, and he never called for any actions against trans people whatsoever.
And Knowles fought back against these outlets demanding a retraction, which he partly achieved.
The truth is that this extreme trans movement has permanently damaged countless individuals who have been sterilized and mutilated with the help of pharmaceutical reps and surgeons who, along with politicians and activists, have spawned a giant and lucrative new trans-political-medical industry.
This massive new industry pressures and lobbies people of all ages to believe they are transgender, and then quickly pushes them to initiate the costly, painful, disfiguring, and life-long process of ‘transitioning’ to the opposite sex.
All while making tons of cash from the doubts and insecurities of their victims.
But this movement doesn’t just harm its trans victims, as the Blaze notes, it also severely impacts “women and girls whose sex-specific spaces (e.g., prisons, bathrooms, shelters) and events have been infiltrated by biological males masquerading as women.”
The Blaze quotes Knowles as noting that conservatives “suffer from low expectations – we think the thing we can most hope for is that we halt the left exactly where it is.”
But watch his entire speech here for yourselves:
Rather than accommodate the left, making concessions about the age children must be to undergo sex-change surgeries, Knowles suggested conservatives ought to reject leftist ideology outright, especially when it comes to transsexuality.
Knowles said, “There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It is all or nothing. If transgenderism is true, if men can really become women, then it is true for everybody of all ages. If transgenderism is false, as it is, if men really can become women, as they cannot, then it is false for everybody too. And if it’s false, then we should not indulge it.”
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
“Judge Judy” Sheindlin called Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s (D) hush money case against former President Trump “nonsense” in a recent interview.
“You gotta twist yourself into a pretzel to figure out what the crime was. [Bragg] doesn’t like him — New York City didn’t like him for a while,” Sheindlin said of Trump in a “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” interview streaming Friday on Max.
“I would be happier, as someone who owns property in Manhattan, if the district attorney of New York County would take care of criminals who were making it impossible for citizens to walk in the streets and use the subway, to use his efforts to keep those people off the street, than to spend $5 million or $10 million of taxpayers’ money trying Donald Trump on this nonsense,” the longtime TV judge told Wallace.
Watch:
“I, as a taxpayer in this country, resent using the system for your own personal self-aggrandizement,” the “Judy Justice” personality said of Bragg.
Asked by the CNN anchor what she thought of Trump, the 81-year-old former Manhattan Family Court judge replied, “I think he was a good businessman, a real estate guy. And he was certainly terrific on ‘The Apprentice.’”
The celebrity judge’s comments come as the Manhattan DA seeks an extension of the restraining order against former President Donald Trump. (RELATED: Manhattan DA Seeks Extended Gag Order Against Trump Amid Death Threats To Bragg)
They argue that Trump’s public statements have increased tensions and led to threats against Bragg and his team before Trump’s July 11 sentencing.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records as part of a hush-money scheme to prevent porn star Stormy Daniels from speaking out about her alleged extramarital affair before the 2016 presidential election.
Before Trump, no sitting or former president ever faced criminal charges. This is the lowest level felony in New York, any potential sentence will more than likely be served after the 2024 election.
As The New York Times reports:
The order, issued before Mr. Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial began in mid-April, bars him from attacking witnesses, jurors, court staff and relatives of the judge who presided over the trial, Juan M. Merchan.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers have sought to have the order lifted since Mr. Trump’s conviction in late May. But in a 19-page filing on Friday, prosecutors argued that while Justice Merchan no longer needed to enforce the portion of the gag order relating to trial witnesses, he should keep in place the provisions protecting jurors, prosecutors, court staff and their families.
Article Published With The Permission of American Liberty News
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has reinstated former President Donald Trump’s access to his infamous Twitter account which was notoriously blocked following the Jan. 6th Capitol riot.
While the former President has yet to make his re-entrance to the Twitter sphere, instead opting for his own TRUTH Social platform, the idea is enough to make liberals’ blood boil over.
Watch Amanda break down the situation below.
