‘At some point we’re all bound to encounter it if it’s as contagious as the ‘experts’ say it is…’
Former MLB Player Aubrey Huff: Flickr
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) Aubrey Huff, a former MLB player, posted his thoughts about the coronavirus Monday on Twitter, saying that he will no longer comply with demands that he wear a mask.
I will no longer wear a mask inside any business. It’s unconstitutional to enforce. Let’s make this bullshit stop now! Who’s with me? #coronavirus
“The liberal left, the soy boy professors, and the blue check mark crazy cat ladies were in unison guilt shaming me for threatening the lives of millions of innocent people,” Huff said.
“Now, if you want to wear a mask and live in fear the rest of your life, it’s certainly your prerogative, but the vast majority of well-adjusted, sane, common-sense people that aren’t sheep—they can reason for themselves—agree with me,” he continued.
Huff is an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump.
His Twitter bio says, “I support Toxic Masculinity. #America.”
In the video, he does not deny the reality of the coronavirus or the fact that the elderly, immuno-compromised, and “morbidly obese” need “to stay the f*** home.”
He said healthy Americans should not have to stay home and shut down their businesses in order to protect this small group of people.
Huff said the coronavirus lockdowns and mitigation efforts do not serve any purpose if everyone will eventually contract it.
If the #coronavirus is here to stay then we may as well take our masks off & get it so we can build up our immunity. At some point we’re all bound to encounter it if it’s as contagious as the “experts” say it is. And I’m not about to wear a mask the rest of my life.
‘This sculpture has now become an urgent matter of public safety…’
Update: A YouTube user provided Liberty Headlines with additional video footage showing the actual assault.
Original story below:
(Liberty Headlines) A 31-year-old man was arrested over a Monday night shooting that occurred as rioters attempted to raze a statue of a Spanish conquistador in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Long-simmering tensions over nationwide race riots came to a head as protesters in New Mexico’s largest city tried to tear down the bronze statue of a Juan de Oñate outside the Albuquerque Museum.
Members of the New Mexico Civil Guard, a self-described civilian militia group, showed up to protect the statue.
Detectives arrested Stephen Ray Baca, son of a former Bernalillo County sheriff, and jailed him on suspicion of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, the Albuquerque Journal reported.
It’s not clear if Baca was there with the militia group as he appeared to be dressed differently from other members.
Gun vs. Skateboard
According to preliminary filings, Baca had been among those trying to protect the statue when protesters “appeared to maliciously pursue him,” the Albuquerque Police Department said.
Video streamed on Facebook Live showed protesters hitting Baca, a former Albuquerque City Council candidate, with what police described as a longboard skateboard and punching him before he opened fire with a handgun.
However, in a statement posted on Twitter, Albuquerque Police Chief Michael Geier said investigators had received prior “reports about vigilante groups possibly instigating this violence.”
Message from APD Chief Michael Geier: “We are receiving reports about vigilante groups possibly instigating this violence. If this is true will be holding them accountable to the fullest extent of the law, including federal hate group designation and prosecution.”
— Albuquerque Police Department (@ABQPOLICE) June 16, 2020
The video showed the two groups engaging peacefully and respectfully for nearly an hour before protesters wrapped a chain around the statue and began tugging on it while chanting “Tear it down.”
Things became more heated as a protester repeatedly swung a pickax at the base of the statue, prompting the militia members to intervene.
Moments later, a few gunshots rang out down the street and people yelled that someone had been shot.
After the shooting, other armed people encircled Baca in an apparent attempt to protect him, the video showed.
Police during the confrontation used tear gas and flash bangs to protect the officers who intervened. Without incident, they were able to detain Baca and the armed people who had surrounded him, said Albuquerque police spokesman Gilbert Gallegos.
Gallegos said the patriots were disarmed and taken into custody for questioning as police worked to secure the scene. On Tuesday, detectives were still investigating the incident with the help of the FBI.
Online court records did not list an attorney for Baca who could comment on his behalf.
The man who was shot was hospitalized Monday night in critical but stable condition, Gallegos said.
A Growing Rift
The shooting prompted the city to announce that the statue would be removed until officials could determine the next steps.
