Russia sent an air force plane to Venezuela and one of its most advanced warships to Cuba on Monday in support of both socialist dictatorships.
A Russian air force plane landed in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas on Monday, according to witnesses from the Reuters news agency. The arrival came just three months after Russia landed two air force planes carrying defense officials and around 100 troops, leading to the U.S. accusing Moscow of engaging in “reckless escalation” of the ongoing country’s political power struggle.
Russia has in recent years positioned itself as a steadfast backer of Nicolás Maduro’s socialist regime, providing vital financial, diplomatic, and military support to the regime amid the country’s worsening economic and humanitarian crisis.
In Cuba, one of the Russian navy’s most advanced warships, the Admiral Gorshkov, docked in Havana on Monday, where it was greeted with a 21-gun salute from the Cuban military located at the entrance to the Bay of Havana.
According to PBS, the Admiral Gorshkov “armed with cruise missiles, air defense systems, and other weapons” and is the “first ship in a new class of frigates intended to replace aging Soviet-era destroyers to project power far away from Russian shores.”
Moscow has also become a crucial ally of Cuba’s communist regime, evoking shades of Havana’s alliance with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Last year, Vladimir Putin agreed to loan the country $50 million in order to purchase new military equipment such as armored vehicles, helicopters, and other weapons. However, Russian officials have repeatedly expressed concern at both Cuba’s and Venezuela’s abilities to repay their debts, as their respective economies remain in dire straits as a result of their socialist economic policies.
In April, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov announced that Russia would do everything possible to help both Cuba and Venezuela overcome the economic difficulties caused by their socialist regimes, blaming U.S. sanctions for them while reaffirming Moscow’s resolute opposition to the Trump administration’s attempts to instigate transitions to democracy in both countries.
“We are concerned over the continuing actions by the United States toward the countries of the Latin American region. We see the sanctions as absolutely unlawful and illegitimate,” he said at the time. “We will oppose them. Venezuela and Cuba are our allies and strategic partners in the region. We will do everything we can to let them feel our support.”
Follow Ben Kew on Facebook, Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart.com.
Administrators at George Washington University are advising students against using offensive words like “lame” and “insane.” Other tips for new students include avoiding “whitesplaining,” which they claim is “a form of racism.”
According to a report by Campus Reform, a new program implemented by officials at George Washington University is telling students to avoid mundane words like “lame” and “insane.” The program, entitled EVERFI, presents students with a set of social scenarios. In each scenario, one student breaks one of the “rules” of political correctness.
Students at George Washington University have reported that this political correctness training program was required before they were permitted to begin their fall classes.
One of the problems given to students involves an encounter between a white student and his Native American friend. “Taylor, who is white, notices his Navajo friend, Kai, wearing a turquoise and silver necklace. ‘That’s pretty, but I hope you didn’t get it at Urban Mercantile. They’ve been selling lots of Native American-type jewelry, but I’m sure you’d want to support Native artists, not chain store. Nobody should shop there.’”
The program informs students that Taylor was “being condescending” and could “lose his friend’s trust.” The program then accuses Taylor of “whitesplaining,” which it calls “a form of racism.”
Another section of the program tells students to avoid words like “lame” and “insane.” The program then tells students that choosing to avoid those words is not a form of “political correctness.”
“Making a choice to avoid using a word like ‘gay,’ ‘lame,’ or ‘insane’ as shorthand to mean something is bad or difficult isn’t about being silenced or ‘politically correct’ — it’s being informed and respectful,” the program reads. “Even though we might not mean it this way, using words related to identities like sexual orientation and disability as if they are negative increases stigma against marginalized groups.”
Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more campus updates.
Google’s shaping of people’s attitudes and behaviors through its control of internet searches amounts to something “way beyond” a monopoly, determined Dr. Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. He joined Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak to discuss Project Veritas’ undercover investigation documenting Google executives’ stated commitment to avoid another “Trump situation.”