The latest polls show why liberalism sucks…
It’s unavoidable and now more Americans are sick and tired of Biden’s leadership has resulted in nothing but an epic failure.
Let Amanda break down the latest situation below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – Big Brother keeps growing – As part of the broader government war against free speech, the Department of Defense (DoD) is now using Orwellian means to search the internet, social media, and just about everything else, for things we say or post.
And it’s not just for legitimate physical threats against generals, it will also be looking for simple negative comments about our top military leaders.
And we should all be outraged. This really is scary stuff. This even goes beyond recent reports of the government buying our detailed personal information from data brokers, which I wrote about here.
The military runs a little-known outfit called the Army Protective Services Battalion under the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID). Think of it as the Pentagon’s Secret Service for generals.
Its mission specifically falls under CID’s Executive Protection and Special Investigations Field Office. And it has a lot of resources. Its new webpage notes:
With over 400 assigned special agents, police officers, analysts, physical security specialists, and professional support personnel spread across three continents, the Executive Protection Field Office is the largest office within CID providing worldwide dignitary protection for the Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of the Army, Chief of Staff of the Army, and over a dozen other protectees in domestic and overseas locations.
Executive Protection also protects foreign counterparts during official visits to the United States, along with designated former or retired Department of Defense officials. Army CID’s dignitary protection mission is supported by robust protective intelligence and threat management investigative capabilities. [Emphasis added].
This perfectly legitimate organization exists to safeguard our senior military brass, as well as foreign brass visiting our country. As part of its duties, it conducts legitimate ‘protective intelligence’ to identify potential physical threats to its protectees.
I am very familiar with their mission having worked with some of these folks as a military attaché during high-level foreign visits by our Defense Secretary and generals. I also have professional experience with dignitary protection.
All this is very good and vital stuff.
The problem arises when the scope of the protective intelligence mission expands to include things that it shouldn’t. In this case, the unit is tasked to protect current and former high-ranking military officers from “assassination, kidnapping, injury or embarrassment.”
Yes, among the big threats is “embarrassment.”
That’s bad enough since it opens the door to looking into things that they shouldn’t just because they might embarrass a general.
But now, according to an Army procurement document from September 2022, reports the Intercept, the detachment’s mission has expanded to include monitoring social media for “direct, indirect, and veiled” threats and identifying “negative sentiment” regarding its protectees.
And it’s hiring a technology contractor to do its dirty work.
“Negative sentiment” – that is almost as bad as “mean tweets.” It is beyond outrageous.
I have expressed ‘negative sentiment’ toward a few senior military leaders numerous times online and in published articles – including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley.
And I will continue to do so, as is my 1st amendment right.
The line should be when anyone makes veiled or direct physical threats against any political or military leader, not just says mean things.
As The Intercept reports: “There may be legally valid reasons to intrude on someone’s privacy by searching for, collecting, and analyzing publicly available information, particularly when it pertains to serious crimes and terrorist threats,” Ilia Siatitsa, program director at Privacy International, said.
“However,” he added, “expressing ‘positive or negative sentiment towards a senior high-risk individual’ cannot be deemed sufficient grounds for government agencies to conduct surveillance operations.”
Siatitsa rightly concluded: “The ability to express opinions, criticize, make assumptions, or form value judgments — especially regarding public officials — is a quintessential part of democratic society.”
Beyond that, what if the Army is protecting a Chinese general visiting the United States? Will they surveil or target Americans who are critical of this foreign adversary’s general or of China?
And according to the documents uncovered by The Intercept, the program the Army is procuring for its newly expanded intelligence mission is a dystopian surveillance nightmare.
It will scour everything, everywhere, and then even pinpoint the location of the person making the comment.
This is extremely frightening.
The Army describes their surveillance system as “a reliable social media threat mitigation service” with an “Open-Source Web-based toolkit with advanced capabilities to collect publicly available information (PAI).”
Information is not only grabbed up from Twitter’s “firehose” but also from 4Chan, Reddit, YouTube, Discord, Telegram, private contractors like Dataminr, as well as smartphone apps and advertisers.