“Our hearts go out the victim, his family and witnesses whose lives were needlessly threatened tonight,” Democrat Mayor Tim Keller said in a statement.
“This sculpture has now become an urgent matter of public safety,” he said.
Tim Keller / IMAGE: Facebook
Keller also said in a press conference Tuesday that he planned to take the “Obama mayor’s pledge” to hold the city accountable for concerns over police brutality.
That initiative included turning over the leadership of the department.
More than a dozen innocent victims died during recent riots promoted by groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, which came in response to the Memorial Day killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd while in police custody.
Since then, the outrage has spawned a wave of demands from leftist radicals seeking to capitalize on their “moment.”
Efforts now have expanded into new areas of political activism, such as the “defund the police” movement.
In the absence of a discernible law-enforcement response, several well-armed militias have organized to maintain the peace according to the provisions outlined by the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.
Prior to Monday’s shooting, there had been no known reports of violence between the two groups of opposing protesters.
Yet, the rift between far-left, pro-anarchy factions and right-wing supporters of law-and-order has grown deeper as rioters have engaged in acts of felonious mischief with little recourse.
As they did previously during Obama-era race riots, racially motivated activists have insisted on censoring anything with ties to slavery or the Confederacy.
Members of the New Mexico Civil Guard / IMAGE: Fight for our Lives via Facebook
In addition to statues being destroyed, NASCAR announced it would ban the Confederate flag, HBO said it was pulling the classic movie Gone with the Wind, and the music group Lady Antebellum said it was changing its name.
The activists, whose desire for destruction has yet to be sated, are now courting aggrieved Native Americans—despite there being no immediate connection between them and the current concerns over police brutality and “systemic” racism within the African–American community.
Several statues of Genoan explorer Christopher Columbus have been among those targeted.
Oñate, who arrived in present-day New Mexico in 1598, is celebrated as a cultural father figure in communities along the Upper Rio Grande that trace their ancestry to Spanish settlers. But he’s also reviled for his brutality among Native Americans.
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) A low-level Twitter moderator recently contacted Sen. Tom Cotton’s office and issued an ultimatum: delete a tweet critical of Black Lives Matter-related riots or the social media giant would permanently lock his account.
Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, made headlines last month after an op-ed he penned appeared in the New York Times. Cotton called on the national guard and active military to back up overwhelmed police forces in cities where Black Lives Matter protests led to riots, looting, arson and violence.
A revolt ensued at the Times with journalists from the news division joining “woke” members of the editorial bureau who together claimed Cotton’s opinion — shared by a supermajority of Americans — had put black lives at risk.
That’s when Twitter came calling — and Cotton refused to back down.
Cotton had tweeted the editorial, and “within a few hours, a low-level employee in Twitter’s Washington office contacted some of my aides at random, claiming that my tweet violated the company’s policies,” he recounted in a new editorial posted on FoxNews.com on Wednesday.
“She gave me only 30 minutes to comply,” he said.
Cotton, 43, unseated an establishment Democrat in 2014 and is a shoo-in for reelection in November. He’s also a decorated Afghanistan war veteran and a Harvard law graduate. Facing off with a Silicon Valley woke functionary was is perhaps a sign of the times.
Cotton and his staff pressed Twitter for an explanation, but they were given different reasons why he was singled-out, some in contrast to others. At one point the moderator said the company took issue with a phrase in his op-ed and follow-up tweet that said, “no quarter.”
“No quarter” is a common expression meant in context to say that looters and violent anarchists should be unable to roam freely in open defiance of the law. But Cotton was told that the expression was taken as a reference that the military would execute urban prisoners of war.
“It was clear, I should add, that this low-level employee was acting as a front for more senior officials at Twitter, whom one might expect would contact directly a sitting senator to discuss such a serious matter,” he said.
“It was equally clear that she avoided putting as much in writing as possible.”
Cotton refused to delete his tweet, and two hours later the moderator called back and said the social media company would take no action against his account.
“Twitter began as an open platform committed to the free exchange of ideas; over time, it increasingly has taken upon itself the role of politically correct censor of thought-crime by elected officials and ordinary citizens alike,” Cotton said.