“What we have here is yet another confirmation of what I and some other people have been trying to warn the world about for years. Google has been amazing in just keeping to itself and never allowing anything to leak, but this is probably the fourth or fifth major leak [within the past year] of materials again confirming what we could call my worst fears about the company.”
LISTEN:
“This has been happening for years,” said Esptein of Google’s manipulation of its services to advance left-wing and partisan Democrat politics. “This is happening now. This is happening every single day, and it’s not just happening in the U.S, which is why I’m speaking up, because politically, I’m closer to Google than I am to Breitbart. “
Epsitein continued, “I’m speaking up because this is happening now. This is not something they’re planning to do next year. This is something they’re doing right now. They’re training the algorithms to do this better and more effectively, more comprehensively. This is happening right this minute. This is happening today.”
“Google algorithms are having a dramatic impact on the thinking, behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, purchases, and voting preferences of two-and-a-half billion people, right now,” stated Epstein. “That’s the power they have. That’s the power they’re exercising.”
Google’s status is beyond that of a monopoly, explained Epstein.
“This is what a totalitarian regime does,” said Epstein of Google’s leveraging of its power in pursuit of political ends. “This is not a monopoly. A monopoly fixes prices. That’s not what this is. This is way beyond that. This is a repressive government. This is a totalitarian, authoritarian government that at this point rules much of the world.”
Epstein recalled, “I had calculated back in 2015 that Google’s search algorithm — even by that time — was determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections in the world. This is because a lot of elections are very close, so it’s very easy to flip them.
Epstein went on, “Ninety-two percent of the searches in the world are conducted on Google’s search engine, and people trust the results they’re getting because [they believe] they’re getting them from an algorithm, and algorithms are objective and impartial. That shifts the opinion very rapidly and dramatically of people who are undecided.”
“Google is not a monopoly,” repeated Epstein. “Google is a totalitarian entity — a government-like entity — the likes of which the world has never seen, and no, I am not exaggerating. If anything, I am underplaying just how creepy this situation is.”
Epstein assessed the worldview of Google’s executives as politically messianic in its paving of the metaphorical road to hell with good intentions.
“The logic behind these creepy terms [such as “algorithmic unfairness”] is utopian,” stated Epstein. “In other words, these are people who see themselves as do-gooders. For the most part, I see them as do-gooders, also, because politically, I’m not a conservative. But the point is they see themselves as do-gooders. They see themselves as utopian, as people with a mission to create a better world.”
Epstein continued, “So they use language — the way they use the terms ‘fairness’ and ‘unfairness’ is so creepy — which on its surface looks really good, right? ‘Let’s have fairness in what we show people. Let’s have fairness in our algorithms.’ Except when you look more carefully, what they’re really saying is ‘Let’s promote one particular set of values. Let’s promote one particular political party. Let’s suppress material that contradicts the values that we hold and the politics we believe in.’”
“They’re hiding all that, which is a very simple straightforward political agenda,” added Espitein. They’re hiding that behind this very highfalutin utopian language. We’re here to make the world better.”
Epstein teased a forthcoming proposal of his which he said will “solve the Google problem.”
“I’ve figured out how to solve the Google problem, and I will be publishing on that within the next two weeks, or so,” said Epstein, noting his invitation to testify before Congress on political matters related to technology companies in July. “There is a way that’s quite viable to really end Google’s worldwide monopoly on search. It actually can be done, and because it can be done, I think it’s actually going to happen. I think Google’s going to go the way of the dinosaurs.”
“I really think there’s a way to end their worldwide monopoly on search, and that’s what you really have to do so that Google is no longer a threat to democracy and a threat to humankind,” concluded Epstein. “You have to end their monopoly on search. I finally came up with a way to do that. I will be publishing fairly soon. The article is now being edited. It will be very, very mainstream.”
“As always, I will give my friends at Breitbart a heads up so that you can cover this,” noted Epstein.
Epstein shared an anecdote in which fear for his safety was expressed.
