‘Age range 16-24 weeks … must be fresh and never frozen…’
Photo by drsuparna (CC)
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) The Food and Drug Administration entered into eight contracts over the span of six years to acquire “fresh and never frozen” tissue from a fetal tissue firm, according to a report by Judicial Watch.
Records show that the FDA worked with Advanced Bioscience Resources, a fetal-tissue supplier that has been the subject of multiple criminal referrals from House and Senate committees, to obtain 1st and 2nd trimester aborted fetuses.
FDA researchers intended to use this tissue to create “humanized mice” for ongoing research, according to the records.
In one 2017 exchange between the FDA and the supplier, an FDA official requests a quote.
“I am tasked with the purchase of tissues suitable for HM [humanized mice] research. I would like to request a quote. Please review the Statement of Work and quote your pricing as outlined,” the email states.
The FDA official then stated that the tissue could be “Age range 16-24 weeks,” and that it “must be fresh and never frozen.”
In total, the FDA spent nearly $100,000 between 2012 and 2018 on fetal tissue, Judicial Watch found.
ABR came under scrutiny in 2015 when a string of undercover videos revealed that Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, sold fetal tissue to various buyers.
It was never confirmed whether ABR was one of the buyers. But in one of the videos, Katharine Sheehan, former medical director of Planned Parenthood Pacific Southwest, specifically mentions ABR.
“We have already a relationship with ABR,” she says to someone posing as a competitor to the company. “We’ve been using them for over 10 years — a really long time. … They’re doing the big collection for government-level collections.”
The FDA isn’t the only agency to buy tissue from ABR. The National Institutes of Health also paid the firm hundreds of thousands of dollars for tissue that came from fetuses that were 17 weeks to 22 weeks old, according to Politico.
‘They set an obstruction of justice trap. There’s no doubt in my mind that we will make a conspiracy referral there…’
Devin Nines (screen shot: RepDevinNunes/Youtube)
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have sent at least 14 criminal referrals to the Justice Department in the wake of the Russia-collusion hoax, according to its ranking minority member, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif.
“We have recommended many criminal referrals now, I think we’re up to somewhere around 14 criminal referrals that we have now made to the Department of Justice,” Nunes told Fox Business on Monday.
House Republicans’ ongoing investigation into the debunked Russian collusion conspiracy has turned up “many unanswered questions,” according to Nunes—questions he hopes Attorney General William Barr will look into at length.
Nunes made at least eight criminal referrals earlier this year, and U.S. Attorney John Durham, the special prosecutor overseeing the criminal probe at the DOJ, is reportedly looking at the House’s findings.
There should be “developments” in Durham’s investigation by the end of the summer, Barr said last week.
“It could involve … very high-level Obama officials,” Nunes said.
“But with what we really want to see happen is those people that were in the [Hillary] Clinton campaign that coordinated with the dirty cops who wasted millions of dollars of taxpayer money—those are the people that the Department of Justice has to really rein in and, hopefully, are able to prosecute.”
Nunes also wants to see former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team investigated, and several of the criminal referrals Republicans have made over the past couple of months have specifically targeted officials involved in “the Mueller witch hunt,” he said last month.
“We’re doing a large criminal referral on the Mueller dossier team that put together a fraudulent report—that knew there was no collusion the day that Mueller walked in the door,” Nunes told Fox News.
“They set an obstruction of justice trap,” he added. “There’s no doubt in my mind that we will make a conspiracy referral there.”
‘There is no legitimate basis [to] compel [Barr’s] testimony at this time…’
Geoffrey Berman / IMAGE: TODAY via YouTube
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Before he was ousted, Geoffrey Berman, the insubordinate former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, refused to sign a letter from the Justice Department criticizing New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio for his unfair treatment of religious groups.
The letter, sent to Berman by DOJ supervisors, called out de Blasio’s double standard, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Democratic mayor openly supported mass protests while sending law enforcement after Jewish religious ceremonies, said the letter.
