Facebook has caved to Democrat political pressure and is censoring newsfeeds on users’ pages, as Mark Zuckerberg explains, for their own good.  The progressives at Facebook have gone nuclear.

We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us. That’s why we’ve always put friends and family at the core of the experience. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our well-being and happiness.  But recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.

Cutting through the Orwellian talk of connecting us together and ‘feedback from our community,’ this is an entirely political story.  After Donald Trump’s election, Zuckerberg came under tremendous pressure to use Facebook for the Democrats’ Resistance.  All the bludgeons were brought out – Russian bots, fake news, that Facebook handed an unearned victory to Trump.  And the greatest of all, the threat of government regulation.

At first Zuckerberg resisted the Resistance, but then he caved suddenly, following a personal intervention by Obama. 

The results of Obama’s intervention are in:

Engagement on Donald Trump’s Facebook posts has dropped by approximately 45 percent since the platform introduced a new algorithm change, following a year of pressure from left-wing employees and the mainstream media for “allowing” the President to win the 2016 general election.

The most interesting aspect of the progressives’ victory has received almost no press.  It was Barack Hussein Obama himself who knuckled Zuckerberg, in a ‘chance’ encounter at an anti-poverty gathering of the glitterati, in Peru.   Obama openly told Zuckerberg he had to do something about the next presidential race.

The Washington Post reported last fall:

Nine days after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as “crazy” the idea that fake news on his company’s social network played a key role in the U.S. election, President Barack Obama pulled the youthful tech billionaire aside and delivered what he hoped would be a wake-up call.

For months leading up to the vote, Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign without making matters worse. …Now huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously, although Facebook representatives say the president did not single out Russia specifically. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race. (snip)

The conversation on Nov. 19 was a flashpoint in a tumultuous year in which Zuckerberg came to recognize the magnitude of a new threat — a coordinated assault on a U.S. election by a shadowy foreign force that exploited the social network he created.

Until Obama’s intervention, Facebook corporate policy was rock solid.  Zuckerberg’s entire business model was that Facebook is a platform, not a content provider.  The company has always claimed they have no responsibility for content.   The Jewish Press begged Zuckerberg to block Islamic Facebook pages teaching how to make ‘lone wolf’ knife attacks fatal.   Zuckerberg refused.  Not his problem.

In the past, Facebook often bowed to PC pressure from the feminist, gay and Islamic communities.  Pamela Geller got fed up with being blocked and sued.  A gun range owner was blocked after the Orlando shooting for offering free self-defense classes to LGBT.  Pro-life crowdfunding a movie on Roe v. Wade was blocked, as were dozens of conservative Catholic websites.  But these forays into censorship of conservatives were isolated, and often reversed with claims they had been done by mistake.

That was before the Obama White House had to cover its tracks of spying on the Trump campaign and newly elected President Trump. 

At first, Zuckerberg was impervious to the hysteria that fake news and Russian bots on Facebook had thrown the election to Trump.  He knew it was nonsense, because he’s a numbers and data guy, and the reach of Russian accounts was pitiful.

Russian interference generated 129 real-world events that drew 340,000 Facebook users.  If we look at the number of mobile active Facebook users for December 2016, we see that there were 1.74 billion.  Thus, the Russians commandeered 0.000195402% of the Facebook users for that one month.

You could argue that the election was thrown in a few key states, where targeted fake news confused voters.  From the Washington Examiner:

Looking at key states, the total spent on ads targeting Wisconsin was $1,979, according to Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr. Ad spending in Michigan was $823. In Pennsylvania, it was $300.  That is not the stuff of rigging elections.

As for Russian content that appeared on newsfeeds:

“This equals about four-thousands of one percent (0.004%) of content in News Feed, or approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content,” Facebook executive Colin Stretch said in prepared testimony before the Senate last November.

From wired.com:

…at a conference two days after the election, Zuckerberg argued that … “The idea that fake news on Facebook—of which, you know, it’s a very small amount of the content—influenced the election in any way, I think, is a pretty crazy idea,” he said….he likes to form his opinions from data. And in this case he wasn’t without it.

