Premiered 3 hours ago
‘CNN doesn’t cover Mueller, they work for him’: Tucker Carlson on Roger Stone’s arrest
Fox host Tucker Carlson offered his take on CNN filming a surprise FBI raid on Roger Stone’s house, saying the channel has turned into the “PR arm” of Robert Mueller, “the single most powerful” – and unelected – man in the US.
In his latest monologue, the Fox anchor said it’s crucial to raise some questions before the arrest of Roger Stone – an associate of Donald Trump – fades from the headlines. Notably, it was almost entirely devoted to a CNN crew being conveniently present at the early-morning FBI raid on Stone’s Fort Lauderdale house.
“How did CNN know about a raid that was supposed to be a secret? Did they learn from [Robert] Mueller’s team?” Carlson asked. Shortly after the raid, which Carlson likened to “a military assault,” speculation began to spread that the network had an inside track with the FBI or Mueller’s team.
“CNN acted as the public relations arm of the Mueller investigation, as they have before,” Fox’s political commentator suggested. “The network is no longer covering [Mueller]; they’re working with [Mueller]. And you should know that as you watch it.”
Carlson was not the only one to comment on Stone’s arrest, and the way it was executed. The Feds sent more armed men to arrest the 66-year-old unarmed man than it did to kill Bin Laden in 2011, he noted.
Mueller, who is leading the Russiagate probe, “can send armed men to your home to roust you from bed at gunpoint just because he feels like it, and there’s nothing you, or anyone else, can do about it,” said Carlson.
He branded the FBI special counsel “the single most powerful person in America,” and yet “nobody voted for him… Nobody in Washington catches the irony in any of this. Mueller himself is the threat to our democracy. The most powerful man, elected by nobody.”
During Trump’s campaign, Stone boasted about having connections with WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, but later said it wasn’t a direct link. Instead, he said that he relied on New York radio host Randy Credico (referred to as “Person 2”in Thursday’s indictment) as a “go-between.”
The indictment says Stone lied to the House Intelligence Committee about his alleged contacts with WikiLeaks, and tried to convince another person to give false testimony.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
‘Fake news’ filter NewsGuard grilled for having links to PR firm that peddled Saudi propaganda
A new app claiming to serve as a bulwark against “disinformation” by adding “trust rankings” to news websites has links to a PR firm that received nearly $15 million to push pro-Saudi spin in US media, Breitbart reports.
NewsGuard and its shady advisory board – consisting of truth-lovers such as Tom Ridge, the first-ever homeland security chief, and former CIA director Michael Hayden – came under scrutiny after Microsoft announced that the app would be built into its mobile browsers. A closer examination of the company’s publicly listed investors, however, has revealed new reasons to be suspicious of this self-declared crusader against propaganda. As Breitbart discovered, NewsGuard’s third-largest investor, Publicis Groupe, owns a PR firm that has repeatedly airbrushed Saudi Arabia.
Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Riyadh enlisted Qorvis Group, a Publicis subsidiary, in the hope of countering accusations that the kingdom turned a blind eye to – or even promoted – terrorism. Between March and September 2002, the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia reportedly paid Qorvis $14.7 million to run a PR blitz targeting American media consumers. As part of the campaign, Qorvis employed a litany of dubious tactics, including running pro-Saudi ads under the name of an activist group, Alliance for Peace and Justice. Tellingly, the FBI raided the company’s offices in 2004, after Qorvis was suspected of running afoul of foreign lobbying laws.
Between 2010 and 2015, Qorvis is believed to have received millions of dollars to continue to whitewash the kingdom’s image in the United States. The accelerated airbrushing came just as the Saudis launched its devastating war against Yemen. In fact, Qorvis created an entire website – operationrenewalofhope.com – to promote the Saudi-led war in Yemen, according to the Intercept.
The firm has also successfully planted Riyadh-friendly stories in major US publications, including a 2016 op-ed by Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, which was published by Newsweek. The headline bravely bellowed: “The Saudis are fighting terrorism, don’t believe otherwise.”
