There may be no place so dispiriting after a mass shooting as Twitter. It’s a little digital analogue of hell. In Real World, the bodies have yet to be cleared away and our countrymen on the scene are only beginning to deal with their unimaginable trauma and grief. But on Twitter, everything is cruelty, insults, accusations and rage. You can almost see the flecks of spittle flying as the gun-grabbers shriek at the constitutionalists and the constitutionalists shriek back.
There is no longer any reason to regard the union movement in the United States as working to support the interests of its dues-paying members. Instead, it has become a fundraising adjunct to the Democrats, one using the force of coercion to confiscate a portion of members’ paychecks and send most of it to the party that is working to depress their wages by flooding the labor market with illegal immigrants.
Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO and therefore the top labor leader in the United States, is now all-in on protecting illegal immigrants.
In an act designed to spread fear and cater to some of the most divisive forces in our nation, the U.S. government came into our workplaces to arrest people whose only crime is working hard for a better life. #ICERaids#1uhttps://t.co/9esui8Y2Hm
The Democrats need millions of poor people coming to the United States and becoming voters, whether or not they become citizens. Motor Voter laws and automatic enrollment of driver’s license applicants as voters ensure that this illegal activity can take place and be shrugged off as an understandable mistake.
Historically, the labor movement strongly opposed immigration, both legal and illegal, because it understood that expanding the supply of labor would depress ages, elementary economics. The United States and Mexico formerly had a very successful guest worker program through a series of agreements, collectively called “The Bracero Program,” that permitted 4.6 million guest worker contracts for agricultural labor between 1942 and 1964. As a result, “Between the 1940s and mid 1950s, farm wages dropped sharply as a percentage of manufacturing wages, a result in part of the use of braceros and undocumented laborers who lacked full rights in American society.” This led Cesar Chavez, the organizer of agricultural workers and a saint of the progressive movement, to strongly oppose it, along with illegal immigration. It was finally killed in 1964, sa Professor Phillip Martin, an expert on agricultural economics at the University of California, Davis, wrote:
The November 1960 CBS documentary “Harvest of Shame” convinced Kennedy that Braceros were “adversely affecting the wages, working conditions, and employment opportunities of our own agricultural workers.” Farmers fought to preserve the program in Congress, but lost, and the Bracero program ended December 31, 1964.
One of the oldest and most popular songs of the labor movement is “Which side are you on?” It is now apparent that union leadership has switched sides.
There is no longer any reason to regard the union movement in the United States as working to support the interests of its dues-paying members. Instead, it has become a fundraising adjunct to the Democrats, one using the force of coercion to confiscate a portion of members’ paychecks and send most of it to the party that is working to depress their wages by flooding the labor market with illegal immigrants.
Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO and therefore the top labor leader in the United States, is now all-in on protecting illegal immigrants.
In an act designed to spread fear and cater to some of the most divisive forces in our nation, the U.S. government came into our workplaces to arrest people whose only crime is working hard for a better life. #ICERaids#1uhttps://t.co/9esui8Y2Hm
The Democrats need millions of poor people coming to the United States and becoming voters, whether or not they become citizens. Motor Voter laws and automatic enrollment of driver’s license applicants as voters ensure that this illegal activity can take place and be shrugged off as an understandable mistake.
Historically, the labor movement strongly opposed immigration, both legal and illegal, because it understood that expanding the supply of labor would depress ages, elementary economics. The United States and Mexico formerly had a very successful guest worker program through a series of agreements, collectively called “The Bracero Program,” that permitted 4.6 million guest worker contracts for agricultural labor between 1942 and 1964. As a result, “Between the 1940s and mid 1950s, farm wages dropped sharply as a percentage of manufacturing wages, a result in part of the use of braceros and undocumented laborers who lacked full rights in American society.” This led Cesar Chavez, the organizer of agricultural workers and a saint of the progressive movement, to strongly oppose it, along with illegal immigration. It was finally killed in 1964, sa Professor Phillip Martin, an expert on agricultural economics at the University of California, Davis, wrote:
The November 1960 CBS documentary “Harvest of Shame” convinced Kennedy that Braceros were “adversely affecting the wages, working conditions, and employment opportunities of our own agricultural workers.” Farmers fought to preserve the program in Congress, but lost, and the Bracero program ended December 31, 1964.
