Their latest stunt isn’t new to the woke ice cream brand…
On the Fourth of July Ben and Jerry’s ice cream released a statement bashing America’s heritage.
Watch Amanda explain the latest controversy below:
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The Supreme Court just dealt a crippling blow to Democrats’ radical agenda for America. It’s about time.
Watch Amanda explain the situation below:
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Liberals just can’t help themselves…
Watch Amanda explain the controversy below:
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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.
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ANALYSIS – Let Freedom ring! – In a major victory for free speech in America, and a major vindication for conservatives who have been warning of Democrats using the government to censor them on social media, a federal judge is blocking federal agencies from communicating with Big Tech firms to censor posts.
The Democrats using federal agencies and other official political bodies to coerce or direct social media firms is being called government “censorship ‘by proxy.”
This injunction is particularly heartening to me, since I was a victim of this censorship when LinkedIn permanently banned my account for ‘multiple violations of their terms of service and user agreement.
In other words, I wrote about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the likelihood that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology biolab.
All since proven valid.
I also noted that there are only two sexes, based on science, and refused to use ‘preferred gender pronouns.’
All these topics were effectively banned by the major social media companies, and as has since been proven via Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ expose, and other investigations, much of this banning was done at the behest of the U.S. government, primarily for partisan political or ideological reasons.
In the preliminary injunction, appropriately made on July 4th, the judge, Terry A. Doughty, wrote (pdf) that:
Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden’s policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed.
He added that government agencies, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.S. Department of State, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are prohibited from taking a range of actions related to communicating or dealing with social media companies.
The judge provided very limited exceptions, allowing government officials to contact social media companies to alert them of criminal activity or clear threats to national security.
He also allowed, reported the Epoch Times: “contacts notifying social media companies about posts intending to mislead voters about voting requirements or procedures as well as communicating with companies about suppressing posts that are not protected free speech.”
The decision comes as a response to Republican state attorneys general (AGs) who sued the Biden administration. According to the judge, the AGs “have produced evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.”
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey hailed the ruling on Twitter.
“The Court has granted our motion to BLOCK top officials in the federal government from violating the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans.”
“What a way to celebrate Independence Day.”
In an accompanying memorandum Judge Doughty stated that the plaintiffs are “likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition.”
In an earlier ruling in March, according to The Epoch Times, Doughty wrote: “This suit arises out of the alleged coercion by the Biden Administration and various government agencies and officials of social-media companies, urging those companies ‘to censor viewpoints and speakers disfavored by the Left.’”
He added that the plaintiffs allege that “this censorship was encouraged—perhaps even mandated—by the Biden Administration and several key governmental departments.”
The judge’s current order notes the various nefarious means in which the Biden administration colluded with Big Tech to censor opposing or dissenting views.
These means include, per the injunction, “engaging in any communication of any kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
The Epoch Times reported:
The agencies are also barred from flagging content on posts on social media platforms and forwarding them to the companies with requests for action such as removing or otherwise suppressing their reach.
Encouraging or otherwise egging on social media companies to change their guidelines for the removal, suppression, or reduction of content that contains protected free speech by the government is also not allowed.
To prevent Team Biden and other Democrats from circumventing the order by outsourcing their dirty deeds, it specifically applies to agents, officers, employees, and contractors.
While this is just a preliminary injunction, expect more to come in the fight against Democrat censorship.
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ANALYSIS – It is becoming sadly clear that this may be the last generation of any real freedom in America as Generation Z (Gen Z or Zoomers) increasingly supports the surveillance and punishment state. Many are also exhibitionists craving 24-7 attention.
As I wrote about earlier – Gen Z ‘loves Big Brother.’ Big Brother is the term used by George Orwell to describe the totalitarian surveillance state in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984).
In that piece, I noted a CATO Institute poll that showed 30 percent of people under 30 support allowing the government to install video cameras in our homes to “reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity.”
And we can blame a lot of that on the far-l*ft w*ke culture at our colleges and universities.
It’s bad enough that many of this generation is willing to let faceless bureaucrats watch us in our homes, but Zoomers appear willing to go beyond even that. They are the generation of snitches, and punishers, going after anyone they disagree with.
This generation has been taught to equate ‘unapproved’ speech with actual violence, so it makes sense that they’ll do whatever it takes to eliminate it.
Much of this can be traced back to higher education. Our colleges and schools are teaching our kids to be hypersensitive, ideological, w*ke snitches.
After providing various scary examples, including one where a professor used the oft-used term “sacred cow,” and a student filed a complaint that said the student would “not feel safe around him” any longer, Christian Schneider writes in National Review:
…part of the reason Gen Z has an unquenchable thirst for surveillance is what they are being taught at their colleges and universities. All the above examples were reports filed with campus “Bias Response Teams” — programs set up by institutions of higher education that incentivize students to narc on each other for expressing unpopular opinions or engaging in disfavored behavior.