Berman, however, refused to sign it, objecting to its assertion that de Blasio had treated religious groups unfairly and arguing that it was nothing more than a political stunt.
This incident was just one of many in which Berman and the DOJ clashed. Attorney General William Barr had already viewed Berman as stubborn and difficult to work with, according to three sources.
But DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec insisted that Berman’s refusal to sign the letter did not factor into Barr’s decision to get rid of Berman.
Barr did not even know Berman had refused to sign it, she said. However, two people familiar with the matter told the Journal that the incident added to Barr’s existing frustration with Berman.
Barr announced last week that Berman would be resigning from his position. However, Berman publicly objected and refused to step down voluntarily, prompting President Donald Trump to fire him. As a result, congressional Democrats have accused Barr of politicizing the DOJ.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., is even preparing to subpoena Barr to testify before the committee and explain why Berman was ousted.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, pushed back and argued that “there is no legitimate basis” for the House to “compel [Barr’s] testimony at this time.”
‘There’s something going on at the moment, these underlying tensions…’
Police tape is seen near the scene of a shooting early Monday, June 22, 2020 in Charlotte. / PHOTO: Associated Press
(Ben Sellers Liberty Headlines) President Donald Trump quipped that he had made Juneteenth celebrations famous after igniting controversy for scheduling his recent return to the campaign trail on the customary African–American day of celebration.
But with the informal holiday commemorating the June 19, 1865 emancipation of slaves now on more radars than in past years, a spate of violence and increase in coronavirus outbreaks due to a lack of social-distancing precautions made the 155th anniversary seem more like a day that will live in infamy.
“There’s something going on at the moment, these underlying tensions,” James Densley, a professor of law enforcement and criminal justice at Metropolitan State University, told the Associated Press.
“Everyone’s been cooped up for so long with the pandemic, and then we had this sort of explosion of anger and grief after George Floyd’s killing,” he said.
Several major cities saw tragedies, including shooting deaths, that were directly related to either the supposed celebrations or linked with recent racial-justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s Memorial Day death while in police custody.
Among those where some occurrence marred the jubilant festivities:
Seattle, where the shooting death of a 19-year-old man occurred in the CHOP autonomous zone
Chicago, which saw more than 100 people shot over the weekend and at least 14 deaths—including a 3-year-old boy who was killed while riding in the back seat of a car with his father.
Atlanta, where ongoing race riots resulted in at least one woman being shot during a protest on behalf of police victim Rayshard Brooks
Detroit, where 18 different shootings over the weekend led to four people dead and 25 injured
Aurora, Illinois, where a 17-year-old was fatally shot during a Juneteenth celebration
Minneapolis, where gunfire broke out at a popular nightlife and retail injuring 11 people early Sunday, and a man was fatally shot in the city’s downtown
Syracuse, NY, where nine were wounded by gun violence at a birthday party
Charlotte, NC, where a block-party celebration resulted in a pedestrian being hit, followed by a shooting when first-responders arrived, which in turn resulted in three shooting deaths and 11 injuries
The episodes collectively hinted at a possible fraying of the seams for the movement. Prior rioting already had led to more than a dozen deaths and untold destruction on innocent victims.
However, several of these occurrences, targeting the very communities that the protesters are seeking to elevate, hinted the previously unified opposition of the protestors to law enforcement giving way to a greater demand for a return to order.
In the Seattle social-experiment, which has lasted roughly two weeks with cooperation from city officials, the CHOP zone’s so-called warlord, Raz Simone, was mocked on Twitter for attempting to blame medics and other first responders who were unable to treat the shooting victim.
Medics refused to help even after people in the CHOP begged. They let our bro bleed out for 30 minutes till he died. Fuck politics. Fuck your currupt system. pic.twitter.com/PMwxU9yEzd
Following the tragedy, Mayor Jenny Durkin announced that she would seek to have police peacefully retake the CHOP in the near future. The announcement also came as Trump pointedly criticized the failed local response during his rally in Tulsa on Saturday.