One of the oldest and most popular songs of the labor movement is “Which side are you on?” It is now apparent that union leadership has switched sides.
Gun-grabbing crisis vultures just can’t let the latest mass shootings go to waste. "Red flag" laws are now all the rage in the Beltway as the magic pill to prevent homicidal maniacs from wreaking havoc on the nation. Even President Donald Trump has endorsed the idea of preemptively confiscating people’s firearms if they are deemed a "threat."
That big set of raids on seven Mississippi businesses employing hundreds of illegal aliens is turning up some interesting data. The fact that nearly seven hundred of their workers were in the country illegally and ineligible to hold jobs is bad enough, but it’s increasingly clear that the employers knew about it and were actively engaged in breaking the law.
Six of seven Mississippi chicken processing plants raided Wednesday were “willfully and unlawfully” employing people who lacked authorization to work in the United States, including workers wearing electronic monitoring bracelets at work for previous immigration violations, according to unsealed court documents.
Federal investigators behind the biggest immigration raid in a decade relied on confidential informants inside the plants in addition to data from the monitoring bracelets to help make their case, according to the documents.
The sworn statements supported the search warrants that led a judge to authorize Wednesday’s raids, and aren’t official charges, but give the first detailed look at the evidence involved in what Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have described as a yearlong investigation.
These employers are facing a lot of trouble, as well they should. One spokesperson for Koch Foods (one of the chicken processing plants that was raided) said they have, “a strict and thorough employment verification policy.” Seriously? Some of the employees were literally wearing ankle monitors from previous illegal immigration arrests. ICE reports that many of the workers were using their real names, but made-up social security numbers.
Mississippi has a law on the books making the use of E-Verify mandatory when hiring. (It’s optional at the federal level.) If they ran any of those names and SSNs through the system they would have immediately seen that they weren’t legitimate. The investigation also suggests that some of the plant managers were submitting fraudulent timecards for imaginary workers and then keeping the paychecks for themselves. There was a lot more going on here than just illegal immigrant employment violations.
The real problem is that so few executives at companies engaged in this activity are ever convicted and sentenced. You can deport all 700 of those illegal aliens and another 700 will show up to take their place in short order. ICE has been getting better about prosecuting the employers (the owner of a Tennessee meatpacking plant was sentenced to prison last year for similar charges) but it’s an uphill battle. Too often, the owners claim that they simply didn’t know it was going on and some low-level drone takes the fall. Others employ contracting firms to supply them with workers, shifting the blame to those third parties.
As I mentioned above, deporting the workers, while necessary, isn’t going to fix things in the long run. If you eliminate the source of jobs for illegal aliens, the motivation to cross our border illegally drops significantly. Some of us were discussing this on Twitter last night and it seems to be an area where both sides can support such a solution. As of this writing, this tweet I put up yesterday evening has already garnered more than 4,000 likes, roughly a thousand retweets and hundreds of replies.
This should be a point both parties can agree upon. If you want to cut illegal immigration, the first time a guy like this is frog marched to jail in an orange jumpsuit, illegal immigration will plummet. I’ve said this for years. https://t.co/fFv3ctJgLd
Meanwhile, all the media is focusing on today is the crying children whose parents were detained. That’s not going to solve anything. The children of legal workers – immigrant or native-born – don’t need to worry about their parents being taken away. We can do better at shutting down illegal alien employment. We must do better.
A Texas Trump supporter reportedly received a vicious voicemail following Rep. Joaquin Castro’s (D-TX) decision to publish the names and employers of Trump donors in his own San Antonio district in what appeared to be an attempt to publicly shame them.
