Month: April 2019

A Norwegian CEO who ran poster campaigns trying to recruit young women to become “sugar babies” to older men outside university campuses has been charged with “public incitement to debauchery” in Belgium.

Sigurd Vedal, 47, began his ‘Rich Meet Beautiful’ website in Scandinavia, launching a recruitment drive to expand the business in Belgium in 2018 with a promise to provide young when with a “Fifty Shades of Grey” experience, according to the Guardian.

Vedal placed billboards recruiting for the website near university campuses, causing the Université Libre de Bruxelles to complain.

“We presumed the existence of a sexual counterpart to the registration on this site,” a spokesman for the institution told the newspaper.

“The message is: ‘you’re young, you’re beautiful, go out with a sugar daddy!’ Everyone understands what it’s about,” they added.

In response, the Belgian authorities are now charging the CEO with violating anti-sexism laws, debauchery, and public incitement to debauchery.

Conservative Plan To Force Sex and Pornography Education on all Secondary Schools https://t.co/TZMhPdotzo pic.twitter.com/oxiM6JYwUL

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) December 19, 2016

Vedal’s lawyer Eric Cusas said Rich Meet Beautiful was not about sex, describing it as “a specialised site aimed at bringing certain people together with a nice physique and others who are well-off” and insisting that any perceived sexual element was “only in the eye of the observer”.

Some of the posters show a woman lying prone in her bra with her eyes closed and her mouth open, with a shirtless man bearing down on top of her from behind.

‘No Doubt’ PM May’s Anti-Breitbart Deputy Accessed ‘Extreme’ Porn at Parliament Desk https://t.co/8GNKrN5x7N

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) December 1, 2017

Vedal has also run poster campaigns in the United Kingdom, targeting universities including the City of London Law School, London School of Economics (LSE), and Kings College London in an attempt to recruit 100,000 users.

“It’s disgusting. It should be illegal for these perverts to pray on youngsters like this,” a student at one of the universities told MailOnline.

“University is expensive, we all know that, and I’m in a massive amount of debt.

“But me and my friends would never turn to prostitution in order to reduce that, and these sorts of websites are tantamount to that — it’s exploitative and wrong,” she said.

Sentence Cut for Paedophile Who Claimed ‘Transgender Crisis’ Led Him to Download Child Porn https://t.co/4RBZxnOpVx

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) October 28, 2017

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Keisha Lance Bottoms, mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, tweeted an invitation Friday to allow a drag queen story hour at city hall after the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System removed one of the story hours from its calendar.

Miss Terra Cotta Sugarbaker and all of our LGBTQ friends are always welcome at Atlanta City Hall. How about we host your next story hour? @CityofAtlanta—let’s make it happen! #OneAtlanta 🌈 https://t.co/gj3eUIRZSC

— Keisha Lance Bottoms (@KeishaBottoms) April 5, 2019

“Miss Terra Cotta Sugarbaker and all of our LGBTQ friends are always welcome at Atlanta City Hall,” posted Bottoms. “How about we host your next story hour? @City of Atlanta – let’s make it happen!”

Bottoms invited the drag queen to read to young children at city hall after support for the event to be held at an Alpharetta library branch was pulled.

Steven Igarashi-Ball, a 40-year-old Buford native who performs in drag as Miss Terra Cotta Sugarbaker, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution he feels the Fulton library system discriminated against him. The system is reportedly allowing only an unsanctioned version of the “Drag Queen Story Hour” on April 27 in the Alpharetta branch, though the event no longer appears on its calendar.

Igarashi-Ball said his past success at a drag queen story hour in another library branch led to an invitation to read to the children at the Alpharetta branch.

“The community has made it clear that they want the event and the county canceled the event,” he said.

Igarashi-Ball explained to Project Q Atlanta that he received an email from a public relations spokesperson for the library system in early March about the change in the program.

“I was told that the event was being cancelled by the county and not by the library and they said that it was above the library’s decision,” the drag queen said. “I was told that all of the libraries support the event and wanted it to continue, but that the county had say over them and that the county was cancelling it.”

Igarashi-Ball posted on Facebook about the cancellation of his event. “I felt that if our program and myself were under attack, I would have a right to know who my attackers were,” he said.

Jessica Corbitt-Dominguez, spokeswoman for the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System, said in a statement to the AJC that the system does “appreciate the community support for the Drag Queen Story Time event, which has been successful and well received at the Ponce de Leon Library.”

“We recommended to the organizer that it continue at the location where it has a strong track record. … Not every program is offered at every location,” she added.

According to the AJC, Igarashi-Ball responded to Bottoms’ invitation that he was “definitely interested to discuss the possibility,” adding, “We love that the Mayor is supporting our event!”

Last year, after seven anti-Trump users sued over the fact they’d been blocked by the president on his official Twitter account, a judge in New York ruled that Trump didn’t have the power to block others on social media as his account had become a “designated public forum.”

“If the principle undergirding Wednesday’s ruling in Federal District Court stands, it is likely to have implications far beyond Mr. Trump’s feed and its 52 million followers, said Jameel Jaffer, the Knight First Amendment Institute’s executive director and the counsel for the plaintiffs,” The New York Times reported last May.

“Public officials throughout the country, from local politicians to governors and members of Congress, regularly use social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to interact with the public about government business.”

The ruling is under appeal, according to TheBlaze. However, for right now, U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald’s decision remains in place.

But apparently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t particularly care about it.

TRENDING: Democrat-Controlled State House Passes Controversial Measure for Illegal Immigrants

Ocasio-Cortez, you might have heard, stirred up a bit of controversy last week after her speech before Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. The clip, which The Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra originally posted, shows her taking on what appears to be a southern accent before a predominately African-American audience.