“I did have someone who’s in law enforcement approach me after I had presented this idea to a small group of people and he told me he thinks I’m going to get killed sometime in the next week or two in an apparent accident,” Epstein remarked. “I’m thinking, ‘Wow, these law enforcement people have a great sense of humor, I guess,’ but he didn’t seem to be joking.”
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.
A coalition of far-left political activist organizations known for peddling smears about conservatives held a protest at Mastercard’s annual general meeting (AGM) today, aiming to pressure the international credit card giant to financially blacklist wider sections of the political right. The groups’ proposal to form a “human rights committee” did not sway shareholders, who voted the measure down.
At Mastercard’s AGM this morning, the far-left groups SumOfUs and Sleeping Giants circled the venue with a mobile billboard stating: “Putting hate groups out of business? #Priceless.”
According to a press release published by the two organizations, this was coupled with a speech from Sleeping Giants co-founder Nandini Jammi, “addressing the need for Mastercard to take swift action by cutting off its services to these hate groups.”
Sleeping Giants, whose founders initially refused to take accountability for the organization’s words and actions by remaining anonymous, was set up in 2016 by far-left political activists with the sole stated purpose of defunding Breitbart by spreading lies about it. The identity of its other founder, former advertising professional Matt Rivitz, was revealed last year.
Sleeping Giants coupled these smears with targeted social media harassment campaigns against corporations whose ads appeared on Breitbart News.
Over time, Sleeping Giants expanded its targets to encompass any conservative media with which its organizers politically disagree, including Fox News shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight, The Daily Caller, Dennis Prager, and the Daily Wire.
SumOfUs is purportedly a “human rights” activist group that now campaigns to make speech with which it politically disagrees unprofitable. Its website lists a number of powerful left-wing foundations among its partners, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Tides Foundation, the Media Democracy Fund, and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation.
Earlier this year, SumOfUs presented a proposal to Mastercard’s shareholders, calling on the company to establish a “human rights committee” that would monitor payments to the “far right.” The protest aimed to pressure Mastercard to accept the proposal. Shareholders voted down the proposal this morning, despite the protest.
“Over the past few years, the rise of the far-right has wreaked havoc around the world, terrorizing and harming marginalized groups,” wrote SumOfUs in its press release.
Although Mastercard’s board says it is committed to the principle of allowing “all lawful purchases,” online payments platform Patreon says that Mastercard asked it to withdraw service from Islam critic Robert Spencer, founder of JihadWatch.org, in August 2018. Mastercard also pressured a payment processor to cut off service to conservative activist, think tank founder and author David Horowitz last year, but later the processor reinstated service following pressure from Breitbart News and other conservative media.
As left-wing political activist groups have pressured social media companies to blacklist their political rivals, they are also intent on destroying the ability of the political right to do business on the Internet. The rise of financial blacklisting has been a trend in recent years, with repeated instances online payment processors and funding platforms cutting off their services to right-wingers and conservatives.
Even liberal groups have sounded the alarm about this trend. In July last year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warned that banks, credit card companies and payment processors are becoming “de facto internet censors.”
“EFF is deeply concerned that payment processors are making choices about which websites can and can’t accept payments or process donations,” an EFF spokeswoman told Breitbart News at the time.
Combined with corporate-controlled cryptocurrencies like Facebook’s “Libra” coin, Corporate America increasingly references the rise of a “cashless society.”
The CEO of Bank of America recently stated that he supports the trend, “from a pure operating cost [perspective]” as it would allow the bank to spend less on moving checks and cash around the company.
But beyond this relatively benign motivation, a “cashless society” would also allow a handful of corporations to control access to the financial system — and potentially cut if off from those deemed politically or socially undesirable. This is precisely the kind of financial blacklisting that Sleeping Giants loudly demands from Mastercard. 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.
According to a recently released survey, two-thirds of employees admitted to having regrets about their higher education, specifically when it came to the high cost of college, as well as the area of study. Student loans represented the largest source of regret across all demographic categories.