Decades ago, courts threw out college “speech codes,” finding that public universities banning language was impermissible under the First Amendment. So when the internet grew as a tool, schools crafted a workaround: What if, instead of the schools targeting students for unpopular speech, it was the students themselves doing the targeting? And thus a majority of public colleges and universities began crowdsourcing their speech codes.
In fact, bias-response teams are actually worse than the traditional speech codes, which outlawed specific words: The new standard for determining whether speech is forbidden is simply anything that offends someone. Any oversensitive campus resident now has the power to log on and anonymously report a fellow student or professor.
Not to be outdone by its elite competitors, Stanford University implemented its own Orwellian system in which the school offered students a cash bounty if they reported insensitive speech on campus. In April, the school backtracked on the plan after an ensuing episode of national outrage.
You can’t get much more Orwellian than that.
But there is a big added factor in why this generation loves surveillance, “cameras are what young people now seek, hoping to parlay their everyday goings-on into a Kardashian-like media empire.”
Schneider notes that one poll found that nearly one-quarter of Zoomers in the United States planned to be internet ‘influencers,’ making their living creating videos for YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
Apparently, we no longer need doctors, engineers, scientists, or lawyers (well, maybe not so many lawyers).
I don’t know about you, but a nation of empty-headed TikTok influencers scares me almost more than the Orwellian surveillance they like so much.
Schneider adds: “Today’s young people have become both informers and self-exposers. If we’re not careful, their snitch culture will threaten privacy and freedom.”
I would go further. If we aren’t careful, very soon, America, as a free country, will be totally unrecognizable.
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ANALYSIS – BOOM! – The landmark Supreme Court decision against racial and sex discrimination by schools and universities (under the guise of ‘affirmative action’) will also impact corporate ‘diversity’ programs based on the same flawed, discriminatory ideas.
In what has become a major legal development in a growing wave of anti-wokeness, corporations will soon have to reconsider all their – likely illegal – Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts.
While pushed by the increasingly leftist establishment, most of these woke programs have been illegal under U.S. state and federal laws, which explicitly prohibit discrimination by race and gender. But until now the courts let them get away with it.
Now the Supreme Court has made it official. Affirmative action (aka – discriminatory ‘diversity’ efforts) are out.
The court held by that Harvard and University of North Carolina’s (UNC’s) admissions programs violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative group, sued Harvard and UNC over their ‘race-conscious’ admissions programs, arguing they intentionally discriminated against Asian American applicants.
In the decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: “Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”
He added: “We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.”
Previously, the Supreme Court in the 2003 case of Grutter v. Bollinger, ruled that “the use of an applicant’s race as one factor in an admissions policy of a public educational institution does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment if the policy is narrowly tailored to the compelling interest of promoting a diverse student body.”
This was intended to be a very narrow exception, but soon became far more. And this helped woke corporate America justify its own discriminatory DEI programs.
A 2022 Harvard Business Review 2022 survey, reported by The Epoch Times, showed that more than 60 percent of U.S. companies had a DEI program, which separates employees according to race and gender.
After the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots, major corporations announced explicit race-based hiring and promotion policies.
But now that the 2003 decision has been superseded, they will all need to revisit the legality of their DEI programs. As Kevin Stocklin explains in The Epoch Times:
In an amicus brief regarding the Harvard and UNC case, the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute and attorney Ilya Shapiro argued that “what this Court authorized in Grutter as a temporary, grudging exception to America’s ideals and generally applicable law of Equal Protection … has metastasized into a threat blooming across the legal landscape, the economy, and society as a whole.”
The exceptions granted by the Grutter case were narrowly tailored to government-funded universities’ admissions policies, and were intended to be a temporary remedy that would include “sunset” provisions. But corporations have applied them as a precedent to race-based policies on staffing and training, and expanded them to include new racial goals.
“To the extent that corporate America has thought that Grutter provided some kind of fig leaf to the illegal discrimination they’ve been engaging in for the last two decades, this would be a really good time for them to rethink that,” Morenoff said. “It never made sense for corporate America to argue that there was a diversity rationale exception to our civil rights laws,” he said.
However, if the Supreme Court decision reverses Grutter or the Johnson executive order, even that questionable pretense would be gone. Rather than standing on thin ice, Morenoff said, “they’re standing on no ice at all.”
This is the next battleground – using this Supreme Court precedent to eliminate discrimination by sex and race from corporate America.
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Viewers are leaving Fox News in droves…
Watch Amanda explain the situation below:
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ANALYSIS – It seems that the Democrat establishment has given its media the green light to start reporting real news about the Bidens. Some will see it as them going after Joe and Hunter Biden, but most will see it as something long forgotten by these organizations – journalism.
Either way, as Hot Air asked: “Who let the dogs out?”
And more importantly, why now?
