As the Left Celebrates Census Delay, SCOTUS Decision Could Be Great News for Trump

Ben Sellers
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‘A court may not set aside an agency’s policymaking decision solely because it might have been influenced by political considerations or prompted by an Administration’s priorities…’

SCOTUS Set to Rule on Landmark Cases in Census, Gerrymandering
PHOTO: Fred Schilling, Supreme Court Curator’s Office

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Pundits on both sides of the aisle interpreted as a victory for leftist open-border advocates the complex ruling by the Supreme Court over the Commerce Department‘s inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2020 U.S. census.

But by striking down arguments that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was “arbitrary and capricious” in his decision to include the question, the court in fact delivered a victory to the Trump administration—provided it can outmaneuver activist stall tactics to delay the census.

The Court’s decision on Thursday sent the Department of Commerce v. New York back to the Southern District of New York, leaving the liberal district court to determine whether Ross can provide a “reasoned explanation,” in keeping with the Administrative Procedure Act, for including the citizenship question.

The Court rebuked what it characterized as a “contrived” explanation provided by Ross that the measure was done in coordination with the Justice Department to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

Instead, the justices contended that Ross’s true aim was pretextual, coming well before he approached the attorney general’s office to provide him with the voting rights rationale.

“The record shows that the Secretary began taking steps to reinstate a citizenship question about a week into his tenure, but it contains no hint that he was considering VRA enforcement in connection with that project,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a unanimous decision that nonetheless received three separate dissents, comprising the objections of all eight other members of the bench.

While casting doubt on Ross’s official explanation, however, the court also upheld the authority of the Commerce secretary to use his discretion in what questions to include of the census.

It thus limited the ability of activist judges in the lower courts to reject his rationale simply because it was politically motivated.

“[A] court may not set aside an agency’s policymaking decision solely because it might have been influenced by political considerations or prompted by an Administration’s priorities,” Roberts wrote.

Renegade Judge, w/out a Jury, Blocks Citizenship Question on 2020 Census 1
Wilbur Ross/Photo by Gage Skidmore (CC)

In essence, the court’s ruling told Ross to admit there were other factors involved in his decision while also asserting that those other factors could not prevent the inclusion of the question.

At several times, the ruling opinion pointedly observed that it was not the court’s place to substitute its own judgment for that of a government agency.

“It is not for us to ask whether his decision was ‘the best one possible’ or even whether it was ‘better than the alternatives,'” wrote Roberts, who criticized the district court and dissenting justices for imposing their own value judgments.

Opponents’ challenge to the decision rested largely on their own political motives—among them, the fear of losing funding and political power if illegal immigrants being harbored in “sanctuary states” declined to be included in the official census count.

The court agreed, saying evidence supported the likelihood that the question would result in fewer responses from illegals.

Even so, it said, that concern did not present a valid legal challenge to Ross’s authority, maintaining that the inclusion of a citizenship question was entirely permissible in the eyes of the law.

“[W]e decline respondents’ invitation to measure the constitutionality of the citizenship question by a standard that would seem to render every census since 1790 unconstitutional,” Roberts wrote.

The question was included on every census up until 1950 when, in order to simplify the process, the Census Bureau began putting it only on a long-form census questionnaire to be completed by a smaller, representative sample of the population.

The Census Bureau then used estimates provided by other agencies to fill in the gaps, but Ross contended that those estimates were not sufficient to provide an accurate count of legal residents.

“Weighing that uncertainty against the value of obtaining more complete and accurate citizenship data, he determined that reinstating a citizenship question was worth the risk of a potentially lower response rate,” Roberts wrote. “That decision was reasonable and reasonably explained, particularly in light of the long history of the citizenship question on the census.”

Although government officials are prevented by law from using the citizenship information collected by the census to enforce immigration policies, Ross can certainly make the case that there is strong national interest in having a thorough count of the number of illegal immigrants residing in the country.

In criticizing Ross’s claims about the Voting Rights Act being his primary motivation, Roberts cited a 1977 opinion that justices were “not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free.”

While that may hold true, however, it also means the justices would likely accept the ongoing national emergency and contentious debate over immigration to be a valid reasons on their face for including the question.

Regardless, the race to come up with a more plausible and legally sound rationale for the citizenship question is likely to mean delays for the Census Bureau, which had set next Monday, July 1, as its target to begin printing.

While in Japan at the G20 summit, President Donald Trump weighed in, saying he would seek to push back the deadlines pending a court resolution.

Supreme Court Upholds Partisan Gerrymandering

Ben Sellers
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‘What the appellees and dissent seek is an unprecedented expansion of judicial power…’

Dem. Attorney Marc Elias Used Activist Court Rulings to Redraw GOP Districts 1
North Carolina’s Congressional districts/IMAGE: USA Today via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In a pair of cases challenging largely left-wing efforts to subvert state legislatures’ ability to establish their own voting districts, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the courts had no authority to force partisan maps to be redrawn.

“No one can accuse this Court of having a crabbed view of the reach of its competence,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts, delivering the majority opinion. “But we have no commission to allocate political power and influence in the absence of a constitutional directive or legal standards to guide us in the exercise of such authority.”