As with the Seattle incident, the Charlotte shooting revealed some of the deep flaws in recent anti-authority rhetoric when the community is reliant upon emergency assistance.
Raw video showed that the arrival of an ambulance with flashing sirens appeared to be what triggered a round of repeated gunshots.
BREAKING: CMPD is investigating a shooting on Beatties Ford Rd after midnight which left one person deceased.
— A Black Socialist ??☠️ (@SonOfAssata) June 22, 2020
Afterward, revelers on the scene were far from cooperative with the police, even though the city and its police force are run entirely by Democrats, many of the officials being African–American themselves.
Some recorded and posted video in which they yelled at the police for trying to restore order using weapons.
This happened in #Charlotte#NorthCarolina lastnight after a shooting at a block party. This @CMPD officer is pointing his assault rifle in the face of innocent people who were assaulted minutes before this video! This is UNACCEPTABLE! pic.twitter.com/LnctZIQqgU
The suspects in the shooting also remained at large due to the reluctance of witnesses to come forward.
Most notably, though, the clear lack of social distancing, face masks and other precautions invited stern criticism as North Carolina sees a spike in second-wave coronavirus cases.
Many reports have indicated that the African–American community is particularly susceptible to the disease.
And yet, few raised concerns as Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper, Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles and other civic leaders marched alongside protesters in recent weeks, actively encouraging the mass crowds and even painting “Black Lives Matters” on a major downtown roadway.
Already, at least two other major urban centers in the state, Raleigh and Greensboro, have now decreed face masks mandatory, and Charlotte is likely to follow.
But attempting to enforce the rule in communities where resistance has calcified in recent weeks, could pose an even bigger dilemma for the authorities who had allowed it to continue unabated as they now try to impose new restrictions.
‘When the mob tears down a statue of U.S. Grant, it’s not about the Civil War—it’s because they hate America…’
Tom Cotton / IMAGE: Fox News via Youtube
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., is urging U.S. Attorney General William Barr to prosecute the violent mobs responsible for toppling and desecrating historic American statues, monuments and memorials across the country.
Cotton, an Army veteran and Bronze Star recipient, is one of the few elected leaders brave enough to speak against the mobs.
He previously penned a New York Timesop-ed that called for the National Guard and active-duty military forces to restore order as a last resort.
The op-ed sparked a mutiny at the Times that led to the forced resignation of the paper’s opinion editor.
Cotton sent a letter to Barr on Tuesday saying, “These criminals masquerade as protestors exercising their lawful right to peaceably assemble, but there can be no right to destroy public or private property.”
He spotlighted the shocking cravenness of the left-wing mobs by citing the recent toppling of a Ulysses S. Grant statue in San Francisco.
Grant was the commander of the Union forces in the Civil War. As president, he battled the Ku Klux Klan, signed the nation’s first major civil-rights legislation and presided over the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave all African Americans the right to vote.
“When the mob tears down a statue of U.S. Grant, it’s not about the Civil War—it’s because they hate America,” said Cotton.
He also cited destroyed statues and monuments of George Washington, Francis Scott Key, Saint Junipero Serra and Christopher Columbus.
“It’s past time to stop the mob; these vandals should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” he said.
Cotton issued the letter to Barr shortly after a Senate floor speech warning of the growing danger of mob rule.
Local authorities have been unwilling to arrest blatant offenders, much less prosecute them for their crimes. In many Democratic-controlled cities, elected officials have even directed the police to stand down.
Cotton commended Barr for taking federal action against rioters and looters in the absence of Democratic leadership, but he pleaded both in his letter and floor speech for Barr to target the statue-toppling mobs.
And won’t be hard, he said.
“They aren’t exactly criminal masterminds, typically filming their crimes and posting the videos on social media,” he noted.
