Category: US Politics

Friday, Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY) sounded off on the House’s second impeachment of President Donald Trump, this time for “incitement of insurrection” after a group of his supporters breached the U.S. Capitol.

Barr acknowledged on “CNN Newsroom” that he does not see Trump as “blameless” in the riot at the Capitol, but said the rushed impeachment looks “more like an act of political vengeance” than “trying to uphold the standards of the presidency.”

“The president here is not blameless, but ultimately, I voted against impeachment because, as a legal matter, the Supreme Court has set the standard for what constitutes criminal incitement in a way that doesn’t violate the First Amendment,” Barr told CNN anchor Jim Sciutto. “And here, based on the facts, the president’s conduct, while unfortunate, did not rise to the level of the legal definition of incitement. But beyond the legal analysis, I think the real point here is that with only seven days left in this president’s term, what does impeachment actually accomplish? It looked to me, and every member, Republican and Democrat, had to make their own judgment, but it looked to me more like an act of political vengeance as opposed to actually trying to uphold the standards of the presidency. And again, what I would say is let’s follow the advice of the president-elect, and let’s try to do what we can to bring the country together to turn the page, heal and unite the country.”

Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent

In a recent article, NBC News provides an insight into the moments leading up to the decision by Facebook and Twitter to blacklist President Donald Trump. One Facebook executive betrayed the depth of progressive groupthink amongst the Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe when they reported said: “We don’t have a policy for what to do when a sitting president starts a coup.”

In an article titled “How Facebook and Twitter Decided to Take Down Trump’s Accounts,” NBC News describes the scenes internally at Facebook and Twitter before the companies’ decision to permanently suspend President Donald Trump from their services. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey claims this blacklisting action was not coordinated, but nevertheless, the companies show eerie similarities in their process.

NBC News writes in its account of Facebook’s decision:

Early the next morning, from his vacation home in Kauai, Hawaii, Zuckerberg held a phone call with Sandberg, Bickert, Clegg, Kaplan and other executives. Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, was on the call, along with Neil Potts, the public policy director for trust and safety policy, and Chief Diversity Officer Maxine Williams, among several others.

Zuckerberg said he had decided that Trump’s attempts to incite violence and undermine the democratic process were grounds for an indefinite suspension. No one voiced a dissenting opinion, the people familiar with the call said.

Shortly thereafter, Zuckerberg published a Facebook post explaining that “the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great.”

A Facebook executive commented on the decisions stating: “This is not normal. These are extraordinary circumstances. We don’t have a policy for what to do when a sitting president starts a coup.”

A short while later, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey discussed the best course of action with Vijaya Gadde, the company’s legal chief, and a number of other Twitter executives. Dorsey approved a permanent ban, although he would later post a series of tweets noting his worries about doing so and his power to heavily influence “the global public conversation.”

Read more at NBC News here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com

Rob |
January 14, 2021 8:00 pm

When the Capitol riots happened on Jan. 6, the blame of President Trump was all over. 

Supposedly, he was the instigator. Supposedly, he’d egged the rioters on. The tape of his urging his supporters to stay strong and fight was Exhibit A in the press, and with no skepticism whatsoever, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared Trump guilty and rushed a crazily hasty second impeachment just days before Trump’s exit. She declared it was all about holding Trump “accountable” and she added, that her explicit aim at the uselessly late date was to prevent him from ever running from public office again.

Never mind what the voters might want. In more ways than one, in Pelosi’s addled mind, their votes don’t count.

The press also rushed to judgment, even the Wall Street Journal’s editorial writers, claiming that Trump’s political capital and credibility was now gone and he’d never run for president again.

But as news of the arrests comes out, showing who these branded Trump so-called supporters are, the conventional argument is starting to splinter apart.

The arrests made in the riots case are starting to show the kind of people who like to riot, which is to say extreme leftists.

Start with this freak, as reported by Fox News:

A left-wing activist who told Fox News last week that he’d followed a pro-Trump mob into the Capitol in order to “document” the siege is now the subject of a criminal complaint in connection with his alleged participation, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

John Sullivan can allegedly be heard egging on protesters in video he provided to the FBI, according to a federal criminal complaint. He has also shared the video to his YouTube and Twitter accounts under the pseudonym Jayden X.