Zuckerberg was correct.  The idea that fake news on Facebook helped elect Trump is crazy.

Donald Trump needed Russian help to be effective on Facebook?  That’s crazy.  The idea that Trump betrayed his country for help on social media is crazy.  And the idea that the scale of the Russian effort on Facebook had any impact is crazy.

But telling the truth in Obama’s progressive America is not allowed.

Zuckerberg’s comments did not go over well, even inside Facebook. They seemed clueless and self-absorbed. “What he said was incredibly damaging,” a former executive told WIRED. “We had to really flip him on that. We realized that if we didn’t, the company was going to start heading down this pariah path that Uber was on.”

Zuckerberg was soon disabused of the notion that he could data check whether fake news threw the election.  Nice little company you have there.

 “After the election, because Trump won, the media put a ton of attention on fake news and just started hammering us. People started panicking and getting afraid that regulation was coming. …and we decided to figure out how we could put together our own packaged program that shows how seriously we take the future of news.”

It took Facebook a long time to figure out how to control fake news.

Censorship at Facebook is no longer a bug.  It is a feature.  President Trump’s clicks are down 45%.

Mark Levin hit a home run with the bases loaded in the second outing of his new Fox News program on Sunday, March 4.  His guest for the full hour on Life, Liberty & Levin was Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.  Starting with their investigation into alleged collusion between the Russians and the Donald Trump campaign, transition, and presidency, Nunes and his committee have developed information that reveals the exact opposite of what had been alleged.  Instead of Trump-Russia collusion, the evidence points to an insidious plot to employ the full power and authority at the highest levels of the previous administration of Barack Obama to illegally surveil Donald Trump’s campaign and advisers for the purpose of making a false criminal case to the secret FISA court in order to plant the seeds for the destruction of the 45th president’s administration.

Levin is an attorney with significant expertise in constitutional issues.  He is one of the country’s leading radio talk show hosts.  He is also a bestselling author of nonfiction political books and the host of a nightly program LevinTV on the CRTV subscription channel.  In the 1980s, Levin was a top aide to Attorney General Ed Meese.

Rep. Devin Nunes on Life, Liberty & Levin, March 4, 2018.

 

Levin approached his interview with Nunes as if he were building the factual basis in a legal case and interviewing the most knowledgeable friendly witness.  He referred – chronologically – to the record of articles published in the mainstream media starting in October 2016 based on illegal leaks from the Obama administration, the purpose of which appeared to be the take down of the Trump presidency.

Levin’s Q&A with Nunes, who was encountering Levin in person for the first time, could not have been more compelling.  In fact, the hour presented the alarming facts of this complex evolving story in a manner that was both informative and shocking.  In this writer’s opinion, it was perhaps the best concise summary of the controversy to date, presented in a way that could be easily followed, understood, and absorbed.

Fox News has not yet made a transcript of the program available.  The network appears unlikely to do so, since a transcript of the first episode of Levin’s premiere show on February 25 has not been forthcoming.  So far, Fox News has posted a 14-minute video clip from the Levin-Nunes episode.  Several third parties have uploaded the full hour, commercial-free, to YouTube, including here.  How long these unofficial videos will remain online is anyone’s guess.  Five hours after the program first aired, a search of Google News shows that nothing has (yet) been written in the media about this news-breaking episode of Life, Liberty & Levin.

Mark Levin and Rep. Devin Nunes on Levin’s Fox News program, March 4, 2018.

The entire program is essential viewing.  Here are a few excerpts, as transcribed by the author:

Mark Levin: As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, did the Obama administration spy on the Trump campaign?

Rep. Devin Nunes: I think it’s pretty clear, and average Americans understand, that that happened.

Levin: My argument to you, sir, is that this goes right to the top.  The president [Obama] may not know all of the particulars, but he had to know a hell of a lot from the public record and from his own people.  What do you say?