All of this is rather extraordinary, considering that NewsGuard bills itself as an app that helps news consumers determine “if a website is trying to get it right or instead has a hidden agenda or knowingly publishes falsehoods or propaganda.”
Social media users quickly seized on the story, pointing out the multiple levels of irony and humor.
“I wondered why their slogan was ‘behead those who we say peddle fake news,'” one Twitter user joked.
Still, NewsGuard’s co-founder Steven Brill has insisted that Qorvis and its parent company have no control over the app.
“Publicis has nothing to do with the content or operations of NewsGuard and has a small stake in the company,” Brill told Breitbart.
If guiding the app is a responsibility reserved solely for the advisory board, NewsGuard likely won’t fare much better: One of its board members, Richard Stengel, is a former managing editor of Time magazine and an ex-State Department official who was dubbed the “chief propagandist” of the US government.
True to form, Stengel openly admitted during a panel discussion last year that “I’m not against propaganda,” and “Every country does it and they have to do it to their own population and I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”
NYT Reporter Fishing for Christian School Horror Stories to #ExposeChristianSchools
By Megan Fox
Hot on the heels of demonizing fourteen-year-old Catholic school students at the March for Life, the rabid press is hungry for more. New York Times reporter Dan Levin put out a call for survivors of Christian schooling to contact him with their tales of woe. “I’m a New York Times reporter writing about #exposechristianschools. Are you in your 20s or younger who went to a Christian school? I’d like to hear about your experience and its impact on your life. Please DM me.”
This was met with much skepticism and blowback from multiple sources.
Levin, sensing he had given away his punchline, pinned the following codicil to his timeline, insisting he intends to include positive stories too.
Forgive us if we don’t believe you, Dan. It’s just that the recent smear job of the students at Covington Catholic High School preceded by the smearing of Brett Kavanaugh’s Catholic high school have left us all a little edgy.
Levin also included a strange age limit, only wishing to hear from twenty-somethings. This, of course, skews the results quite dramatically since twenty-year-olds are notoriously left-wing and anti-religious. The Atlantic reported that beyond being left-wing, most people under thirty are downright socialists!
And if there’s one thing people are learning about this young generation, it’s that they are liberal. Even leftist. Flirting with socialist. In Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, more than 80 percent of voters under 30 years old voted for Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist so outside the mainstream of his party that he’s not even a member.
Levin’s desire to only speak to people under thirty couldn’t possibly have anything to do with getting the negative results he wants to print, could it? If he spoke with Generation X, I have a strong feeling he would get very different responses. But while we are on the subject of exposing Christian schools, why not go all the way? Let’s expose exactly what Christian schools have done to this country.
According to the last national study of public schools versus private schools in 2006, private Christian students outperformed public school students — by a lot. Perhaps that’s why the comparison survey hasn’t been repeated. According to the National Assessment of Educational Process:
In grades 4 and 8 for both reading and mathematics, students in private schools achieved at higher levels than students in public schools. The average difference in school means ranged from almost 8 points for grade 4 mathematics, to about 18 points for grade 8 reading.
The only private Christian schools that scored the same or lower than public schools were non-Catholic conservative Christian schools. Catholic and Lutheran schools outperformed public schools consistently and bigly.
This is not news to anyone. It’s why parents take second jobs to afford the high tuition. They want their kids to learn how to read and think — unlike public schools that consistently turn out illiterate children like in Chicago, where 79 percent of 8th graders can’t read and 80 percent are below grade level in math. If they can’t read, how do they pass any other class? When public school students get into colleges that take them based on “diversity quotas,” their professors genuinely can’t teach them anything but basic grammar, but even that is “racist.”
American University is hosting a seminar next month to teach faculty how to assess writing without judging its quality. In the seminar’s own words: “grading ain’t just grading.” They will learn how to engage students “with how judgements [sic] are formed and how those judgements [sic] use a set of White racial habits of language, no matter who the reader is.”