“Not surprisingly, the censorship falls overwhelmingly on conservatives,” he added.
Notably, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey unfollowed the New York Times Opinion Twitter account after it published Cotton’s original op-ed.
“The first African Americans sent into the English colonies came to Point Comfort in 1619,” Kaine said.
“They were slaves—they had been captured against their will—but they landed in colonies that didn’t have slavery,” he continued. “There were no laws about slavery in the colonies at that time. The United States didn’t inherit slavery from anybody. We created it.”
This is historically false — slavery was present throughout Europe, Africa, and other parts of the world long before the United States was founded. But Kaine continued to push his theory.
“[Slavery] got created by the Virginia General Assembly and the legislatures of other states,” he added. “It got created by the court systems in colonial America that enforced fugitive slave laws.”
Kaine then argued that the U.S. has “never gone back to undo” the system of slavery it created, despite ending some of its practices—which is why congress needs to “dismantle the structures of racism” that exist in the legal system, he added.
Tim Kaine / IMAGE: CSPAN via YouTube
“Stopping racist practices at year 350 of 400 years, but then taking no effort to dismantle them is not the same as truly combating racism,” he said.
Before gaining national notoriety as Hillary Clinton‘s 2016 running mate, Kaine served as governor of Virginia from 2006 to 2010 but showed little interest at the time in dismantling the commonwealth’s four-centuries-old practices.
However, current seat-holder Ralph Northam—after having been snared in a scandal over his own racist yearbook photo—has proceeded to enact several laws and fiats to do so.
Those include a symbolic purge of Virginia’s obsolete, “racist” laws and the removal of Confederate statues long deemed historic landmarks.
Earlier this week, Northam—who previously ended the state’s Lee–Jackson Day honoring two top Civil War generals—declared Friday’s “Juneteenth,” the date upon which slaves were freed during the war, to be a new state holiday.
But Kaine’s remarks evoked controversial comments that Northam made in a February 2019 interview with CBS’s Gayle King, during which he euphemistically appeared to downplay slavery by referring to the first slaves to arrive in the U.S. as “indentured servants.”
After facing online backlash, Kaine’s office tried to clarify his recent comments in a formal statement.
“Did slavery already exist in the world? Of course. But not in the laws of colonial America at the time,” Kaine said in the statement.
“We could have been a nation completely without the institution,” he continued. “But colonial legislatures and courts, and eventually the U.S. legal system, created the institution on our shores and maintained slavery until the 13th Amendment. As I said, we didn’t inherit it. We chose to create it.”
‘Billy Kersands, a black comedian and dancer, wrote ‘Old Aunt Jemima…”
Flickr: Aunt Jemima
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) Mars, Inc. said the product branding for Uncle Ben’s rice will “evolve,” while Quaker Oats said it will discontinue the Aunt Jemima pancake and syrup brand to fight racism, WCNC reported.
Mars, which owns Uncle Ben’s, issued a statement on the product’s brand evolution.
“We know we have a responsibility to take a stand in helping to put an end to racial bias and injustices,” the statement said. “We stand in solidarity with the Black community, our Associates and our partners in the fight for social justice. We know to make the systemic change needed, it’s going to take a collective effort from all of us.”
Leftists have targeted Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima as vestiges of slavery in America, Newsweek reported.
Aunt Jemima supposedly portrays a “mammy” caricature of a black woman who happily serves her white masters and neglects her own family.
The name also refers to a song called “Old Aunt Jemima,” which white men would sometimes perform while their skin was tinted black.
The attacks on the song often do not mention that Billy Kersands, a black comedian and dancer, wrote “Old Aunt Jemima.”
PepsiCo, which owns Quaker Oats, said the Aunt Jemima brand is “based on a racial stereotype.”
“While work has been done over the years to update the brand in a manner intended to be appropriate and respectful, we realize those changes are not enough,” said Kristin Kroepfl of Quaker Foods North America.
The newly branded pancake mix and syrup will replace the Aunt Jemima product brand in the fourth quarter of 2020. Quaker has not yet announced the product’s new name.
As part of the company’s atonement, PepsiCo will spend $400 million over 5 years “to lift up black communities and increase black representation at PepsiCo.”