The decision remanded two cases back to the lower courts with the charge to dismiss due to lack of jurisdiction: Rucho v. Common Cause, an appeal to a federal court ruling that forced North Carolina‘s GOP-led legislature to redraw its lines making the map more favorable to their opponents; and Lamone v. Benisek, in which Republicans in Maryland challenged the Democratic legislature over a lost seat.

The court’s conservative majority not only affirmed the role of duly-elected representatives to make redistricting decisions, but it also delivered a stinging rebuke to those attempting increasingly to use the courts for their own partisan, political purposes.

“What the appellees and dissent seek is an unprecedented expansion of judicial power,” Roberts wrote.

In a 2017 ruling, Cooper v. Harris, also from North Carolina, the court struck down race-based gerrymandering as a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

But despite repeated efforts to get the court to do so over the past 45 years, Roberts said it has never once ruled a a partisan gerrymander to be unconstitutional.

Doing so would establish an alarming precedent for the court, already criticized for having lost its objectivity as politically motivated forces continue to pressure it to be the final authority on divisive issues—including elections themselves.

“The expansion of judicial authority would not be into just any area of controversy, but into one of the most intensely partisan aspects of American political life,” Roberts said.

“That intervention would be unlimited in scope and duration—it would recur over and over again around the country with each new round of districting, for state as well as federal representatives,” he said.

In tackling the question of fairness, Roberts expressed skepticism that any courtroom was more fit than any legislative chamber to make those determinations.

SCOTUS Set to Rule on Landmark Cases in Census, Gerrymandering
PHOTO: Fred Schilling, Supreme Court Curator’s Office

Citing the late Justice Antonin Scalia in a previous decision that attempted to tackle a judicial standard of “fairness,” Roberts wrote, “The initial difficulty in settling on a ‘clear, manageable and politically neutral’ test for fairness is that it is not even clear what fairness looks like in this context. There is a large measure of ‘unfairness’ in any winner-take-all system.”

That is why the Constitution specifically vested the power to those who were elected and could be held politically accountable, he added.

“Even the most sophisticated districting maps cannot reliably account for some of the reasons voters prefer one candidate over another, or why their preferences may change,” noted Roberts.

“Voters elect individual candidates in individual districts, and their selections depend on the issues that matter to them, the quality of the candidates, the tone of the candidates’ campaigns, the performance of an incumbent, national events or local issues that drive voter turn-out, and other considerations.”

It was not immediately clear what the implications might be for other states, such as Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Virginia, where, prior to the 2018 elections, the lower federal courts already had mandated that legislative maps be redrawn due to alleged partisan influence.

The court previously had punted on challenges to lower court decisions from Wisconsin and Virginia, saying that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the cases. It had recently put on hold the cases pending in Ohio and Michigan.

Thursday’s landmark decision determined that the states themselves must decide what standards to follow, which also left open the possibility of judicial activism at the state level rather than the federal level.

Joined by the court’s other liberal members, Justice Elena Kagan said in her dissenting opinion that by choosing not to impose its own activist demands on state legislatures, the court was effectively breaking precedent.

“For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities,” she began, accusing the recent gerrymandering efforts of having “debased and dishonored our democracy.”

Gerrymandering practices, originally named after a Democratic governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, have been in existence since at least 1812.

The challenges to the practice picked up momentum after a coalition of leftist politicians and investors established the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, led by former Attorney General Eric Holder, which has been at the forefront of many of the “Sue till Blue” legal challenges targeting red states.

Additional reporting drawn from the Los Angeles Times contributed to this piece.

SCOTUS Set to Rule on Landmark Cases in Census, Gerrymandering

Ben Sellers
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Contrary to expectations, conservative justices have kept people guessing on recent decisions by siding with liberal minority…

SCOTUS Set to Rule on Landmark Cases in Census, Gerrymandering
PHOTO: Fred Schilling, Supreme Court Curator’s Office

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As the final day of the Supreme Court’s current session arrived, it had yet to announce the decisions in several landmark cases that will likely impact the political landscape in next year’s presidential election and beyond.

Those cases will determine whether state legislatures are permitted to factor in partisan advantages when drawing the lines of voting districts and whether the national census, which the Commerce Department will soon undertake, may include a question about citizenship.

Although some had anticipated that the court’s addition of Justice Brett Kavanaugh might help entrench its conservative bloc, either by design or happenstance justices have kept court-watchers guessing.

While it was expected that Chief Justice John Roberts might fill the former niche of the retired Anthony Kennedy as a moderate swing vote, instead the recent decisions have seen some of the bench’s most conservative members—including justices Clarence Thomas and the libertarian-leaning Neil Gorsuch, siding with the liberals in several cases.

In keeping with past sessions that pushed major cases on matters like Obamacare and gay marriage to the very end, Thursday’s cases are, with little dispute, the most impactful and politically divisive of the current session.

The first issue will be decided in a pair of cases: Lamone v. Benisek, in which Republicans in Maryland challenged the Democratic legislature over a lost seat; and Rucho v. Common Cause, an appeal to a federal court ruling that forced North Carolina‘s GOP-led legislature to redraw its lines making the map more favorable to their opponents.