Nunes: Well, it’s hard to believe that she [national security adviser and top Obama confidante Susan Rice] didn’t know that.  The letter that she writes to herself on January 20th[, 2017], hours before the Trump administration comes into power, it doesn’t make any sense other than to say it must have been some type of way to justify whatever actions were taken or [to] cover something up.

Levin asked Nunes about the difficulty his committee has encountered during the past year in getting information from the courts and the executive branch.

Nunes: This has been the challenge historically for the Congress.  Once they create something [not in the Constitution, like the courts and the FBI], it’s hard to oversee it, it’s hard to shut it down, it’s hard to control it.  What our committee has done, for the first time in a long time – with the help of all of our members, on the Republican side at least – who want to get to the bottom, to get to the truth.  This is the first time in a long time when you’ve seen Congress really use our authority and use our power to go all the way to the courts to get information to try to rein in out-of-control bureaucracies.  It should alarm people what it has taken for us to get to the bottom of this fiasco that’s occurred. …

Nunes: The media in this country is dead.  It no longer exists, and the American people need to understand this.  I don’t know where it’s going to all end – if it’s dead forever – but 90% of the media is far-left-wing, and they are totally reliant on getting clicks and playing to their base and to their owners to support what their owners want.

Levin: We have what I call a Praetorian Guard media – they’re going to protect the Obama administration no matter what that administration did or does.  If the shoe were on the other foot –  if this were a Republican administration that did this to a Democratic candidate – it would be the greatest scandal in American history.

It is apparent that Life, Liberty & Levin, which airs Sundays on Fox News at 10 P.M./E.T. and P.T., will be appointment viewing from now on, especially when Levin’s guest is a potential news-maker like Devin Nunes.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran reporter and analyst of news on national politics, media, and popular culture.  He is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.  Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.

The great wave continues.  First Brexit in the U.K.  Then Donald Trump in the U.S.  And now Italy.  Not every country on Europe has managed to elect an outsider in direct contravention to its country’s out-of-touch elites, although they all have factions for it.  But Italy, with the world’s eighth largest economy, has, joining the U.S. and Britain to signal that the larger economies are moving this way, rebuking their elites and reclaiming their sovereignty.  According to The Guardian:

A majority of Italian voters have supported Eurosceptic candidates in the national election, preliminary results showed, after decades in which Italy has steadfastly championed the European project.

Early results released by the interior ministry on Monday morning, as ballots continued to be counted, pointed to a hung parliament, though there was still a possibility that the centre-right coalition, with about 37% of the vote, could secure a majority once parliamentary seats are allocated.

Either result would represent a repudiation of Brussels by Italian voters, less than two years after the UK narrowly voted to leave the European Union.

Obviously, Italians are tired of not recognizing their county anymore.  They’re battered by a European Union that has sucked the life out of their country’s economy with its out-of-touch currency, a death spiral in its own population, and now a migrant wave flooding the country, giving uneducated, unassimilated migrants from hellish cultures more rights than ordinary Italians along with access to the public till.  No, they don’t recognize their country much after events like that.  There was a recent cake-baking in one Italian town to celebrate the exit of its migrants, which gives a whiff of the sentiment.

They rebelled.

What it suggests to us is that a long-term trend is taking place now that Italy has rejected its elites and the E.U. monoculture (which stands for nothing) and reasserted its unique identity and culture as Italian.  With Trump in the saddle over here in the states, and Eastern Europe reasserting itself, too, this trend might not let up anytime soon, even as U.S. Democrats and their media allies slaver to oust Trump quickly and dream of a blue wave in the U.S. midterms.  It’s hard to buck a deeply embedded trend such as this one.  Italy is telling us something about how ordinary people are feeling worldwide.

The bottom line is that the smug elites have failed, both in the U.S. and in Europe.  They continue to fail to recognize it, and they refuse to reform.  Now they’re being swept away.

Let’s stay optimistic about midterms and a Trump second term.

Once upon a time, Nelson Mandela put South Africa on the path toward racial reconciliation and a transition to a society based on black and white equality.  Alas, race-hatred is winning that battle now, and what was once the most prosperous nation in Africa is set to follow the path of Zimbabwe toward utter ruin.