Combined with cellular location data the Army could also precisely pinpoint those who might make a mean tweet about current or former military officials.
The Intercept adds that all this data, plus CCTV feeds, radio stations, personal records, and even webcams – would be available via a “universal search selector.” That means they can access just about anything.
The Army also wants the contractor to preserve the “anonymity and security needed” by “using various egress points globally to mask their identity.” This means they can conveniently make it look like the folks doing the snooping are in China or Russia.
This is a very scary domestic spying capability to use against Americans. Congress must investigate this Orwellian program immediately and remove elements that will infringe on our constitutional rights.
Or it will soon be used against you.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Liberals aren’t happy about this…
The new movie “Sound of Freedom” is dominating the box office and Democrats are scratching their heads as to why…
Watch Amanda explain the situation below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – It isn’t news that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has proven to be vulnerable to political pressure. Just look at the threat assessments produced in 2020 that single out ‘white supremacists’ as the ‘most lethal domestic terror threat’ in the U.S., despite their numbers being minuscule.
According to that report, self-described ‘white supremacists’ were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks spread across more than a decade and a half – from 2000 to 2016.
Yes, that’s more murders than any other specific domestic extremist group but let’s get real.
There are more murders in Chicago in one weekend than the entire number of white supremacist killings nationwide in those sixteen years.
This DHS report, though produced under the last year of Trump’s term, like many others recently by different federal agencies, like the FBI, is part of a wider political campaign that conflates the relatively small number of white supremacists, and other so-called right-wing extremists, with the tens of millions of mainstream conservatives and Trump supporters.
And we can now add traditional Catholics to the feds’ “most wanted” list.
The FBI recently produced a memo by its Richmond, Virginia, Field Office that was leaked on Jan. 23, 2023.
That memo, according to a group of 20 GOP state attorney generals, “identifies ‘radical-traditionalist Catholic[s]’ as potential ‘racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.’”
In their letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Fox News reported, the AGs told the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) to “desist from investigating and surveilling Americans who have done nothing more than exercise their natural and constitutional right to practice their religion in a manner of their choosing.”
The AGS also asked that the DOJ and the FBI “reveal to the American public the extent to which they have engaged in such activities.”
The AGs letter notes that the FBI memorandum deploys “alarmingly detailed theological distinctions to distinguish between the Catholics whom the FBI deems acceptable, and those it does not.”
It’s in this context of politicized and weaponized federal law enforcement agencies, that this latest report of DHS malfeasance deserves special attention.
Specifically, we are talking about the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis (OIA), whose leadership, according to Politico, was called “shady” and run “like a corrupt government.”
For years it has been operating a secretive domestic-intelligence gathering program that many DHS employees have complained may be illegal.
The OIA’s Overt Human Intelligence Collection Program allows DHS officials to bypass lawyers and seek intelligence interviews with individuals being held in local jails, federal prisons, and immigrant detention centers.
While most law-abiding U.S. citizens may not care much about this DHS target group, remember this is just another example of how elements of DHS appear corrupt, and play fast and loose with the law, and all our civil liberties.
But the Department’s politicization is probably the biggest danger according to documents obtained by Politico.
As the New York Post reports:
The ability of DHS to be impartial and withstand caving to political pressure was also a major concern, documents show.
An internal analysis during the Trump administration found a “significant number of respondents cited concerns with politicization of analytic products and/or the perceptions of undue influence that may compromise the integrity of the work performed by employees. This concern touches on analytic topics, the review process, and the appropriate safeguards in place to protect against undue influence.”
The document adds that “a number of respondents expressed concerns/challenges with the quality and effectiveness of I&A senior leadership” such as the “inability to resist political pressure.”
“The workforce has a general mistrust of leadership resulting from orders to conduct activities they perceive to be inappropriate, bureaucratic, or political,” the document continues.
It is clearly time to rein in rogue elements at DHS and FBI, but also to clean house at the top levels of both organizations, and DOJ.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