The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, led by former Attorney General Eric Holder, has been at the forefront of many of the legal challenges targeting red states, which enabled Democrats to pick up seats last year in places like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

But many were left struggling to read the omens after the court last week dismissed a challenge brought by Virginia’s Republican legislature.

The majority opinion in Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune–Hill said that the legislators lacked standing and that only the state’s left-wing attorney general, Mark Herring, had the authority to pose a legal challenge to the lower court’s decision.

While it could possibly signal reason for the Republican plaintiffs to worry in the other two cases, it is equally likely that the court simply sought to clear the docket knowing that the Lamone and Rucho cases would provide a stronger basis for the same outcome.

The court’s decision in Department of Commerce v. New York, whether to allow Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to include a citizenship question on next year’s census will also have implications on the balance of political power.

Democrats, who have pushed for open borders an allowing illegal immigrants to reside in sanctuary states, stand to gain funds and, possibly, congressional seats by importing new residents, regardless of whether they have the ability to legally vote in the state.

On the other hand, they have raised objections to the addition of the censorship question out of the fear that it will cause illegals not to participate in the census, thus costing seats.

Ross has said the purpose of its inclusion was to help ensure compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in its efforts to ensure that all legally voting citizens have equal access.

Challengers have lately sought to urge the justices to send the case back to the lower courts, claiming they have discovered new evidence of Ross’s partisan intentions.

However, the effort seems a likely stall tactic as the Supreme Court initially had agreed to fast-track its hearing because the printing of the census needs to begin soon.

The decisions, regardless of how they break, are likely to draw a firestorm of criticism from opponents.

One more case remaining on the docket, Mitchell v. Wisconsin, may offer the justices a brief respite, as they decide whether blood drawn from an unconscious motorist is a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s search and seizure protections.

The court will begin its session at 10 a.m., according to the SCOTUSblog website. Stay tuned to Liberty Headlines for the latest developments as they come.

Fake Neuroscientist Rehashes Claims that Trump Supporters Are Ignorant Rubes

Ben Sellers
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‘For some voters, it’s just not cool to be smart, and the view seems to be gaining popularity…’

Research into 'Disgustology' May Help Explain Left's Lax Ethical Attitudes
Donald Trump/ IMAGE: AFP news agency via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A recent piece in Psychology Today is the latest effort by partisan liberals to deconstruct the elusively enigmatic appeal of President Donald Trump using dubious scientific research.

Their conclusion: He dumbs things down.

Many academics, sequestered in the left-leaning ivory towers of college campuses, were shocked and overcome with righteous indignation at the results of the 2016 election.

The reasons for Trump’s political success—notably, his ability to take on the corrupt Hillary Clinton campaign, his refusal to capitulate to blatantly biased media smears and his promise to dismantle the years of radical social-engineering during the Obama administration—may seem obvious to the president’s supporters.

Left-wing elitists, however, have continued to interpolate other factors, with the foundational assumptions being their own superior intellect and emotional complexity.

Often, the suggestion is that the public was, in some way, duped into voting for Trump over Hillary Clinton—which these so-called scholars condescendingly assert was an irrational decision, clearly indicative of a lack of healthy, normal reasoning capacity.

Such was the thrust of a 2017 study conducted by a University of Texas at Austin graduate student and her professor, a leading social psychologist in the area of linguistics.

In “The exception or the rule: Using words to assess analytic thinking, Donald Trump, and the American presidency,” Kayla N. Jordan and James W. Pennebaker concluded that Trump measured low on a scale devised by Pennebaker to gauge a person’s intellectual processes based on his use of low-level vocabulary words.

In fairness, such linguistic analysis has been the focus of Pennebaker’s research throughout his career, and Trump’s unique rhetorical approach certainly invited a study of this kind.

“The analysis of speeches, debates, and various documents demonstrates that Trump stands out from other politicians as being very low in analytic thinking,” the researchers wrote in their abstract.

“However, he represents the next step in a trend wherein most Presidents and presidential candidates have been becoming less analytic. Trump may be an anomaly, but he is also a part of a long-developing presidential pattern,” they said.

The “findings” played well into a common left-wing trope—the same thread that insisted Yale-educated George W. Bush was a cowboy dummy while Barack Obama was  “cerebral” and “erudite,” casting aside his failures in leadership because he was too busy being immersed in deep thoughts.

More interesting than its discoveries about Trump (revealing his language to register nearly 20 points lower than Clinton’s on the scale, 23.8 to 42.8) were that Ben Carson—a literal brain surgeon—scored the lowest among Trump’s Republican competitors (39.1), while Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, scored the highest (62.1).

The study also looked at the broader historical trends, suggesting presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt have declined in their analytical-thinking quotients based on Pennebaker’s linguistics scale.

This coincides, conveniently, with the emergence of broadcast media as a primary communications platform, one that lends itself to the sort of concise “sound bite” statements that Trump—a public figure and television personality for the past four decades—seems to have mastered.

It was from this study that Bobby Azarian—a partisan hack with a long history of promoting a political agenda under the auspices of science—staged his recent attack via the Psychology Today blog “Mind in the Machine.”