‘People are acting the fool out here, and now you know the police aren’t going to be coming around this summer with all that’s going on…’
Detroit / IMAGE: NBC News via YouTube
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) When Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013, the city slashed police department funding by 20 percent and officers’ wages by 10 percent. Now, crime rates are up, Deadline Detroit reported.
There have been 100 murders so far this year (a 25 percent increase from last year), and 271 non-fatal shootings (a 30 percent jump from last year).
During the 80 days in which the state was locked down for the coronavirus, 18 children were shot.
Since Detroit’s bankruptcy, more than 500 children have been shot or killed, and suspects have been arrested in only 20 percent of cases.
And nine police officers have been killed on the job since 2013.
Detroit’s experience with cuts to police departments provides insight into the effects that the #DefundthePolice political movement may have on America’s communities.
Since Detroit’s police officers suffered a 10 percent pay cut in 2014, their pay has remained stagnant if it is adjusted for inflation.
Their starting pay is $40,000 per year to defend one of the nation’s most dangerous cities.
Since the city cannot offer competitive pay and benefits, Detroit has not been able to hire enough cops or to keep the ones that join the force.
Since 2014, Detroit’s police force has shrunk by 20 percent.
Rochelle Jones, who has two children and works, said the protests to Defund the Police will drive police officers out of her neighborhood, which will make children less safe as they play this summer.
“We don’t have enough police as it is,” Jones said. “People are acting the fool out here, and now you know the police aren’t going to be coming around this summer with all that’s going on. So what are the children supposed to do?”
Plus, these cops have limited experience in law enforcement, with half of the city’s police officers having served for five years or fewer.
As a result of either funding cuts or fear of public outrage, Detroit’s police have used less force and crime rates have risen.
Since 2014, situations in which police officers use force have declined by 60 percent.
Also, arrests have fallen by 40 percent.
‘Working to get websites you don’t like demonetized by Google isn’t journalism, it’s activism…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Conservative leaders reacted swiftly and sharply to Google‘s threat to demonetize two major conservative websites based on pressure from a campaign waged by left-wing radicals.
The tech goliath—which is able to manipulate and control much of the flow of internet traffic to and from information sites—sought to blacklist The Federalist and Zero Hedge after NBC News flagged the sites in coordination with a British activist group.
A leftwing activist masquerading as a NBC journalist helped bully @Google into pulling ad revenue from The Federalist because they criticized a political movement they disagree with.
The effort was apparently led by NBC activist–reporter Adele Momoko–Fraser, a London-based correspondent working with the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which claims to be funded largely by British television personality Rachel Riley.
The CCDH waged an ostensibly crowd-funded campaign called “Stop Funding Fake News” that targeted 10 U.S.-based right-leaning sites using flimsy, subjective evidence to claim the sites were promoting racism.
They claimed to be standing in “solidarity” with demonstrations led by the leftist group Black Lives Matter to protest “systemic” racism in America.
.@Google bans @FDRLST from its ad platform for writing the media had lied about violence & rioting at “largely peaceful” protests.
Many conservative news sites have questioned BLM’s true motives in promoting the often violent and lawless demonstrations. Some have noted its links to well-funded globalist organizations and groups with ulterior agendas that seem intent on destablizing and undermining America’s democratic institutions and electoral process.
Photo by pburka (CC)
BLM was criticized after secretly rerouting donations it had received following George Floyd‘s death while in police custody—not to causes that directly addressed the concerns raised but rather to the Democratic Party and the campaign of its presumptive nominee, Joe Biden.
While liberal outlets have laid cover for the so-called demonstrations, recasting inherently partisan activities—and even terrorist-style tactics—with a rosy filter of “social justice,” leftist operations like the CCDH have made clear their interest is only in suppressing alleged misinformation that runs counter to their agenda.
“Fake News and racist narratives can cause real-world harms: dehumanising black people and whipping up fear,” shrieked the group’s website. “Stop Funding Fake News is fighting back: we’re calling on advertisers to blacklist these 10, U.S-based, racist Fake News sites.”
A History of Censorship
Google’s move follows recent efforts by social-media sites like Twitter and Snapchat to censor President Donald Trump in the lead-up to the November election.