He was charged Thursday in federal court in Washington after being arrested by the FBI. He remains in custody in Toeele County, in his home state of Utah, on a U.S. Marshals Service hold request.

The Epoch Times reports that he was a Black Lives Matter activist. Andy Ngo notes that he’s been busted for BLM riot activity, too. GatewayPundit reported that he was caught on video bragging about posing as a Trump supporter.

He had a pal, too, from CNN. According to this report from TrendingPolitics:

On Thursday night, damning new footage showed CNN’s Jade Sacker inside of the Capitol with John Sullivan, the BLM member who was charged by federal prosecutors for inciting chaos on January 6th.

Sacker co-conspired with the liberal activist in order to cause chaos and make Trump supporters look bad.

The shocking video shows her and Sullivan celebrating and shouting “We did it!” when they got the footage they were looking for. When she asked Sullivan if he was filming, he said was going to delete it. He never did.

Trending Politics ran a tweet of the actual video, and described this:

As you can see, Sacker and Sullivan are overjoyed with the fact that they got footage of Trump supporters “rioting”.

“Is this not gonna be the best film you’ve ever made in your life?!” Sullivan asks her.

Verified twitter user Amuse breaks everything down in further detail in a series of tweets.

“To make this clear. CNN was embedded with BLM/Antifa pretending to be Trump supporters taping them incite a riot. This is freaking huge. If CNN is allowed to maintain its press access anywhere in DC there needs to be a serious overhaul of our entire system,” he tweeted.

Here’s another one, who showed up with furs, and also got himself arrested. According to the New York Post:

Aaron Mostofsky was busted Tuesday at his brother’s house in Brooklyn by federal agents on multiple charges, including theft of government property for allegedly stealing a police riot shield and bulletproof vest, the source said.

Mostofsky, who is the son of Shlomo Mostofsky, a Supreme Court judge and a prominent figure in the Orthodox Jewish community, was photographed with both items.

Video circulating on Twitter following Mostofsky’s arrest shows FBI agents swarming the home and carting out what appeared to be the fur pelts and walking stick he had on him during the insurrection.

His politics? According to this report, registered Democrat.

Even the press is starting to notice that the pieces aren’t fitting together. Rather than a picture of all wicked and crazed Trump supporters, charging the Capitol, leftist news outfit Bloomberg reported that its survey of various parties involved, including those who died or were arrested, didn’t paint the desired picture. Conclusion?

Many of those shown in news footage had no party affiliation and voted sporadically, if at all. 

Bloomberg’s survey of the players showed that only the people who died of medical emergencies seemed to be fully normal Republican voters — the rest didn’t vote at all, voted sporadically, voted Libertarian, Independent or Democrat, and in general were fringe players. Bloomberg, missing that obvious conclusion, seemed to consider these mostly arrested characters “Trump’s people” and Trump’s “base,” in a bid to still pin the riots on Trump. But how anyone who votes Democrat or doesn’t vote at all could be a part of Trump’s rise and the huge crowds he draws was never actually explained. Trump supporters … vote for Trump. This isn’t rocket science.

More and more, it looks like Trump was framed. This, in addition to transcripts not bearing out the claims that Trump called for an attack on the Capitol, as well as the inconvenient timeline — the FBI put out warnings of plans for disturbances days earlier, and the attack on the Capitol began before President Trump finished speaking and probably uttered the words the Democrats literally impeached him on.  

It was a rush to judgment, a failure to look at facts. It happened in the aftermath of the event, and it turns out Trump had little or nothing to do with it. Even House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy blamed Trump for the riots. But he, too,disgracefully rushed to judgment, so we await his apology, please.

The rush to judgment, incidentally, didn’t affect just President Trump, who got a second impeachment from it. There were many rushes to judgment in this leftist hysteria.

Here’s a blameless man named David Quintavalle, a retired Chicago firefighter, who was falsely accused of being the person who hurled the fire extinguisher that killed police officer Brian Sicknick, who by the way, really was a Trump supporter.