Although he purports to be a doctor of neuroscience, Azarian’s degree is a Ph.D, not a medical degree, and he appears to have worked in no professional research capacity other than a few short-term stringer assignments since graduating from George Mason University in 2014.

But as a freelancer for far-left media—including Salon, Slate, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast and the Huffington Post—Azarian has received a warm embrace due to his willingness to lend pseudo-scientific authority to outlandish and sensational conservative-bashing claims.

Azarian wrote similar hit pieces on Trump—attempting to diminish the intellectual faculties of his supporters—prior to the 2016 election, and he was more recently vaulted into the liberal echo chamber for claiming a link between religious fundamentalism and brain damage.

His latest blog post, just in time for the new election cycle, rehashed one he originally published in 2017, shortly after the UT linguistics study was first released.

“While the analytically-minded may see Donald Trump’s opinions and answers as superficial and uninformed, many people view them as straightforward and relatable,” Azarian said.

Azarian acknowledged that a less complicated style of communication could prove to be a political asset—as it did in Trump’s case.

“A certain degree of perceived ignorance can be beneficial for a presidential candidate, especially if he can pass it off as being ‘folksy,'” he said.

However, he then strayed from the research in order to do some editorializing of his own.

“Perhaps presidents are just becoming better at simplifying complex information into direct, simple language. But the case of President Trump seems to tell a different story,” Azarian wrote.

“It appears to indicate a thriving movement composed of individuals who are anti-intellectual and anti-science, and they want a president who is the same,” he continued. “For some voters, it’s just not cool to be smart, and the view seems to be gaining popularity.”

Of course, when this is what passes for ‘science’ in scholarly publications, it is easy to see why some conservatives might come across as “anti-science”—but that, too, is likely to become a topic in need of further (government-funded) research by progressive “thinkers.”

Google Official Stonewalls Senate Committee on Anti-Conservative Bias

Ben Sellers
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‘You guys could literally sit down at your board meeting, I believe, and determine who’s gonna be the next president of the United States…’

Senate Panel of AI Experts Denies Anti-Conservative Bias, Downplays Evidence
Ron Johnson / IMAGE: Senate Commerce Committee screenshot

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The day after Project Veritas released an exposé providing both documents and a hidden-camera confession from a Google executive that it was engaged in anti-conservative bias, senators had the chance to grill a company representative about it during a committee hearing.

But even when faced with evidence of bias, a panel of so-called expert researchers in artificial intelligence continued to downplay tech companies’ efforts to manipulate their algorithms in service of a partisan agenda.

The panel appeared before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation, and the Internet, chaired by Sen. John Thune, R-SD, on the topic “Optimizing for Engagement: Understanding the Use of Persuasive Technology on Internet Platforms.”

Among the witnesses was Maggie Stanphill, director of Google user experience, who repeatedly stonewalled questions about the company’s use of “persuasive technology.”

Several senators, after criticizing Stanphill for refusing to give direct answers, turned to the other three panelists, who offered a sometimes damning account of what companies like Google did to maximize their profit margins.

Tristan Harris, of the Center for Humane Technology, likened the user-optimization experience that kept people coming back to tech companies “crawling down the brain stem” of their platform’s users.

Panelists testified to the dangerous and subversive effects of algorithms that deployed data-mining to influence a user’s perspectives and choices in a variety of ways.

Citing Instagram and its parent company, Facebook, as examples, Harris said, “What it actually is doing is an attempt to cause you to come back every day because now you wanna see, ‘Do I have more followers now than I did yesterday?'”

If someone attempts to delete a site like Facebook, a screen will pop up asking users if they are sure they want to leave, along with the faces of five close connections.

“They’re calculating which of the five faces would be most likely to get you to hit cancel and not delete your Facebook account,” Harris said.

The panel also addressed the dangerous social impact that the platforms could have on non-users, such as a traffic app, Waze, that redirected vehicles through a residential neighborhood, resulting in increased accidents.

But when it came time to discuss allegations of anti-conservative bias, despite recent evidence, all four witnesses seemed to dismiss the notion that the overtly left-leaning Silicon Valley monopolies would be engaged in such a thing.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., told the panel that five conservative staff members of his, as an experiment, had sought suggestions from the photo-sharing Instagram app on whom to follow, only to be bombarded with a litany of radical, far-left organizations and political candidates.

Only a single conservative-leaning institution, the Wall Street Journal was included in the list, Johnson said. (The Journal‘s opinion page leans conservative, while the newspaper’s reporting mostly leans left.)

Johnson said the experiment made clear it was not user habits dictating the results but some outside influence steering them in the opposite direction.

“If there are really algorithms shuffling the content that they might want to—that they would agree with—you would expect they would see maybe Fox New, Breitbart, Newsmax,” he said. “You might even see like a really big name, like Donald Trump.”

Even so, Harris rejected the possibility of bias and suggested that the prior “click pattern” of the staffers may have driven the recommendations.

Two other panelists—Rashida Richardson of the AI Now Institute and Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Research—said that the overwhelmingly left-wing results from the five conservative staff members likely had to do with what was popular and trending at the time on Instagram.

Stanphill, the Google representative, claimed ignorance but broadly denied (contrary to evidence) that the company played political favorites in its search results.