‘Yes, we had more people die in nursing homes than anywhere else … because the federal government missed the boat…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo continues to insist that his disastrous policy forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients had nothing to do with New York’s alarming death rate.
.@NYGovCuomo shifts the blame to the federal government for NY’s nursing home deaths.
He says his policy of sending COVID+ patients was not a mistake.
“We had the virus coming from Europe when the federal government told us the virus was coming from China.” pic.twitter.com/jtEUiQm6jH
More than 6,000 people have died from the coronavirus within New York’s nursing homes.
State Republicans have attributed that number to Cuomo’s directive requiring long-term care facilities to accept COVID-19 patients after they were released from nearby hospitals.
Cuomo, however, blasted such criticism as “pure politics,” and blamed the federal government for his office’s failures.
“Yes, we had more people die in nursing homes than anywhere else, because we had more people die, because the federal government missed the boat and never told us this virus was coming from Europe and not from China,” Cuomo told MSNBC on Monday.
“So, New York had more cases, more deaths, and more deaths in nursing home because that’s who the virus affects,” Cuomo explained. “It affects senior citizens, we know that.”
Cuomo is right about one thing: Government officials did indeed know that COVID-19 disproportionately affects elderly, vulnerable citizens.
‘In no way am I trying to erase history. But we shouldn’t glorify our shameful past…’
Gina Raimondo / IMAGE: Infosys via YouTube
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) At a time when nearly anything can be construed as racist or promoting slavery, the governor of Rhode Island is upping the ante.
Gov. Gina Raimondo, the Democratic chief executive of the nation’s smallest state, signed an executive order on Monday to take the “first steps” toward changing the state’s name.
Rhode Island was founded as an original British colony in 1636. Its official name was, “The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.”
Three years after the signing of the U.S. Constitution it became known as “The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.”
Now, 230 years later, the name is offensive because of the word plantation‘s perceived association with slavery.
“Whatever the meaning of the term ‘plantations’ in the context of Rhode Island’s history, it carries a horrific connotation when considering the tragic and racist history of our nation,” state Sen. Harold Metts told the Providence Journal.
Metts, a Democrat, is the only black member of the Rhode Island Senate. The state’s government has a Democrat “trifecta,” consisting of single-party control of both houses of the state legislature and the governor’s office.
Metts introduced a bill to change the state’s name last week, but Raimondo is taking the first meaningful action.
Her order declares the state’s official name as “Rhode Island.” No longer will any prior reference be allowed on gubernatorial executive orders, citations or letterheads.
The order further directs all state agencies to strip any mention of the state’s full name on government websites.
Permanently changing the name, however, will require changing the state’s constitution. And that requires a statewide ballot referendum.
A previous attempt to strip the “plantations” term occurred in 2010, but an astounding 78 percent of voters rejected the proposal based on the popular recognition of the state’s long anti-slavery history.
Rhode Island was a historically agrarian economy. It also sided with the Union in the American Civil war and was the first colony to pass an abolition law in 1652—or 138 years before even becoming a state.
The recent push for the name change started when an online petition began circulating after the death of George Floyd, a criminal suspect who died while in the custody of Minneapolis police.
“In no way am I trying to erase history. But we shouldn’t glorify our shameful past,” Tyson Pianka, a half-black student at the University of Rhode Island told the Associated Press earlier this month.
Pianka, 20, organized the online petition. “Now is a perfect time to do it,” he said.
‘The easiest way to ensure Trump’s reelection is to be overconfident…’
Donald Trump / PHOTO: Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Several prominent Democrats are sounding the alarm for their base not to grow complacent amid deceptive and biased media coverage that, like 2016, conveys a decisive lead on their deeply flawed presidential candidate.
Biden is currently leading President Donald Trump in Michigan by 8 points, according to a RealClearPolitics average.
But Dingell said that that doesn’t correspond with many of the complaints she’s heard from voters in her own district. Many Michiganders plan to reelect Trump, she told Politico.