Sentence structure and grammatical rules are now a symbol of white supremacy. This is what parents who pay thousands of extra dollars to send their kids to Christian schools are paying to avoid. We are also paying to avoid the social programming, including teaching kindergarteners about anal sex and junior high-schoolers how to properly masturbate. Public schools waste so much time training children to learn an infinite number of pronouns to call the gender-confused that there is no time for learning basics like math and science. In Christian schools, learning about the 57 genders is not on the docket at all. It is a constant, non-stop drilling of reading, writing, and arithmetic (with PE, science, history, foreign language, technology, art, music, and religion squeezed in).
A 2002 congressional study of child sex abuse in public schools found that children were abused at a rate one hundred times higher than the Catholic Church scandal. CBS News reported
Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft looked into the problem, and the first thing that came to her mind when Education Week reported on the study were the daily headlines about the Catholic Church. “[T]hink the Catholic Church has a problem?” she said. “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”…[T]he federal report said 422,000 California public-school students would be victims before graduation — a number that dwarfs the state’s entire Catholic-school enrollment of 143,000.
Perhaps an effort to #ExposePublicSchools should be made.
I am a graduate of Christian schooling. I started in kindergarten and went all the way through the beginning of my junior year, when I transferred to a public school. When I got to public school, I was shocked to learn I needed to be placed in honors classes. I was an average student in the private school, but in public school, I was at the head of the class because I had already learned what my fellow juniors were studying.
My experience in private school can only be described as idyllic. It was a Dutch Christian Reformed school filled with sincere, underpaid, but loving faculty in the suburbs of Chicago. My fifth-grade teacher was one of the most influential people I ever encountered. I had troubles with mean girls for a few years, and Mrs. W was always there to let me stay inside at recess with her and work on writing or drawing. She is the one who told me I had a talent for writing. I kept my folder with all of my fifth-grade writing, decorated with her hopeful words, that I still look at from time to time. It is because of her encouragement that I believed I could write. I’ve been doing it professionally now for over a decade, including writing books.
Christian schooling gave me an appreciation for life, freedom, charity, and volunteerism. I don’t remember what history we studied and I don’t remember much of the minutiae of the work (except one extremely detailed and extensive leaf identification project for science that took up an entire summer of riding all over town with my friends on our bikes to collect weird and different leaves). But I do remember the overwhelming lesson that we were taught every day. Do unto others as you would have done unto you. It’s why I don’t respond in kind when people rudely insult my beliefs to my face by assuming I have Trump Derangement Syndrome, just like they do. It’s why I don’t scream at strangers wearing Bernie shirts. I was taught to smile and say nothing, just like Nick Sandmann.
That’s what Christian schooling is all about. The academics are excellent, but they are secondary. The highest goal of Christian education is to know God and make Him known. To value children with character, kindness, and tolerance over test scores. And oddly enough, when you put God first and care for one another’s souls as the highest priority, the grades go up.
But the most important thing about Christian schools is the freedom they give parents to choose what kind of education their children are given. Our Constitution gives us the right to religious freedom and that includes having our children taught by Christians and not godless, secular government agents. We have the right to association, which by definition means the right to not associate with the kind of programming happening in the public school system. We have the right to pursue happiness, too, which does not come in a one-size-fits-all sardine can of educational standards that are seriously flawed and failing everywhere you look.
For my family, I chose homeschooling and then Catholic school, where they get to hear the beauty of God’s word every day and meditate on whatever is pure, lovely, praiseworthy, and excellent. If your happiness lies in public school, then by all means, pursue it. But let’s agree to leave each other alone to be free to choose what’s right for our individual families. Because if you start messing with our religious freedom, it’s going to get ugly.
By all means, let’s #ExposeChristianSchools. The public schools might learn something.
‘Largest scam in history’: HALF of Facebook accounts fake, says Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmate
As many as half of Facebook‘s two billion accounts are fake or duplicates, according to a new report from a former classmate of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He has highlighted how the fakes defraud users, advertisers and investors alike.