The former Rhodesia turned itself from the breadbasket of Africa, a major exporter of staple grains, into a country on the perpetual verge of mass starvation by expropriating and often murdering white farmers and giving land to cronies of President Mugabe, who were not capable of stewardship.  The same thing happened to other elements of the economy as well, all based in getting even for racial grievances of the past.

South Africa’s Parliament has just voted to seize white-owned farmland without compensation.  Will Racke reports in the Daily Caller:

South Africa’s parliament voted Tuesday to move forward with an amendment to the country’s constitution that would allow the government to seize and redistribute white-owned land without compensation.

The motion was brought by the radical Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party and was widely supported by the ruling African National Congress, which controls almost two-thirds of the parliament.  The measure passed by a vote of 241 to 83, reports Reuters.

EFF leader Julius Malema, a longtime proponent of land expropriation, said the “time for reconciliation is over.  Now is the time for justice.”

“We must ensure that we restore the dignity of our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land,” Malema told parliament ahead of the vote, according to South Africa’s News24.

The ANC has long promised land reforms aimed at evening the distribution of land among racial groups, still a highly contentious subject more than two decades after the end of apartheid.  Whites own roughly three-quarters of South Africa’s farmland, according to a 2017 government audit.

Reportedly, there may be constitutional obstacles to expropriation that could delay its implementation.  But the obvious political weight behind this move demonstrates that one way or another, South Africa will pursue this suicidal course.

I am not holding my breath for the leading lights of the Western world to denounce the racism inherent in this path.  World opinion did help bring down the white racist regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia.  But that was easy righteousness.  Denouncing black racism is quite the opposite.  No presumption of personal virtue is assigned to those who denounce it.

When it comes to choosing national suicide, South Africa is also pursuing a separate racist path that may result in mass deaths on an accelerated schedule.  Cape Town, a metropolis of almost 4 million people, has roughly two months left before it runs out of water, owing to extended drought and inadequate water capture and storage infrastructure (just like California).  “Day Zero” is reckoned to be April 12, 2018.

But South African authorities have spurned an offer of help from The Zionist Entity Israel, the world’s leading practitioner of water conservation and desalination.  Aish.com:

Israel has learned how to recycle about 85 percent of its water and has achieved what many considered impossible: making water readily accessible to all of its inhabitants.  As soon as Israel became aware of Cape Town’s water problem, without any hesitancy it volunteered assistance, making clear their [sic] ability and willingness to help.

Former Israeli Ambassador to South Africa Arthur Lenk, current Ambassador Lior Keinan, and Israel’s economic attaches to South Africa all made repeated overtures to the relevant bodies to assist with the Cape Town water crisis.  Scientists were prepared to share their knowledge.  Volunteers were ready to come to implement them.  Organizations were ready to help in the planning and even in the financing for what was required to prevent Day Zero from becoming a reality.

But the governing body of Cape Town sides with the Palestinians.  That makes Israelis the enemy.  And that allowed hatred to trump sanity and enmity to prefer calamity over offered salvation. …

In the early part of 2016, when it already became clear that parts of South Africa would be facing one of the most severe droughts in its history, an important conference was called to make plans for the initiation and implementation of specific programs to prevent catastrophe.  Listed on the program as one of the delegates was Israel’s ambassador to South Africa, Arthur Lenk, who had already spent considerable effort in educating and assisting the region wherever possible.  No sooner did this become public than Prof Lorenzo Fioramonti of the University of Pretoria, withdrew his participation.  That was immediately followed by the BDS movement successfully lobbying the South African government to entirely cancel the water conference due to Israel’s participation.

Thanks to the growing influence of the increasing Muslim population and the leadership of the pro-jihad President Jacob Zuma aligned with the BDS, South Africans rejoiced at their ability to “tell off the Israelis” and to deny Israel the ability to claim credit for any humanitarian aid.

There will be many innocent victims of the problems that lie ahead for Cape Town and South Africa.  But they are the victims of their own country’s conscious choice of race-hatred.