“I can speak for Google’s stance, just generally, with respect to AI, which is we build products for everyone, so we’ve got systems in place to ensure no bias is introduced,” she said.

Johnson remained skeptical and called on further investigation into the matter.

“Conservatives have legitimate concern that content is being pushed from a liberal/progressive standpoint to the vast majority of users of these social sites,” he said.

Thune agreed with him.

“If you Google yourself, you’ll find most of the things that pop up right away are gonna be from news organizations that tend to be to the Left,” he said.

“I have had that experience as well,” he continued, “and it seems like if that actually was based upon a neutral algorithm or some other form of artificial intelligence, that since you’re the user and since they know your habits and patterns, you might see something, instead of from the New York Times, pop up from Fox News or from the Wall Street Journal.”

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., expressed a similar line of concern over the alarming addictiveness he had observed in his own grandchildren while engaged in online content and the potential impacts it could have in swaying public sentiment.

“I will tell you that I’m probably gonna be dead and gone—and I’ll probably be thankful for it—when all this shit comes to fruition,” Tester told the panel.

Addressing Google, he said, “… You guys could literally sit down at your board meeting, I believe, and determine who’s gonna be the next president of the United States.”

Sen. Ted Cruz also confronted Stanphill directly on the report from Project Veritas, including the hidden-camera admissions from Jen Gennai, Google’s head of “responsible innovation,” that top brass there saw a duty to influence election outcomes and “prevent” another 2016.

Cruz grilled Stanphill over a PowerPoint presentation leaked to Project Veritas in which Google’s internal memos proposed actively intervening in the machine learning process to account for what they considered “fairness” that might not otherwise be reflected in user-driven algorithms.

“Google according this whistleblower, deliberately makes recommendations—if someone is searching for conservative commentators—deliberately shifts the recommendations … [to] organizations like CNN or MSNBC or left leaning political outlets. Is that occurring?” Cruz asked.

Again, Stanphill pleaded ignorance, claiming that it was outside her realm of expertise.

“I can’t comment on search algorithms or recommendations given my purview as digital well-being lead,” she said. “I can take that back to my team, though.”

Michigan GOP the Latest in a String of Anti-Right Vandalism Attacks

Ben Sellers
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‘Our attack is merely a beginning. We are not passive, we are not civil, and we will not apologize…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The Michigan Republican Party said its headquarters in Lansing was vandalized over the weekend with a profanity spray-painted on the side of the building attacking federal immigration authorities.

Although cameras captured the crime occurring overnight between Friday and Saturday, police were unable to identify the culprit based on that alone, reported the news site MLive.

MIGOP Chair Laura Cox posted on Twitter that the graffiti may have been in connection with her previous role as agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

However, Cox may be giving the vandals too much credit in ascribing their motives. The act is just one of many in recent memory that involves presumed leftist radicals defacing both public and private property.

Since 2016, Republican offices in Indiana, North Carolina, Texas, Wyoming, Florida and New York are among the documented cases of vandalism (including the use of gunfire), burglary and arson that appear to have been politically motivated.

An attack on the Manhattan’s Metropolitan Republican Club last October, which included spray-painting, gluing locks shut and damaging a keypad at the front entrance, the vandals left a threatening message accusing Republicans of running concentration camps at the southern border and claimed it “shamelessly murders black people.”

The radicals, who sprayed anarchist symbols and also criticized the Democratic Party in their message as “spineless partners-in-crime,” said there would be more to come.

“Our attack is merely a beginning,” said their message. “We are not passive, we are not civil, and we will not apologize.”

The latest attack on the Michigan office came as President Donald Trump announced that he would delay by two weeks his previously announced plan for massive deportations, saying it was to give lawmakers an opportunity to fix legislative loopholes in the asylum laws.

Project Veritas Exposes Google Exec Discussing Efforts to ‘Prevent’ Another Trump

Ben Sellers
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‘They’re going to redefine a reality based on what they think is fair and based upon what they want, and what and is part of their agenda…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) While tech mega-corporation Google has persistently ducked accusations of systematic bias, whistleblowers continue to derail the narrative and embarrass the company with revelations of its extreme-left-wing internal deliberations.

Project Veritas is the latest to cast light on the search platform’s overt hostilities directed at conservatives when its staff members think they are in friendly company.

A new video and report from the conservative undercover watchdogs levied an array of accusations against Google’s alleged efforts to suppress the Right—and possibly to interfere illegally in next year’s presidential elections.

The exposé caught Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation, tipping her partisan hand in what appears to be a casual restaurant conversation caught by hidden camera.

Gennai’s department, with a quasi-Orwellian-sounding name, oversees the development and implementation of Google’s artificial-intelligence technology—meaning that if androids and cyborgs are ever given the right to vote, they will definitely swing socialist.

Gennai, upon hearing that Google’s monopolistic trust could be broken up by Congress, offered her own unique rationale for why it should continue to operate as a corporate monolith with unprecedented powers to surveil and censor its users according to its own whims.

“Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google,” Gennai said. “And like, I love her, but she’s very misguided—like, that will not make it better; it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation—it’s like, a small company cannot do that.”