Rocked by a major privacy scandal last year, Facebook has been trying to create an image of a company with high community standards, striving to curb the illicit behavior of users. But the company may be deliberately understating the amount of fake accounts, a new report says.
The firm’s own quarterly investment reports reveal that the its much-vaunted account base, which is supposedly has over 2 billion monthly active users, is packed with fake accounts communicating with just enough randomness to trick the social network’s algorithms, according to Zuckerberg’s former classmate at Harvard, Aaron Greenspan.
Greenspan claimed that he had originally come up with the idea for Facebook and worked on the future network, before Zuckerberg eventually founded the company. That claim was the basis of the trademark dispute between Facebook and Greenspan’s company, Think Computer Corporation, settled in 2009.
In a report, published by his legal data nonprofit PlainSite, Greenspan alleges that Facebook “has been lying to the public about the scale of its problem with fake accounts, which likely exceed 50 percent of its network.”
The fake accounts are particularly dangerous because they “often defraud other users on Facebook, through scams, fake news, extortion, and other forms of deception” and often “involve governments,” he writes.
He further accused the company of “selling” ads to “hundreds of millions of phantom buyers – users who do not actually exist.”
According to Greenspan, Facebook has attempted to obscure and downplay the actual number of fake accounts and their prevalence by employing “cleverly worded disclaimers” in its official reporting as well as dropping “many” of the important metrics from quarterly reports altogether.
In his report, citing the social network’s own estimates, Greenspan concludes that since the end of 2017 Facebook has deleted at least 2.8 billion fake accounts, which is more that the amount of its monthly active users and more than a half of “all accounts ever created.”
Facebook outright denied Greenspan’s claims. “This report is completely wrong and not based on any facts or research,”the company told RT, adding that Facebook files its fake account estimates with the Securities and Exchange Commission every quarter. “This is unequivocally wrong and responsible reporting means reporting facts, even if it’s about fake accounts,” the statement continued.
Still, an entire industry has sprung up to supply convincingly “aged” fake Facebook accounts, often bundled by the hundred and boasting less than 1 percent detection rate.
Facebook attracts advertisers by flaunting the access to its billion-plus users, sorted and categorized by a marketer’s dream of individual data. However, some reports claim that in reality a sizeable amount of traffic online is generated by ‘fake-clicking’ done by bots and humans working on specially-organized ‘click farms,’ as the company reached the market saturation or simply ‘ran out of humans.’
Small advertisers sued the social media giant last year, claiming it overstated the amount of time users spent watching videos by up to 900 percent. According to Marketing Land, the alleged fraud is far from an isolated event: Facebook misreported the reach of Facebook Page posts, the proportion of users who watch ad videos all the way through, the average time users spend reading “instant articles,” the number of referrals to external websites, and the number of mobile views, as claimed in the reports the outlet collected.
Facebook’s role in global ads is expected to grow. Digital publishing agency Polar estimated that the tech giant, together with Google and several other ‘digital goliaths’ like Amazon, will control 80 percent of all digital advertising in 2019.
In recent years, the social network had been entrenched in high-profile controversies over users’ data protection, privacy issues, and the spread of misinformation online. To make matters worse, Facebook’s market value has been slidingdownwards since July, when it lost almost $120 billion in a single day of trading – the largest-ever drop in company valuation in stock market history.
Following the Cambridge Analytica data-mining scandal, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook didn’t do enough to safeguard its users’ interests and apologized. In response to mounting criticism, he vowed to step up commitments to privacy protection.
In an effort to combat disinformation, the company experimented with its algorithms to detect ‘fake news’ and broughtthird-party fact-checkers on board for help.
ALSO ON RT.COMFacebook may face a record fine over privacy lapses – reports
In the first six months of 2018 alone Facebook said it removed around 1.5 billion fake accounts. Last year, the company also reported removing fake accounts linked to either Russia or Iran, and although the numbers were minute on the overall scale, measuring from under 100 to several hundred, the news received wide coverage.