White House Press reporters not from Fox News, or other conservative outlets, are finally asking Joe Biden tough questions, including whether he was involved in his son’s shady business deals.
And CBS Evening News did an entire national broadcast piece interviewing the senior IRS whistleblower about how the agency held back in its investigation into Hunter Biden.
The segment was only three minutes long, but that’s a lifetime in broadcast news, especially when the topic has literally been banned from the establishment media since Biden launched his campaign in 2020.
In the CBS segment reporter Jim Axelrod interviewed IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley in a professional manner and allowed him time to fully answer his questions.
The segment included reporting “…the stunning claim he [Shapley] was blocked from pursuing leads that could have led to the president himself.”
This follows another CBS News story on the two whistleblowers last Thursday that included transcripts of their interviews with GOP lawmakers.
That story noted that: “Two IRS whistleblowers allege sweeping misconduct, including interference in the Hunter Biden tax investigation, according to the GOP House Ways and Means Committee chairman and newly released transcripts of congressional interviews with the whistleblowers.”
This can only start building to a bigger deluge of actual reporting on the Biden scandals. The question is why now? David Catron explained his view of the Democrat intrigue in the Spectator:
Something changed last week inside the Beltway that suggests the people who run the Democratic Party now realize President Biden’s tenure in office is not sustainable beyond 2024. The “tell” was not, however, the latest revelation by IRS whistleblowers about his corrupt administration. It was instead the sudden awakening of the White House press corps. The same “reporters” who snored through more than two years of preposterous claims by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and her predecessor simultaneously woke up Friday. Correspondents from media outlets CNN, CBS, NBC, and even the New York Times aggressively questioned Jean-Pierre about the metastasizing Hunter Biden scandals.
This wasn’t spontaneous. The word has gone out that regime change is coming [emphasis added].
So, it seems Democrats want Biden out. And Kamala Harris too. And can you blame them?
I have long predicted that Biden would not finish the 2024 race. Too old. Too frail. Too demented. Too scandal plagued. And Harris is just plain dumb. And unelectable.
But what now? Conservative commentator Chad Prather notes in The Blaze:
“They’re gonna really run Joe down, and it’s gonna get to a point where basically, Jill’s gonna come along and pull Joe and say, ‘You know, Joe and I have decided that we have fixed everything Trump messed up. We’ve done our job; it’s time to pass the mantle on to the successor.’”
Prather adds that Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 race will allow him to avoid any criminal liability and believes he and Jill will sign a very big book deal, and as part of a bigger deal, will likely let Harris be president, briefly.
“She’ll get to be the first female president — just for a second. That’ll keep her from running her mouth too much later on, because they’ll throw her that bone,” Prather adds.
“She’ll go down in history as that.”
I must admit this scenario sounds plausible to me. The only remaining question is, who will be the real Democrat candidate for president in 2024?
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A new Biden administration proposal to hike mortgage payments for Americans with good credit, to subsidize loans for people with bad credit, is running into opposition to Congress.
But is it enough to stop Biden?
The U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed an amendment from Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-CO) “requiring the Government Accountability Office to publish a report on its website exposing the costs and process associated with the Biden administration’s socialist housing policies,” a statement Boebert reports.
The amendment “will help protect homeowners from Biden’s disastrous scheme to raise fees for people with higher credit scores to subsidize those with lower credit scores,” says Boebert.
“(O)n a $400,000 mortgage, a borrower with a credit score of 680 would be forced to pay $40 more per month to subsidize similar borrowers with worse credit scores,” Boebert reports.
“Joe Biden’s decision to subsidize failure makes more sense when you realize he’s hired Mayor Pete, Karine Jean-Pierre, and Kamala Harris. Raising housing fees at a time when mortgage rates are at the highest level in years thanks to the Biden-Pelosi spending spree will make housing less affordable and result in higher mortgage costs and reduced access to credit for most borrowers who are working hard and doing their best to just get by,” says Boebert.
“My commonsense amendment provides transparency for the American people and exposes the costs and arbitrary processes used by Biden’s minions to ram through his socialist housing policy that penalizes responsible homeowners to subsidize high-risk individuals,” says Boebert.
“Unelected bureaucrats in Washington should not have the ability to impose these un-American regulations on hardworking middle-class families,” Boebert adds.
“This is a gross overreach and will ultimately exacerbate the growing inflation problem we have in this country,” Boebert concludes.
Boebert’s amendment “requires the Government Accountability Office to publish a report on its website and publicly disclose to the American people any costs and the process utilized by the FHFA to unilaterally change Loan Level Pricing Adjustment (LLPA) fees and implement Biden’s unfair, socialist housing policy changes,” her office reports.
Boebert’s amendment to Congressman Warren Davidson’s Middle-Class Borrower Protection Act was approved by the House in a unanimous voice vote.
The amended bill passed the House by a 230-189 vote and now goes to the Senate.
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