Gennai also candidly acknowledged that the company had been making efforts to reprogram its systems with a specific political agenda in mind.

“We all got screwed over in 2016—again it wasn’t just us [Google]; it was the people [who] got screwed over, the news media got screwed over—like, everybody got screwed over, so we’ve rapidly been like, ‘What happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again?'” she said.

“We’re also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have—would the outcome be different?” Gennai added.

Previous accusations against Google have presented evidence of the site’s anti-conservative biases—showing, for example, that 96 percent of its search results for President Donald Trump came from sites that were hostile toward conservatives.

In the past, Google engineers have used the cover of algorithms as a scapegoat, saying that their development helped to eliminate the human biases that would otherwise result.

However, it long has been suspected that its engineers were actively manipulating the algorithms themselves.

A report last September on a leaked e-mail thread at the company revealed its internal discussions on how to tweak the messaging related to Trump’s ban on travel to and from countries that provided safe harbor to terrorists, as well as terms related to illegal immigration.

More recently, the Daily Caller reported earlier in June, based on information provided by a whistle-blower, that the company maintained programs that effectively blacklisted many mainstream conservative news organizations from surfacing in certain search results.

The Project Veritas video further explored the way a program at Google called Machine Learning Fairness systematically suppresses the viewpoints that the company disagrees with.

An anonymous insider with the company provided documents that it said outline many of Google’s policies, sometimes using coded or euphemistic language to mask their true intent.

“They’re going to redefine a reality based on what they think is fair and based upon what they want, and what and is part of their agenda,” said the source.

The source revealed that one of Google’s top sites, video platform YouTube, had manipulated the way it recommended similar results after someone had viewed specific content in order to bury conservative-oriented influencers.

The insider, who also provided documents with titles such as “Fair is Not the Default” suggesting Google sought to further rationalize its systematic pursuit of biased perspectives, said Project Veritas was the only investigative operation currently capable of handling the revelations against Google.

The organization—headed by James O’Keefe—has also conducted recent investigations into bias at Facebook and Pinterest.

“The reason why I came to Project Veritas is that you’re the only one I trust to be able to be a real investigative journalist,” said the informant.

“Investigative journalist is a dead career option, but somehow, you’ve been able to make it work,” the source said. “And because of that, I came to Project Veritas—because I knew that this was the only way that this story would be able to get out to the public.”

Mainstream Media Finally Probing Biden Corruption Scandals

Ben Sellers
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‘Why were these foreign governments and these foreign corrupt oligarchs stuffing money into Hunter Biden’s pocket?’

1
Joe Biden / IMAGE: America Rising ICYMI via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As he attempts to solidify his front-runner status in the Democratic primaries, former Vice President Joe Biden faces greater scrutiny from the mainstream media than ever before.

In fact, reporters at ABC News recently came around to addressing a concern, long raised by opponents, that Biden used his influence during the Obama administration to financially benefit his son, Hunter—while possibly violating one of the same laws for which Democrats have attempted to impeach President Donald Trump.

Supporters recently have tried to turn many of Biden’s liabilities into assets—claiming, for instance, that his indecent liberties with women and young girls are a benevolent throwback to the era before political correctness defined politics.

Meanwhile, Biden’s waxing nostalgic over two segregationist senators from his early days in Congress was spun as the ultimate hallmark of bipartisanship.

These faux scandals seem a calculated effort to roil his liberal opponents and define his “moderate” claim, despite also embracing increasingly radical, borderline-socialist positions on issues like abortion, free college tuition, healthcare, infrastructure and the environment.

Yet, Biden’s greatest danger may rest not in a carefully engineered gaffe, but in a long buried corruption scandal that has taken new significance in light of the Left’s incessant attacks on Trump.

‘Cancer of Corruption’

House Democrats, based on little more than a hunch, have sought to examine the president’s tax returns, claiming he has repeatedly violated the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, which prevents U.S. office holders from accepting gifts or titles from foreign entities.

Applying the same standard, however, Biden’s dealings with in Ukraine and China while his son was involved in major business ventures there raise grave concerns as to whether his conflicts of interest crossed the line into corruption.

ABC News said Biden refused to specifically answer questions about the scandal at multiple campaign stops recently, although he released statements through his campaign claiming he had always followed prescribed ethical guidelines and that, if elected, he would issue an executive order to clearly address ethics policies.

Ironically, Biden was sent to the Ukraine in 2014 to assist in its own efforts to clean up government following a populist revolution.

“You have to fight the cancer of corruption that is endemic in your system right now,” he preached at the Ukrainian parliament. “And with the right investments and the right choices, Ukraine can reduce its energy dependence and increase its energy security.”

Shortly thereafter, one of the investments the country made was that the its largest energy producer, Burisma, appointed Hunter Biden to be a paid member of its board of directors.

Hunter Biden had recently been discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine and had little to no experience with Ukrainian politics or affairs, ABC News reported.

From Bad to Worse…

Hunter Biden / IMAGE: CNN via Youtube

In March 2016, Joe Biden returned to Ukraine, again to pressure it to deal with a major corruption scandal.