Facebook’s model of operations “can feel opaque” and be hard to understand for outsiders, Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an op-ed for Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
“Sometimes this means people assume we do things that we don’t do. For example, we don’t sell people’s data, even though it’s often reported that we do.”
The company’s CEO reiterated that the network has “strong incentive” to protect users’ data and selling off such information is against the company’s business interests.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
No need to install: Microsoft has controversial fake news filter NewsGuard built into mobile browser
Corporate and neocon-backed startup NewsGuard is one step closer to its vision of bringing its “unreliable” news rater to every screen after Microsoft makes it an integral part of its Edge mobile browser.
Rather than having to download an app as before, Edge users on Android and Apple devices can now just click one button to enable its “green-red rating signal if a website is trying to get it right or instead has a hidden agenda or knowingly publishes falsehoods or propaganda.”
Among the green-rated websites: Voice of America, CNN, Buzzfeed, the Guardian, New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as left-leaning upstarts such as Vice News and Refinery 29. Ones that are given the red warning label of “failing to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability”: RT and Sputnik (obviously enough) and the right-wing Daily Mail, Breitbart and the Drudge Report, in addition to hundreds of other non-mainstream news websites such as Wikileaks.
Not only does the integration ensure that NewsGuard is present on every browser, and is easier to use than to ignore, but by making it a fundamental Microsoft-provided feature, the company gives it inherent level of trustworthiness, something akin to a bundled anti-virus feature, only this time the virus targets your brain, not your computer or iPod.
‘Totally transparent’
None of this is the slightest bit alarming if you believe that NewsGuard is an absolutely fair arbiter of what constitutes real news or propaganda.
Its pride of place is its “Nutrition Labels” which ape the precision of a list of calories, carbs, and saturated fats to give a supposedly scientific assessment of media reliability on nine different criteria. Among them: doesn’t repeatedly publish false content, avoids deceptive headlines, gathers and presents information responsibly, handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly.
The green-listed media outlets above apparently do not ever engage in these practices, or at least not knowingly. So CNN never misleads with its headlines, the Guardian never dresses up its agendas as news, and Buzzfeed stories are always accurate. One literally doesn’t have to go back three days to find dozens of examples to the contrary, but this would be too mind-numbingly pedantic a task.
Even regular readers of the green-tick media must be able to see these are judgment calls. What is even “presenting information responsibly”?
Perhaps realizing that their pseudo-scientific fancy diagram is insufficient, NewsGuard has stressed that they are not using shadowy methods like tech companies and are open to two-way communication.
“We want people to game our system. We are totally transparent. We are not an algorithm,” company co-founder Steve Brill told the Guardian.
This is how he explained the Daily Mail red warning.
“We spell out fairly clearly in the label exactly how many times we have attempted to contact them. The analyst that wrote this writeup got someone on the phone who, as soon he heard who she was and where she was calling from, hung up. As of now, we would love to hear if they have a complaint or if they change anything.”
On the other hand, RT did answer NewsGuard’s queries in detail. You can guess how much difference that made.
From anthrax scares to Russia fears
But who are these people that the Daily Mail or RT have to impress and why?
Brill himself is a veteran centrist journalist and author, his co-CEO Gordon Crovitz is a former Wall Street Journal columnist. After Brill, its second-biggest investor, along with his father, is Nick Penniman, the liberal publisher, and the third-biggest is Publicis Group, a multinational advertising agency.
Meanwhile, its advisory board includes Tom Ridge, the first-ever Homeland Security chief, and developer of another famous color-coded system, the terror alert, and Michael Hayden, the CIA director, also under George W. Bush. There are also several Obama and Clinton-era figures.
The overall picture emerges of a mix of establishment journalists, hawkish old-school Washington insiders, and so-called ethical businessmen.