According to The Patch of Chicago:

The retired Chicago firefighter from Mount Greenwood — whom social media trolls called a “terrorist” and accused of fatally wielding a fire extinguisher that killed a cop as a mob of Trump-supporting insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 — was grocery shopping and celebrating his wife’s birthday in Chicago, Patch has learned.

This is a hell of a sorry picture.

The facts will continue to roll out and the picture that emerges will likely start to show that these rioters were hardly “Trump’s people” as a rule, or people who were egged on by Trump. They were, in general, leftists, political fringers and people who like to go to riots. There remains to be news of whether and how this fiasco was plotted out but expect news of that to roll out. 

That leaves Congress and all the jerks who voted for impeachment of President Trump looking like boobs and losers. They’ve hitched their star to this leftist impeachment obsession, and now have seen it falling flat. Now they are about to sully and overshadow Joe Biden’s first days in office with increasingly discredited charges against President Trump and rest assured, the voters will notice just how bad it is. This rush to judgment will trash their own legacies for history.

Image credit: Twitter screen shot

Prime Minister of Poland Mateusz Morawiecki has vowed to “defend freedom of speech on the internet” and insisted “the owners of social media networks cannot operate above the law” after U.S. President Donald Trump and Parler were purged.

“I was born and raised among people for whom freedom was the most precious of values… because we know what it is like when someone tries to limit it,” said the 52-year-old conservative who was born in the same year that the Soviet communists and puppet regimes in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland itself invaded the wayward satellite state of Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.

“For close to 50 years we lived in a country in which censorship was practised, in which Big Brother told us how we are meant to live and what we are meant to feel, and what we are not allowed to think, say or write,” wrote Morawiecki on his Facebook page, going on to praise the internet as “the most democratic medium in history, a forum on which everyone can have a voice”.

Nevertheless, he warned, the internet’s lack of regulation has, paradoxically, had “negative consequences” for freedom over time: “It became dominated by huge, international corporations, wealthier and more powerful than many nations.”

“These corporations treat our online activity merely as a source of revenue and a tool to increase their global domination. They have also introduced their own standards of political correctness, and they fight those who oppose them,” wrote Morawiecki.

“We are now increasingly faced with practices we believed were left in the past. The censoring of free speech, once the domain of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, is now back, but in a new form, run by corporations, who silence those who think differently,” he lamented.

The Polish leader insisted that there can be “No tolerance for state censorship, such as the one Poland faced under communism, or the private type, which we are seeing today.”

“Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of democracy — that is why we must defend it. It is not up to algorithms or the owners of huge corporations to decide what opinions are correct and which aren’t.”

The Polish prime minister promised that his government would “do everything to define the frame of operations of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other similar platforms” with respect to free speech.

“In Poland we will regulate with appropriate national regulation. We will also suggest similar laws be passed in all of the EU,” he added.

“Social media platforms have to serve us, and not the interests of their powerful owners. Everyone has the right to freedom of speech. Poland will defend that right.”

Ministers in Morawiecki’s government have previously explained that the regulations will take the form of an ‘Act for the Freedom to Express One’s Views and Obtain and Disseminate Information on the Internet’, giving social media users a statutory right to appeal bans and content removal to tech giants — with the possibility of further, all-digital, and anonymised appeals to a new Court for the Protection of Freedom of Speech.

The court will be able to order social media platforms to restore banned users or their posts if their words were lawful under the Polish constitution, with multi-million dollar fines for firms which refuse its rulings or fail to address them in a timely fashion.

“The Constitution… guarantees full freedom of expression… Therefore, any manifestations of limiting it must meet with the reaction of the state to enable protection against interference with this freedom,” explained deputy justice minister Sebastian Kaleta.

“The Left tries to define any fundamental criticism of its views or ideology as ‘hate speech’, and then expects such content to be censored or even punished… This law is a response to what they are trying to impose on us as legal norms, that is, forcing us to censor with political correctness and refrain from expressing one’s opinion,” Kaleta added.

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