During that visit, the vice president threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that the U.S. would pull a $1 billion loan guarantee if he didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

The issue, on its face, was that Shokin was not bringing enough corruption prosecutions, according to Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff.

However, one prosecution Shokin was looking into at the time was that of Hunter Biden, who appeared to be funneling regular monthly deposits in excess of $160,000 from a Burisma account into that of his American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC.

After leaving office, Joe Biden would go on to brag about flexing his authority with Ukraine at an event for the Council on Foreign Relations.

“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recounted. “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

Ukraine has since come under scrutiny for having exerted considerable lobbying efforts with both the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

Those efforts ultimately resulted in Trump adviser Paul Manafort being charged during the course of the Mueller investigation for failing to register as a foreign agent due to his his Ukrainian business dealings.

No Democrats are known to have been indicted, though investigations into the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee are ongoing.

Unfortunately, for the Biden campaign, the Ukraine episode was not an isolated incident. ABC News also noted that Hunter Biden was involved with an earlier conflict of interest involving China in December 2013.

At that time, Hunter accompanied his father on a state visit to Beijing that involved meetings with high-ranking officials. Weeks later, Hunter had secured a contract with Bohai Harvest RST, a joint American–Chinese investment firm that sought to raise $1.5 billion.

The Left’s Double-Standard

Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, is among the outspoken conservatives who raised the issue of Biden’s conflicts of interest, at one point planning a trip to Ukraine to investigate it himself.

The scandal also figured prominently in the book Secret Empires, released in March by investigative journalist Peter Schweitzer, who called on Hunter Biden to testify before a Senate committee.

“Why were these foreign governments and these foreign corrupt oligarchs stuffing money into Hunter Biden’s pocket?” Schweizer asked during a Breitbart podcast.

But even Biden defenders acknowledge that the appearance of impropriety is strong.

“At absolute minimum there’s a huge appearance of conflict, and there’s every reason to think that the investors that he‘s working with want him partnering with them because he’s the son of the then-vice president and now presidential candidate,” said Robert Weissman, president of progressive watchdog group Public Citizen, according to ABC News.

“[Joe Biden] should have encouraged his son to not take these positions,” Weissman said.

Hunter Biden remained defiant and expressed no regrets in a statement to ABC.

“The narratives that have been suggested and developed by the right-wing political apparatus are demonstrably false,” he said.

“These distortions of reality will not distract my father, nor make me question my judgment in my initial decision to join the board of Burisma to do the good work necessary for the benefit of the company and Ukraine.”

However, following the attention brought to the scandal, Hunter Biden announced his decision not to continue on the Burisma board.

“In this political climate, where my qualifications and work are being attacked by Rudy Giuliani and his minions for transparent political purposes, I have decided not to renew my directorship,” he said.

Acosta Gloats over Trump Compliment, Unaware It Is a Common Behavior-Correction Technique

Ben Sellers
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‘We are here not just to report the news now, we’re here to defend the truth…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) During an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta bragged about once receiving a compliment from President Donald Trump.

Acosta and Kimmel appeared to be trying to psychoanalyze Trump while relating one of the anecdotes contained in Acosta’s new tell-all book about his experiences as a frequent nemesis to the president.

“I feel like, deep down, maybe he kind of likes you even though he hates you,” Kimmel mused. “Of course, he mostly hates you—but sometimes he begrudgingly compliments you.”

Acosta then recounted a time when, after a press conference where Trump had referred to him as “very fake news,” then-Communications Director Hope Hicks had followed up and offered him some kind words.

“Jim, I just want you to know the president thought you were very professional today, and he said ‘Jim gets it,’” Acosta recalled Hicks saying.

“And I thought to myself, ‘Wait a minute, I was just very fake news five minutes ago, and now I’m very professional,'” he continued.

After accusing Trump of running the presidency like a reality television show, he and Kimmel settled on another theory: that the White House was sucking up so that Acosta would go easy on Trump.

“He loves the coverage but he hates the scrutiny,” Acosta said, “and one of the things that we find out, when we call him out on some of these falsehoods—some people call them lies—uh, you know, that’s when it gets under his skin, and his folks get very upset about it.”

In reality, what Acosta may have neglected to see was his own role in the exchange and how the Trump administration truly views him.

As many a parent or teacher has discovered, positive reinforcement—like the method Hicks used—is a frequent behavior modification technique when dealing with unruly children.

In the eyes of the White House, Acosta, and other members of the liberal media, have conducted themselves accordingly.

At no time was this more apparent than in April, when Press Secretary Sarah Sanders—having abandoned daily press briefings in January, due to the rude and disruptive conduct of Acosta and others—held a rare briefing with the children of the White House press corps to underscore the point.

Following frequent interruptions and a physical altercation with a White House staffer, Acosta had his press pass revoked in November, but CNN successfully challenged the decision in court, using an activist liberal judge to file an injunction.

The White House ultimately chose to abandon the case after issuing new guidelines for conduct. However, as often happens in elementary school classrooms, Acosta’s abusive conduct wound up losing the privilege of daily media briefings for the entire class.

The CNN correspondent groused over the unfairness of it during his appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel.”

“You know, this used to be when the press secretary would go and answer all of our questions. We don’t do that anymore,” Acosta said.