They may all be experts in their fields, but if you believe that these are selfless neutral adjudicators you are probably beyond being helped by color charts. And this is not some one-off initiative either: NewsGuard is part of Microsoft’s Defending Democracy program, which combats purported election meddling, presumably primarily from Russia. The frontline of the information war is not customarily the place for impartial news judgment.
But I wasn’t an Edge user…
However much respectability NewsGuard enjoys through Microsoft, Edge has a laughably small – a fraction of a percent – market share on mobiles. In practical terms, even an increase of popularity of several thousand percent will only mean several thousand new users, and other browsers are available.
This would be that, if not for newsGuard’s self-proclaimed ambition “to expand to serve the billions of people globally who get news online.” This is just a beginning: there is an overarching plan where all public computers, from the school to the university to the library, are automatically equipped with the same “safe browsing” system.
And rather than as an individual warning, NewsGuard plans to make its designations work as an effective financial tool. The company, which has received $6 million in backing, also plans to soon work with advertisers, “keeping ads off unreliable news websites” to ensure “brand safety.” Fall foul of the green ticks, no money for you. Advertising managers are already demonetizing programs with alternative or controversial viewpoints elsewhere, and soon the process can be automated, and Brill is boasting that he is “happy to be blamed” – doing the dirty work for the platforms. No wonder alternative outlets in the US are openly opposed.
So, just like the use of NewsGuard in all public libraries in the faraway state of Hawaii (no money charged), it is best to look at the Edge integration is more of a test, a pilot project, a dry run. Latching NewsGuard onto a popular browser like Chrome, or a social network like Facebook, would stir tremors of public debate, as it has done in the past when similar initiatives have been tried. Instead, first they came for the Edge users.
Muslim Congresswoman Deletes Covington Catholic Tweet After Being Threatened with Libel Suit
By Peter D’Abrosca
A notably anti-Christian congresswoman deleted a Tweet spreading the false narrative aired by the mainstream press regarding the interaction between several boys from Covington Catholic High School and proven liar Nathan Phillips, a Native American man.
“The boys were protesting a woman’s right to choose and yelled ‘it’s not rape if you enjoy it.’ They were taunting 5 Black men before they surrounded Phillips and led racist chants. Sandmann’s family hired a right wing PR firm to write his non-apology,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said in a now-deleted Tweet from Tuesday night.
Among the problems with Omar’s Tweet is the fact that none of those things happened. Omar’s Tweet also came a full three days after the fake news narrative surrounding the incident was debunked by video evidence showing the full context of the exchange.
A prominent attorney, Robert Barnes, who is representing the Covington Catholic boys pro bono against those in the media who have libeled them, shot back at Omar.
“This is libel. Retract, or get sued,” Barnes said.
Omar got herself into some hot water for mocking Vice President Mike Pence’s Christian faith in December.
In another demonstration of why it’s never a good idea to elect radical extremists to political office in the United States, Minnesota Congresswoman elect Ilhan Omar, who is a Somali Muslim immigrant, took to twitter to mock Vice President Mike Pence’s Christian faith.
According to Twitter, you can’t post facts about Sharia Law, but if you’re a Muslim, you’re allowed to call for Jews to be exterminated, and you can say anything you want about Christians and Jews. Not only is Twitter actively enforcing Sharia law around the world, but Twitter is also giving a platform to jihadis and terrorist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR, Hamas, Linda Sarsour, and 9/11 co-conspirator Siraj Wahhaj, just to name a few.
Someone on Omar’s staff must have alerted her to the fact that libeling teenagers is perhaps not the best optic, especially for a Freshman congresswoman. That she couldn’t figure that out for herself is troublesome in itself.
Most of the cable news networks have backed off their libelous coverage of the boys’ interaction with Phillips, but some, like NBC, are continuing to push the narrative even today.
New Migrant Caravan Heading To U.S. As Pelosi And Schumer Block Trump’s Border Wall
Jerry Eldred
Published on Jan 21, 2019
Tom's Blog 