Using the pretense of media-driven “crises” engineered by the Left, including the overblown coronavirus panic and recent pro-anarchy race-riots, the sites have tried to suppress conservative speech using a variety of techniques.
IMAGE: Google via Youtube
Among them:
fake fact-checks to delegitimize right-wing arguments with specious counter-claims
use of algorithms for blacklisting conservatives and granting preferential promotion to far-left sites
the deletion or shadow-banning of accounts under the phony pretense of enforcing arbitrary “community guidelines” or terms of service
Ben Domenech, the publisher of The Federalist, said Wednesday on Fox and Friends that attacking advertising platforms was yet another dishonest tactic the radicals could use to disrupt the flow of ideas in favor of their political outcomes.
“We are really learning the degree to which Big Tech can be weaponized by woke mobs, or woke journalists in this case, to try to shut down places who disagree with their leftist agenda,” Domenech said.
Facing backlash, Google appeared to downplay the Federalist threat, claiming it had sought merely to address a specific concern over the website’s comments sections.
Our policies do not allow ads to run against dangerous or derogatory content, which includes comments on sites, and we offer guidance and best practices to publishers on how to comply. https://t.co/zPO669Yd0p
— Google Communications (@Google_Comms) June 16, 2020
However, the company—which also includes YouTube in its stable of communications platforms—has a long and troubled history of persecuting ideas with which it disagreed.
It has been known to use arbitrary conditions to de-index smaller sites in order to prevent them from appearing in its search-engine results altogether.
Calls for Accountability
Following Twitter’s recent attempts to fact-check Trump, the president responded with an executive order invoking Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
That would re-define platforms that unreasonably censor speech as “editors” rather than content-creators and publishers, subjecting them to stricter standards including culpability for libel and defamation lawsuits.
The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., suggested that Google also needed to have its role as a self-declared conduit of the First Amendment scrutinized more deeply.
As usual big tech wants to have it both ways where they can censor one side and not face any consequences on the other. https://t.co/zwiKWQoOzU
He called on GOP senators to “wake up” and force Google to answer for colluding with the radical activists in their extortion campaign.
The GOP Senate needs to wake up & IMMEDIATELY subpoena & haul in the CEO of @Google for questioning.
Google is an out of control monopoly, with a leftwing political agenda, engaging in a clear campaign to silence dissent. It’s election interference, full stop.
Several lawmakers responded, noting the hypocrisy, yet again, in the mainstream media’s blatant effort to push a leftist narrative.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who sits on several committees that provide oversight and regulation of Google, said he planned to send a letter to company CEO Sundar Pichai to address the latest abuse of power.
“These individuals demand that people with different views lose their livelihoods if they step out of line,” Cruz wrote, according to Fox News.
“Companies like Google must—to use a most Orwellian term—‘demonetize’ them,” he continued. “As evidence by its actions yesterday, Google seems more than happy to play this censorship role by trying to break the financial back of a media publication it disagrees with.”
Cruz noted that taking issue with content from a media site’s comments section was ironic given the fact that YouTube has a particularly unwieldy one which likely violates many of the same purported guidelines.
NBC, likewise, was dinged from several directions for its duplicity in the censorship scandal.
President Trump himself offered indirect criticism by retweeting post that highlighted the double-standards in NBC’s coverage.
Surprisingly, even Trump’s longtime nemesis, CNN, came to the Right’s defense in condemning the underhanded, non-journalistic means that NBC had used to inject itself into the story.
Working to get websites you don’t like demonetized by Google isn’t journalism, it’s activism.
‘I am certainly willing to put my vote where my words are…’
Black Lives Matter in Charlotte, North Carolina, via Twitter @HBGranttCenter
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) Charlotte, North Carolina city officials said they support a resolution to declare that racism is a public health crisis and Mecklenburg County officials unanimously passed a similar resolution.
Mecklenburg County Commissioners drafted and approved a resolution to declare racism a public health crisis on June 16, WBTV reported.
“Racism unfairly disadvantages Black and Brown individuals and communities, while unfairly giving advantages to other individuals and communities,” the county’s resolution said.