The GOP War Room posted a video featuring a threatening voicemail purportedly left on a Trump donor’s phone. It follows Joaquin Castro – who serves as the chair of his brother’s presidential campaign – posting the names and employers of 44 individuals who donated the maximum amount to Trump’s campaign on Twitter.
“I think you’re a scumbag and I fucking despise everything you stand for … I am going to spread your information all over the Internet,” the caller states in part.
This threatening, hateful voicemail was left for a Trump supporter in Texas after @JulianCastro‘s campaign chairman posted the supporter’s personal information online.
Intimidation and threats are exactly what Castro wanted when he posted this target list.
Castro has defended his decision in days past, arguing that he shared information that was already readily public. However, critics argued that his move essentially called for harassment:
This is disgusting. Inciting violence against private citizens for participating in our Democracy is beyond the pale. Your rabid hatred of @realDonaldTrump has made you deranged. https://t.co/vwj9a6EDiT
EVERYONE needs to tone the hateful partisan rhetoric way down. This is WRONG & Castro should retract it. In our constitutional Republic, the People rightly hold their representatives accountable; elected representatives should not be vilifying & doxxing their own constituents. https://t.co/rrgQbK7PLU
People should not be personally targeted for their political views. Period. This isn’t a game. It’s dangerous, and lives are at stake. I know this firsthand. https://t.co/PbxUMIOhae
Rep. Castro spoke to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough Wednesday morning and defended his actions.
“My post was actually a lament … many of those folks are Hispanic and they’re giving their money to a guy who’s running ads talking about Hispanics invading this country,” he said:
Rep. Castro on his post with the names of Trump donors: “My post was actually a lament … many of those folks are Hispanic and they’re giving their money to a guy who’s running ads talking about Hispanics invading this country.” https://t.co/4aHDvsKSeApic.twitter.com/HhNJ3Znfha
Castro: Again, my brother put out a list of names of people who had maxed out to the Trump campaign. That is public information. That kind of information is put out all the time. And for anybody to pretend or suggest that it’s not, that’s just untrue. Let me also be clear: he did not put down anybody’s private information. And he did not put down their addresses, he did not put down their phone numbers.
Reporter: But he singled them out —
Castro: What he did is not “doxing.” Anybody who understand what doxxing is know that — he did not do that, all right? What he did was he put forward publicly available information that was already out there. The right wing want to make this a story because they want to pretend like in some way that’s equivalent to the hate or the division that Donald Trump is fostering in this country. It is not. I guess what Donald Trump wants is he wants these donors to be secret. He doesn’t want you to know who’s donating to him.
Reporter: Do you know that they’re donating to you, too?
Castro: He doesn’t want you to know who’s donating to him because that’s inconvenient for him. Maybe he believes that these people are embarrassed because they are donating to him.
As Breitbart News reported, another individual on Rep. Castro’s list also donated to the lawmaker.
“I was also on a list of people that gave to Castro and if he dislikes me enough that he wants to put my name out there against Trump, I’m not going to give money to him,” Real estate developer Wayne Harwell told Fox News.
“Obviously Castro feels pretty strongly against me,” he added.
The New York Times article posed as a "fun" interactive quiz but hid some nasty Republican sliming in the text, accusing the GOP of conspiring to hold on to office via “voter suppression or attempts to skew the census” : “Quiz: Let Us Predict Whether You’re a Democrat or a Republican.” It’s a creation of Sahil Chinoy, similar to his previous “graphics” story, in which one of his graphics showed a major swerve to the left by the Democrats since 2008 but was downplayed in favor of the story’s intended takeaway of Republicans…
Twitter is exploding with folks looking and talking about ‘Clinton body count.’ Click on the tweet to enlarge and then click on it again when it shows on Twitter. Currently trending on Twitter Epstein, Clintons, Clinton body count Manhattan jail, prince Andrew, Ghislane Maxwell pic.twitter.com/LPTswtVgFg — shanthi kiran (@ShanthiKiranK) August 10, 2019
Saturday Night Live rarely mocks Democrats. That’s obvious in the Age of Trump, but it also held true during President Barack Obama’s two terms in office. SNL player Jay Pharoah said the show “gave up on the Obama thing.” The few times the show mocked Obama’s policies the media took notice. Which brings us to The Babylon Bee. For the uninitiated, the Bee serves up Christian satire with a heaping helping of political humor. Yes, the site often pokes fun at President Trump.