Ocasio-Cortez speaks in an accent that she never uses while telling a room of predominately black people that there is nothing wrong with them folding clothes, cooking, and driving other people around on a bus for a living. pic.twitter.com/FIbIAPokt0

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) April 5, 2019

This led to a strong bit of self-victimization by Ocasio-Cortez, who claimed it was her code-switching into her Bronx accent and saying she had done the same thing during her speeches at the Women’s March and on Brett Kavanaugh:

As much as the right wants to distort & deflect, I am from the Bronx. I act & talk like it, *especially* when I’m fired up and especially when I’m home.

It is so hurtful to see how every aspect of my life is weaponized against me, yet somehow asserted as false at the same time.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 5, 2019

So, Saavedra posted those speeches, too:

Here’s her Women’s March speechhttps://t.co/tlPvYBwuHT

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) April 5, 2019

Here’s her speech on Kavanaugh https://t.co/4odidt2LAy

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) April 5, 2019

RELATED: CNN’s Don Lemon Gives Weak Excuse for Ocasio-Cortez’s Strange Accent at Black Event

There was nothing like what was on display during the Friday speech. What happened?

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA

She finally blocked me and it was after I called out her latest set of lies pic.twitter.com/9mjrBBjDVv

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) April 5, 2019

Yes, she blocked him.

Now, let me again note that the ruling against Trump is under appeal, though judges hearing the case as of now don’t appear too sympathetic to his arguments.

The New York Times reported last week that “(t)he judges seemed skeptical of Mr. Trump’s contention that he was acting in a personal, not official, capacity when he blocked people.

“(Second) Circuit Judge Barrington D. Parker asked Mr. Trump’s counsel, a Justice Department lawyer, why blocking ‘points of view the president doesn’t like’ isn’t ‘just a quintessential First Amendment violation.’”

But here’s the thing — if it’s “a quintessential First Amendment violation” for the president to block somebody, it’s also almost certainly a violation for other elected officials using their accounts as an extension of their office. So, whither Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Some Twitter users noted the incongruity:

@AOC FYI Blocking @RealSaavedra – is actually a violation of the 1st Amendment. Twitter is considered a public forum. Last year – Trump got sued by 7 people for the same thing, and they won. I know your methodology stems from dictators who stifle press, but this is the USA.

— American Patriot (@MarcsClass) April 7, 2019

Sue her like those that sued @realDonaldTrump for blocking them on Twitter. If they can win, so can you.

— Vasilios Kalaitzidis (@VKalaitzidis) April 7, 2019

@AOC You pobably cannot mute or block people now, Congressperson.A federal judge ruled that President Donald Trump’s practice of blocking his critics on Twitter violates the First Amendment. The practice is unconstitutional, Check the decision by Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald.

— Steve Austin (@suscepit) April 6, 2019

Will this end up being called out? Highly unlikely. Yet again, the pieces noting the fact that she blocked Saavedra are all from conservative news outlets thus far. Not a single Democrat has come out to express outrage.

We’ll see if any lawsuit gets filed, but even then, will it attract attention? Probably not — not, anyway, in the same way that Trump’s Twitter account does.

To be fair, he is the president. However, last I checked, Ocasio-Cortez believed that she was “the boss.”

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

Under pressure from left-wing journalists and activists, Amazon is purging right-wing authors from its store, including a book co-authored by English Islam critic and independent commentator Tommy Robinson.

The web retail giant has become the dominant market player in book sales, accounting for nearly 50 percent of physical and 83 percent of e-book sales in the U.S. As such, Amazon has the power to effectively cut an author off from the vast majority of the books market.

Amazon began its new round of purges by targeting the white nationalist fringe. In February, the tech giant banned a number of books from white identitarian Jared Taylor, and a book called The White Nationalist Manifesto by Greg Johnson.

This followed bans on Holocaust revisionist books in 2017, and a purge of all books by controversial pickup blogger and author Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh in 2018.

As with financial blacklisting, a censorship spree that starts by targeting extreme ideas quickly moves towards the censorship of more mainstream ones. In early March, the online retailer banned Muhammed’s Koran: Why Muslims Kill for Islam, a Chronological Koran and critique of the Islamic religion co-authored by British populist Tommy Robinson.

The book is a chronological reordering of the Islamic Koran, followed by commentary by Robinson and his co-author, Peter McLoughlin. Amazon did not return Breitbart News’ request for an explanation of why the book was banned.

In 2010, Amazon refused to take down a book defending pedophilia on first amendment grounds. “Amazon believes it is censorship not sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable,” an Amazon representative told CNBC at the time.

“Amazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.”

Public and media outcry was not enough to pressure Amazon into watering down its commitment to content-neutrality when it came to a pro-pedophile book. But it now takes only the slightest pressure for the tech giant to ban right-wing critiques of religion.

And even before that, Amazon had watered down it’s commitment to “the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.” In 2015, the site banned the sale of all merchandise depicting the Confederate flag.

Amazon doesn’t seem to have a problem with extremist of destructive books in general. Two of the most destructive books in history, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are available for purchase. So too are books by black nationalist Louis Farrakhan, notorious for his racist and anti-semitic comments — so it seems racial hatred isn’t subject to a blanket ban on Amazon either.

Amazon has abandoned its previous commitment to carry all books no matter how controversial, and it’s unclear what consistent principle, if any, the company now follows.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter, Gab.ai and add him on Facebook. Email tips and suggestions to allumbokhari@protonmail.com.