“Now Sarah Sanders, she goes out to the Fox News Live position on the North Lawn of the White House, takes questions from them, and then if she has time she’ll stop and talk to us for a few minutes in the driveway,” he said. “It’s not what the taxpayers are expecting from the press secretary. We pay their salaries, we should be getting our money’s worth.”

Ironically, while complaining about the lack of access, Acosta immediately followed up by relaying another story about how Trump had begrudgingly taken a question from him shortly after reinstating his press pass.

“They were saying, ‘We’re never gonna talk to Jim Acosta again, we’re never gonna take questions from him again,'” Acosta said. “The next day, after I got my press pass back, he took a question, he took a follow-up question…”

A picture of that occasion became the cover of Acosta’s book, Enemy of the People.

Acosta was quick to cite other hostile, liberal media outlets, like The Washington Post, claiming that Trump had issued 10,000 false or misleading statements during his presidency.

However, despite his own network’s frequent fixation on coverage of debunked conspiracies and sensationalist headlines, Acosta was steadfast in his insistence that by attacking Trump he was embarked on a noble and heroic quest.

“We’re there to hold their feet to the fire, and it doesn’t matter what they call us, what they try to do to us—we’re here to work on behalf of the American people and get answers to these questions.”

While he claimed many of those within the White House had lost sight of the fact that they worked for the people and not the Trump Organization, Acosta maintained that he, himself, was the truest public servant of them all.

“We are here not just to report the news now, we’re here to defend the truth,” he said.

GOP Congressmen Ask Why Al Jazeera Not Registered as a Foreign Agent

Ben Sellers
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‘Al Jazeera and its media subsidiaries act as alter egos of the Qatari government in ensuring dissemination of the government’s viewpoints…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As tensions flare on a variety of fronts in the Middle East, a coalition of seven Republican congressmen on Tuesday sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr questioning why one of the Arab world’s foremost propaganda mouthpieces, Al Jazeera, was not registered as a foreign agent.

The group—led by Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Tom Cotton of Arkansas—asked the Justice Department to provide all unclassified material pertaining to the Foreign Agents Registration Act and Al Jazeera, which was chartered and continues to be funded mainly by the Qatari government.

“As such, one can reasonably infer that Al Jazeera is a messaging tool for the Qatari government, and, on its behalf, has engaged in inherently political activities and sought to influence public opinion in the United States,” they wrote.

Although a cable channel called Al Jazeera America, in coordination with former Vice President Al Gore, ultimately shuttered in 2016, the Al Jazeera Media Network, the network now maintains a U.S.-based digital syndicate called AJ+, with a strong presence of followers on social media and Youtube.

“Clearly, Al Jazeera has established and is building a significant reach within the United States,” wrote the congressmen.

They noted that the Al Jazeera sites had released a number of videos promoting anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli views, as well as some that were anti-American.

The network has previously lent its support to Hamas, the pro-Palestinian group that regularly engages in violent conflict with Israel.

“Qatar has not only allowed U.S. State Department-designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas to operate within the country but also has regularly hosted Hamas supporters and its leaders on Al Jazeera,” the congressmen said.

Qatar also maintained support for the Muslim Brotherhood, once deemed a stabilizing and democratizing influence on the region—although the role Al Jazeera played in driving that perception through its global reporting was likely considerable.

More recently, the Muslim Brotherhood’s authoritarian, militaristic influence on governments like Egypt’s has raised questions about whether its interests align with those of the U.S.

The group’s use of violence to enforce Islamic law prompted President Donald Trump to consider formally naming it a foreign terrorist organization in April, after a meeting with current Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

“When the available evidence is taken as a whole, it appears that Al Jazeera’s broadcasts, including AJ+, mirror the policies and preferences of the Qatari government,” wrote the congressmen, “which, together with the state funding and other indicia of agency, demonstrate that Al Jazeera and its media subsidiaries act as alter egos of the Qatari government in ensuring dissemination of the government’s viewpoints.”

Grassley recently introduced a bipartisan bill, the Foreign Agents Disclosure and Registration Enhancement Act of 2019, that he said would help to strengthen the 1938 FARA law, originally passed to stem the spread of Nazi propaganda.

Sen. Grassley says FBI Had Double Standard in Clinton, Trump Probes
Chuck Grassley/PHOTO: Gage Skidmore (CC)

The act, although rarely used since the 1960s, figured prominently into some of the prosecutions during the now-debunked Russia-collusion investigation led by Robert Mueller.

Grassley, the former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who now heads the Finance Committee, raised alarms during the Obama years over the links between members of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign with the governments of Georgia and Ukraine.

Grassley also called attention to the ties between Trump campaign adviser Paul Manafort and the Ukrainian government. Manafort ultimately was charged and found guilty under the FARA law as part of the Mueller investigation.

“Long before Special Counsel Mueller’s team sparked a renewed interest in enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act, I was raising concerns about undisclosed foreign lobbying and a lack of FARA enforcement,” Grassley said in a recent statement.

“This bill gives the Justice Department new tools to detect and deter secret foreign lobbying and ensures policymakers and the American public know when influence campaigns are being pushed by foreign interests,” he said.

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