The vast majority of those with a bachelor degree regret some aspect of their education, according to a PayScale survey released on Tuesday. The survey results also found that the two most common regrets pertained to high cost of higher education, and the individual’s choice in major.
“By far the most common regret reported was student loans,” reported PayScale, “No matter how we cut the data, student loans was the number one regret reported. After this, the most common regret was area of study, but this varied greatly by major. Those who majored in technical or high-earnings fields had the lowest rates of saying they regretted their field of study.”
The report added that 248,000 respondents — all whom at least had a bachelor’s degree — took the online survey from April to May of 2019.
Respondents were asked about their education level, major, school name, degree, and age, among other things. With regards to which aspect they regretted most about their experience with higher education, respondents were able to select one of the following answers:
Student loans
Area of study (major, minor, concentration)
School/institution choice
Too many degrees/over-education for my career
Time to complete (too long)
Academic underachievement
Not making the right connections (networking with peers/faculty/alumni)
I have no regrets
Among all of the respondents surveyed, it was discovered that 66 percent — or two out of every three — said that they have regret about their college education, while just 34 percent reported having no regrets.
Of the 66 percent who had regrets, “student loans” was by far the largest category selected at 27 percent, while “area of study” and “not making the right connections” came in second at 12 percent and 11 percent. It was also noted that these three answers were the most common college regrets throughout most of the same groups.
“The burden of student loans is a plight shared by every group in this research, but the degree of student loan regret changes throughout these data cuts,” says PayScale. “Those who are younger, majored in lower-earning fields or attended private universities tended to regret their student loans the most.”
Older Americans were more likely to report that they have no regrets about their education.
The results of the survey are not at all shocking, given that the national student loan debt in the United States is approaching $1.6 trillion, as big-government politicians, such as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), use the issue as a means for collecting votes from millions of frustrated Millennials who regret their own decisions.
Among those resentful Millennials even includes 29-year-old Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who says that she wants student loan debt “canceled,” admitting that she, too, still has to pay off her student loans — a responsibility that she would rather not be burdened with.
Regrets about college also varied by major.
“Although no group had a majority of ‘no regret’ responses, fields that lead into high-earning or high-meaning jobs did see a larger portion of respondents that had no regrets about college,” said PayScale, “Engineering, education and computer science majors were among the major groups with the highest rates of ‘no regret’ responses.”
“Humanities majors, on the other hand, had the largest percentage of respondents that had some type of college regret,” added the report.
“Perhaps the most insightful look into choosing a major is to determine which groups regret their area of study the most,” suggested PayScale, “Humanities majors report regretting their area of study at a much higher rate, 21 percent, than other majors.”
At a Senate commerce committee hearing on social media algorithms today, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) took the opportunity to take Facebook-owned Instagram to task for apparent bias in its suggested follows feature, which recommends new accounts for users to follow.
Sen. Johnson noted that when his staffers followed the Instagram page of the news website Politico, Instagram immediately suggested a range of liberal Instagram accounts to follow, despite the fact that they were conservatives.
According to the senator, Instagram recommended that his conservative staffers follow (among others) Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, HuffPost, The Daily Show, Hillary Clinton, Bill Maher, MoveOn.org and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
Sen. Johnson asked the big tech representatives why his staffers saw no recommendations for conservative sources like Breitbart News, Newsmax, Fox News or Donald Trump.
The senator suggested that the list of suggestions may be because of Instagram’s liberal bias. Commerce Committee chairman Sen. John Thune (R-SD) noted that if search results and recommendations were based on “neutral algorithms” and artificial intelligence, based on big tech’s data on the behavior patterns of users, then conservative users would not see as many left-leaning and liberal sources as they do.
Facebook’s representative at the hearing could not provide a conclusive answer to Sen. Johnson, stating that they would need to see the user’s click pattern to explain the list of recommended follows. Other panelists suggested that the recommendations may have happened because the liberal accounts were in the news, or were simply more popular across Instagram.
Breitbart News has reached out to Facebook, which owns Instagram, for comment.