It also discusses systemic racism and the need to dismantle America’s institutions.
“Looking at racism in this way offers legislators, health officials, and others an opportunity to analyze data and discuss how to dismantle or change problematic institutions,” the county’s resolution said.
Commissioner Trevor Fuller said racism is “the original sin of America” and it still exists.
Charlotte City Councilman Malcolm Graham said racism is everywhere, WBTV reported.
“This is a defining moment in our country’s history,” Graham said.
“That I think we have to make a stand against racism and all its forms whether it’s racism in police departments, health care systems, educational systems – employment opportunities,” he added.
He said either the mayor or city council will draft a proclamation about racism.
Graham said he believes that the proclamation will be a reminder to the city’s leaders that they should consider race in every decision they make.
“I think the people want us to follow those statements with action,” Graham said. “I am certainly willing to put my vote where my words are.
Both Charlotte and Mecklenburg’s proclamations stem from the “disparate impact” ideology, which asserts that disparities among different groups of people related to employment, healthcare, housing, criminal justice, etc. are the result of racism.
Graham said the proclamation will be the first step toward eliminating these disparate impacts in employment and healthcare.
“Making sure that our workforce reflects our community as a whole,” Graham said. “Making sure we work with our delegation to say that we want healthcare for all – Medicaid expansion.”
‘At what point does this become a national religion?…’
The Boy Scouts (Wikimedia Commons)
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) The Boy Scouts of America announced this week that it will require its Eagle Scouts to earn a “diversity and inclusion merit badge” as part of its support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
Starting July 1, the group will also require its employees to undergo “diversity and inclusion” training and review its “property names, events, and insignia” to make sure that they do not bear resemblance to racist stereotypes.
“This is not a political issue,” the organization’s National Executive Committee said in a letter released on Monday. “It is a human rights issue and one we all have a duty to address.”
The BSA did not list the requirements Eagle Scouts must meet to earn the “diversity” badge, but several critics have already pointed out how worthless the award will be.
The Boy Scouts are introducing an “inclusion” badge in a partnership with BLM. You must earn to it become an Eagle Scout.
If your kid needs a badge to feel good about accepting people, you’re doing a crappy job as a parent. Woke politics is ruining everything.
Meanwhile, the organization continues to face several lawsuits from hundreds of former Scouts who have alleged sexual abuse. In February, the BSA had to file for bankruptcy protection because it could not keep up with all of its legal costs.
This could be one of the reasons why the BSA is taking coming out strong in support of BLM, said Alvin Tillery Jr., a political science professor at Northwestern University.
“This is an organization that is super-embattled and they’ve had to adopt more progressive stances because nobody wants to have anything to do with them,” Tillery told NBC News.
‘They don’t like anybody to have a business. They don’t think capitalism works…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) The Democratic mayor of Olympia, Washington, came out in support of the Black Lives Matter movement earlier this month.
But as soon as her own home was vandalized by rioters who claimed to be associated with the movement, she likened it to “domestic terrorism.”
Mayor Cheryl Selby refused to condemn violent riots taking place across the country after George Floyd’s death, and instead argued that “we should feel sick” about the “racial injustices black people continue to endure at the hands of police in the United States.”
But then her home was vandalized by rioters who spray painted “BLM,” “racist,” and “abolish” on her house.
“It’s like domestic terrorism,” Selby told the Olympian. “It’s unfair.”
Protesters had tried to gather in front of her house earlier last week, but Selby saw them coming and called the cops immediately. The protesters had scattered filers around the area with a picture of Selby and the words, “Drink Your Wine,” according to a local radio station.
These rioters were “anarchists,” Selby said.
“They don’t like anybody to have a business,” she added. “They don’t think capitalism works.”
The group of rioters eventually made their way back downtown after vandalizing Selby’s home, smashing the glass doors and windows of several businesses and setting flags on fire. A rival group of protesters, who called themselves the “peacekeepers,” tried to protect the city’s businesses, fixing street signs and holding paintball guns to fend off looters.
Protesters similarly turned on Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who was shouted down and forced to leave a protest after he said that he would not support efforts to defund the police.
“Go home, Jacob go home!” the protesters chanted. “Shame! Shame!”