“Everyone will roll their eyes and say, ‘that’s Debbie.’ But I was right in 2016,” she said.
Dingell was, in fact, right about the 2016 election. She warned Democrats that “anybody who believes the polls right now is overconfident,” and sure enough, Trump narrowly won Michigan.
Dingell isn’t the only Democrat urging caution.
“The easiest way to ensure Trump’s reelection is to be overconfident,” cautioned Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del.
“Too many Democrats are looking at national polls and finding them encouraging,” he said. “Too many Democrats assumed that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in and didn’t vote or didn’t work.”
Some Democrats, however, are convinced that the 2020 election won’t be anything like four years ago.
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, claimed that Trump will lose blue-leaning swing states that he won four years ago like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as other important states like Ohio, Iowa, Florida and Arizona, which the GOP might once have taken for granted.
“We’re going to beat him in November, and I think we’re going to even beat him in Ohio. And Ohio will mean an Electoral College landslide,” Brown said.
But Republicans outside the Beltway are telling a much different story. They believe recent events have all but solidified Trump’s reelection, regardless of what the polls say.
“The more bad things happen in the country, it just solidifies support for Trump,” Phillip Stephens, GOP chairman in Robeson County, North Carolina, told Politico.
“We’re calling him ‘Teflon Trump,’” Stephens continued. “Nothing’s going to stick, because if anything, it’s getting more exciting than it was in 2016.”
‘They don’t care enough about their fans who love this country…’
Colin Kaepernick / VH1 via YouTube
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Former NFL player Burgess Owens blasted NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell for encouraging the league to rehire failed quarterback Colin Kaepernick.
Owens argued that giving the washed-up Kaepernick a starting quarterback job would be like “affirmative action for a Marxist.”
The former San Francisco 49ers star last took the field in 2017, but he was benched midway through the season for performance reasons.
After declining to renew his contract, he was shocked to discover that no other franchises were interested in him. Kaepernick blamed his controversial anthem-kneeling and sued the NFL, which settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.
He later capitalized on his notoriety as a social activist by signing a lucrative Nike contract and continues to ignite controversy while insisting he has been discriminated against.
The NFL has been pandering to Kaepernick in light of recent race-riots (which he actively endorsed) and Black Lives Matter protests.
The league recently apologized to him and the other players who knelt during the national anthem, and asked him to “inform” the NFL’s continued efforts toward increased diversity. But what the NFL is really doing is “approving” of Kaepernick’s “ideology,” Owens said.
If Kaepernick comes back, Owens argued, so should Tim Tebow, the former Denver Broncos quarterback and outspoken Christian who was likewise shunned for his “Tebowing” genuflection in prayer.
Tim Tebow / IMAGE: NFL via YouTube
“It doesn’t matter how long he’s been out of the game,” Owens told Sports Illustrated. “It doesn’t matter his talent. He was a Christian who kneeled in prayer and was a positive on his team. The reason why Tim Tebow—as talented as he was with the Denver Broncos—the NFL didn’t like his essence.”
Insofar as Tebow was a “distraction,” Kaepernick is much worse, he added.
“Meanwhile, we’re willing to have the distraction of a Marxist—a Castro-brother-loving Marxist—to come back and play [despite the fact] that many Americans don’t want to see him play,” he insisted.
Owens said he won’t be the only American who will refuse to watch the NFL play if Kaepernick returns.
“They don’t care enough about their fans who love this country,” he said of the NFL. “If Goodell allows Kaepernick to come back, if they allow players to kneel during the national anthem, I’m willing to not watch the game.”
There is, in fact, a chance that Kaepernick could return to the NFL. Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll hinted earlier this month that at least one team was interested in signing him.
“I got a phone call today asking and inquiring about the situation,” Carroll said. “I know somebody is interested, so we’ll see what happens with that.”
It is not known whether Kaepernick would opt to take up residence in Seattle‘s new CHOP district, a six-block “autonomous” zone recently taken over by Antifa-linked anarchists in the heart of the city.