Are you an insider at Instagram, Facebook or any other corporation who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Live,” 2020 presidential hopeful Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA) said if elected he can stop the influx of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border by confronting the causes, one of which he claimed was the so-called climate crisis.
Partial transcript as follows:
VELSHI: Day one, if you’re president, how do you deal with the actual situation in which there continues to be an influx of migrants at the southern borders? And then beyond day one, what would you actually do to fix the immigration system?
INSLEE: Well, the first thing we have to do is remove a person who has looked at this through a lens not of helping solve the problem, not of helping follow the law, not of doing your job as the American government, but instead has used it as a political cudgel.
VELSHI: What happens if you win, once you remove Donald Trump, there will continue to be an issue on the southern border, what will you do about it?
INSLEE: We will follow the law, which is to allow people to have asylum requests. We will provide humane treatment for them and not separate children from their parents, which is both inhumane and I believe illegal. We will also importantly confront the causes of this immigration, one of which is we have climate refugees now because the climate crisis is making Central America uninhabitable for a large portion of people. Donald Trump keeps calling this a climate hoax, and we have climate refugees. We have to give a chance for those people to stay in their ancestral homeland. Those are three things we can do.
Via MSN: Pakistan threw its full weight behind the new UN Strategy and Plan of Action to combat hate speech, saying that language was being used to secure narrow political and electoral gains in many parts of the world, including the South Asian region. “An inevitable consequence is to fan the flames of bigotry, intolerance, […]
The DOJ claims Omarosa was informed after she was fired in December of 2017 that she had to file a financial disclosure form — and reminded again in January through March of 2018
“Notwithstanding the numerous attempt to obtain her compliance, Ms. Manigault Newman has not filed her termination financial disclosure report,” the lawsuit said.
Omarosa may be fined up to $50,000 for violating the Ethics in Government Act, the lawsuit states.
Trump has given Omarosa many opportunities in life yet she stabbed him in the back and accused the President of using various racial slurs such as the n-word several times after she left the White House.
Social media was set ablaze last summer after Omarosa released a secret recording of Chief of Staff John Kelly firing her.
Last August on “Meet the Press,” Omarosa released a secret recording of CoS John Kelly firing her from the White House.
Prior to that, Omarosa slammed Trump in her soon-to-be-released book titled, “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House.”
President Trump called Omarosa a “lowlife” last year in response to a reporter who asked him if he “felt betrayed” by the former White House aid.
President Trump suffered a set back on Tuesday when he lost a bid to halt a lawsuit brought by over 200 rabid Congressional Democrats who are seeking a DC federal court to require that Trump get approval from lawmakers before he accepts any financial benefits from foreign governments, reported Bloomberg.
In other words, loser Democrat lawmakers, who couldn’t even run a successful lemonade stand, are targeting president Trump and accusing him of violating the very rarely litigated emoluments clause of the US Constitution by claiming his luxury hotels which are blocks from the White House is evidence Trump is receiving benefits.
The emoluments clause is a provision that bars US presidents from accepting gifts from foreign governments without permission from Congress first.
US District Judge Emmett Sullivan (the same judge assigned to General Flynn’s case), a Clinton appointee on Tuesday denied Trump’s request to stop the lawsuit.
The 2017 lawsuit against Trump was led by Stolen Valor fraud Senator Richard “Da Nang Dick” Blumenthal (D-CT).
In a pair of orders issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan denied Trump’s request to halt the lawsuit so he could immediately appeal Sullivan’s earlier refusals to dismiss the case. The decision means the 2017 lawsuit led by U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut can proceed.
In a separate order, the judge said lawmakers can begin collecting evidence to support their claims on June 28, but must wrap up that process by Sept. 27.
The president’s lawyers say money flows into his businesses legally. The judge has not yet made a final determination on that issue.
Noting the lawmakers told him they can quickly gather evidence and that both sides say final briefs can be submitted within six months, Sullivan ruled that Trump’s lawyers hadn’t met their burden of showing a mid-case appeal would significantly speed up resolution of the case.