Tech giant Facebook is reportedly facing billions of dollars in potential damages as a federal appeals court rejected the firm’s argument to halt a class action lawsuit relating to the storing of biometric data of millions of users.
TechCrunch reports that a federal appeals court rejected Facebook’s argument to block a class action lawsuit this week which could see the firm facing billions in potential damages. The lawsuit has been moving through the court system since 2015 when Facebook users in Illinois sued the firm for violating the states’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by automatically collecting and identifying individuals in photographs posted on the social media site.
This week, a unanimous decision was made by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco allowing the lawsuit to proceed with the court stating in its decision: “We conclude that the development of face template using facial-recognition technology without consent (as alleged here) invades an individual’s private affairs and concrete interests. Similar conduct is actionable at common law.”
The American Civil Liberties Union supported the court’s ruling with ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project staff attorney Nathan Freed Wessler stating: “This decision is a strong recognition of the dangers of unfettered use of face surveillance technology. The capability to instantaneously identify and track people based on their faces raises a chilling potential for privacy violations at an unprecedented scale. Both corporations and the government are now on notice that this technology poses unique risks to people’s privacy and safety.”
Facebook plans to appeal the decision telling Reuters in a statement: “We have always disclosed our use of face recognition technology and that people can turn it on or off at any time.” Under BIPA, negligent violations of the privacy law could be subject to damages of up to $1,000 and intentional privacy violations are subject to $5,000 in penalties per instance. With a potential of seven million Facebook users that can take part in the class-action lawsuit, Facebook could see itself facing a hefty fine.
Rebecca Glenberg, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Illinois, commented on the case stating: “BIPA’s innovative protections for biometric information are now enforceable in federal court. If a corporation violates a statute by taking your personal information without your consent, you do not have to wait until your data is stolen or misused to go to court. As our General Assembly understood when it enacted BIPA, a strong enforcement mechanism is crucial to hold companies accountable when they violate our privacy laws. Corporations that misuse Illinoisans’ sensitive biometric data now do so at their own peril.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolanor email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
An exclusive report from Vice News claims that researchers have discovered that 35 critical U.S. election systems have been connected to the Internet for months despite manufacturers and election officials claiming that the machines are never online.
An exclusive report from Vice News has revealed that despite claims by voting machine vendors and election officials that their voting systems are never connected to the Internet and as a result can’t be hacked, researchers have discovered that nearly three dozen backend election systems in ten states have been connected to the Internet over the last year, including some in swing states.
Vice News reports:
“We … discovered that at least some jurisdictions were not aware that their systems were online,” said Kevin Skoglund, an independent security consultant who conducted the research with nine others, all of them long-time security professionals and academics with expertise in election security. Skoglund is also part of an advisory group, not associated with the research, that is working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop new cybersecurity standards for voting machines. “In some cases, [the vendor was] in charge [of installing the systems] and there was no oversight. Election officials were publicly saying that their systems were never connected to the internet because they didn’t know differently.”
Vice News explained that some of these voting machines are meant to only be connected to the Internet for a brief few minutes in order to rapidly deliver election results to county officials:
For security reasons, the SFTP server and firewall are only supposed to be connected to the internet for a couple of minutes before an election to test the transmission, and then for long enough after an election to transmit the votes. But the researchers found some of the systems connected to the internet for months at a time, and year-round for others, making them vulnerable to hackers.
Vice notes that although there is no direct evidence that these machines were hacked, they were vulnerable and appears to show a lack of regard for digital security:
While no one is suggesting that any of these systems have been manipulated or hacked, the findings highlight how little local and federal election officials understand how these critical election systems are really configured and connected, and the extent to which they are beholden to what the vendors tell them.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolanor email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