Liberty Headlines’ Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
‘If someone wears a MAGA hat, I’m gonna delete ’em for terrorism…’
Zach McElroy / IMAGE: Project Veritas
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A new Facebook whistleblower at one of the company’s content-moderation warehouses in Tampa, Fla., has further confirmed the company’s long-suspected systemic bias in censoring conservative voices.
Zach McElroy took his story to Project Veritas, which has previously worked to exposed the latent—and in some cases, overt—bias at social media and tech companies including Google, YouTube and Facebook.
He estimated that 75 to 80 percent of the posts that were deleted via the company’s “civic harassment queue” were from conservative sources.
“Because there are not very many conservatives, I really don’t think there’s anyone sticking up for the voice of conservatives at a company that handles the flow of conversations—basically a large portion of the discourse online,” McElroy said.
“We are essentially in charge of what gets said and what gets stifled,” he said.
The Project Veritas video explained that Facebook relies on soft-censorship through secretive blacklisting techniques such as shadow-banning that may limit or suppress conservative posts without the user’s knowledge.
Content moderator Daniel Will confirmed that the company employed the controversial practice, despite officially denying it.
“Facebook shadow bans,” he said. “Facebook’s notorious for it—and they say they don’t, but it’s clear that people’s content doesn’t come up because it’s been defiltered off the queue.”
During prior congressional testimony and public statements, Facebook has repeated a common trope that it is algorithms and not human moderators who generally flag the content.
However, McElroy noted that there is always a human behind the algorithm.
“Certainly the algorithm is not human, but it had to be made by a human,” he said. “You can say it was a bot, but somebody had to design that algorithm.”
Two-Faced Censorship
Publicly, Facebook—after having encountered pressure from both the White House and Senate—has made a big show of touting its neutrality with the November presidential election approaching.
Other sites—including Twitter, Snapchat and the Chinese-run espionage platform TikTok—all have determined to actively interfere in the political discourse by imposing left-wing fact-checks, openly blacklisting right-wing voices, and encouraging disruptive or violent left-wing activism.
However, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has sought to remain tactfully diplomatic in his public statements.
“We’ve seem plenty of statements from Mark Zuckerberg about how they don’t want to meddle in the election,” McElroy said.
“… But we know that privately they [Facebook employees] have very different opinions,” he added. “I have no doubt that what he said publicly is not what he means to do privately.”
Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg / IMAGE: The Obama White House via YouTube
While Zuckerberg has claimed to be resisting pressure from his own employees to take a hard-line stance against President Donald Trump, an undercover Project Veritas journalist recorded an Austin, Texas-based content moderator admitting that the company does block supporters who share messages from the president that Facebook censors deem offensive.
“Even if he [Trump] does say something, if it gets repeated, we can at least get the average Joe,” said Steve Grimmett. “… Facebook’s done a better job of at least policing the mimickers and the mockingbirds that come after Trump.”
Meanwhile, Facebook has allowed its blatant double-standard to continue in several other areas:
The company aggressively imposed biased fact-checking on what it claimed was false information about the coronavirus, using unreliable sources like the United Nations’ World Health Organization that downplayed the role of China and suppressed skepticism over a number of false, overly sensational and authoritarian claims.
Likewise, it monitored and deplatformed hundreds of peaceful right-wing patriot groups attempting to organize pro-Constitution demonstrations during both the COVID lock-downs and recent race riots, but it openly encourage leftist groups and allowed looters to use its platform to sell stolen goods
Both Facebook and its photo-sharing subsidiary Instagram have sent subtle cues to redirect users to support extreme left-wing groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, Black Lives Matter and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People during recent race riots, even as the groups espouse overtly partisan, far-left-wing agendas.
It blocked an expensive ad developed by the Trump campaign that criticized domestic-terrorism group Antifa while showing one of its historical symbols, an upside-down red triangle. Facebook justified the anti-Trump censorship by saying the Antifa symbol was considered “hate speech” because the Nazis had used it also.
It was revealed to be abusing US guest-worker H-1B visa programs to give hiring preference to Chinese and Korean workers over American workers for the sake of promoting corporate “diversity” despite its clear lack of ideological diversity.
‘Spiteful’ Anti-Trump Resistance
McElroy warned that the known offenses were merely the tip of the iceberg. He offered recordings of internal memos that had been distributed to content moderators, many of which outlined special exceptions for offensive left-wing speech under they guise of newsworthiness and other false pretenses while censoring equivalent—or considerably milder—examples from the Right.
Applying its censorship double-standard, Facebook allowed the work of anti-Trump “art” on the left but banned the cartoon-based meme on the right depicting Democrat Beto O’Rourke
In one instance, the company expressly permitted the sharing of an “art” from a Seattle gallery that showed Trump getting his throat slit while banning a meme response to political attacks by former presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke.
Following comments that gun-rights advocates deemed hostile to the Second Amendment, the meme depicted cartoon character Elmer Fudd appearing to blast O’Rourke with a cartoon shotgun showing a puff of smoke.
The Project Veritas video also featured a montage of interviews with biased content moderators who expressed their overt disdain for Trump.
McElroy said the workplace culture in many of the moderation facilities—which are sometimes outsourced to private contractors and not directly overseen by the company itself—created a climate of radical leftist groupthink.
“In speaking with a lot of them, I found that they are not at all shy to exercise their political will in deleting or leaving up content, whether or not they’re allowed to, or whether or not they’ll get penalized for it,” he said.
One of them—when asked if she would delete any conservative content she came across in the queue, even if it was determined to follow policy guidelines—responded, “Yes! I don’t give no f**cks, I’ll delete it.”
Another content-moderator, identified as Lara Kontakos, said she would like on her last day to delete all Republican content.
“If someone wears a MAGA hat, I’m gonna delete ’em for terrorism,” she said. “I’m just gonna, like, go crazy.”
Another, Marteyuna Holmes, admitted in a hidden-camera conversation that she routinely deleted every Trump post she saw.
“I just feel spiteful,” Holmes said. “Revenge for all the s*** I have to see.”
Time for Accountability
In the wake of recent censorship efforts on social media, which likely are designed to help sway the November election in favor or deeply-flawed presumptive Democrat nominee Joe Biden, Trump announced an executive order recently that would clarify the definitions in the Bill Clinton-era Communications Decency Act.
Facebook headquarters / IMAGE: Wochit News via YouTube
Under Section 230, online platforms that aggregate and repackage user-generated comment are allowed limited ability to curate it, in cases where it may violate obscenity laws, for instance.
However, Trump said that the virtue-signaling companies’ decisions to apply their own “community guidelines” has made them private editors, no longer advancing the public interest, and therefore subject to additional liabilities such as defamation lawsuits over the content that appeared on their sites.
Left-wingers have attempted to circle the wagon in response and reframe the debate, ironically, as an attack on their own free speech.
But the new exposé shows that the major social-media platforms cannot be trusted to self-moderate in a manner that is evenhanded without facing additional oversight or consequences.
Project Veritas founding CEO James O’Keefe said in a press release that it was past time for regulators to step in.
“Zach McElroy’s story raises serious doubts about the Capitol Hill testimony of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who gave lawmakers the impression that his company only takes content that could cause harm, such as relating to terrorism or hate speech, but never for politics,” O’Keefe said.
“Facebook and other social media platforms are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, because they claim that unlike traditional publishers that do not actively edit content—they say they are like the phone company just stringing wires on poles,” O’Keefe continued.
“Facebook’s $400 billion market capitalization is tied to this protection, and our report shows for the first time anywhere Facebook’s robust and human-directed process for restricting the marketplace of ideas, which calls into question their CDA 230 immunity,” he said.
