On a long road trip, Taylor shared the video with their husband. Taylor says the couple appreciated Trumps apparent sense of humor. We streamed a lot of those videos on that drive.

By mid-December 2015, the subreddits subscriber base had doubled, and on December 21 it became one of the 10,000 biggest on the platform. That month, Trump called for banning all Muslims from traveling to the United States. Posts on the subreddit defended the proposal as not fascist and probably not unconstitutional. The day after his proposal, Trump led New Hampshire polling rival Rubio by 32 percent to 14 percent in the statewide running. Rubios subreddit, r/marco_rubio, floundered at a few hundred subscribers.

The day that poll came out, December 8, The_Donalds moderatorsmods, as they are known on Redditnoticed a spike in their daily viewership. Their unique viewers, usually around one or two hundred per hour, spiked to more than 2,000 per hour. The mods thought they knew why. Users from the r/Politics subreddit, a massive forum with a December 2015 total of 3.1 million users, had found out about T_D. Now they were flocking to it, often harassing and downvoting the regulars. It was among the first of many such incidents over the next four and a half years.

T_D moderator u/NYPD-32, then one of five volunteers on the page, made a post calling the visitors out.

TITLE: The Great /r/The_Donald Invasion

POST: When /r/politics sends their people they arent sending their best. Theyre losers, theyre Reddit TOS violators, some of them I assume may be good people.

The backlash from the new arrivals was swift and sustained.

REPLY BY u/InitiumNovum: There needs to be a total and complete shut down of libtard /r/Politics users entering this subreddit.

Yet there were also a fair number of positive comments, both about the volunteer moderators and the admins, or administrators, Reddits paid staff who run the sites deeper features. u/NYPD-32 wrote that the admins had been receptive and helpful in dealing with the brigade.

COMMENT BY u/TRUMPTRUMPTRUMPTRUMP: Admins, wonderful people! Do a great job, high energy people.

When Redditors or their communities misbehave, the sites paid administrators are the highest court. Volunteers such as T_Ds moderators have substantial power within their fiefs but can do nothing beyond them. The admins, meanwhile, can see everything and do anything. December 2015 marked one of the first interactions between the staff and The_Donald. Like that days battle between T_D and r/politics, it was not to be the last.

Reddit today employs just under 700 people. In 2016, as The_Donald began to emerge on the sitewide scene, the company staff stood at under 100, and in an interview with WIRED, CEO Steve Huffman says he wrote some of the sites early 2016 announcements himself.

No wonder, then, that Huffman was aware firsthand of T_Ds growth. They were a little dysfunctional, Huffman says of the T_D moderators, who first received disciplinary messages from the staff in April 2016. He says it was difficult to decide on how to handle T_Dor even to know when its users were for real.

In the early days of The_DonaldI wasnt a user myself, so pardon me for this being a little fuzzyit was like, half troll users saying ridiculous things as if they were Donald Trump supporters, and half actual Donald Trump supporters, Huffman says. I think if youve lived in America over the last four years, thats actually not as far-fetched as it sounds. Not being able to distinguish between parody and satire and reality was actually a truth that we lived.

In 2016, the policy team at Reddit consisted of Huffman and his general counsel. He says there were often debates about the subreddit among the sites staff, debates which he says evolved as the subreddit gained prominence.

We can make an educated guess about what was said in those debates. Over time, Reddit, like many other institutions, gradually stepped up its responses to Trumps rhetoric. Perhaps everyone at Reddit was united behind this slower response, but it seems more likely that internal division existed over when and how much to censure T_D. When asked what specifically came up in those years of debates, a Reddit spokesperson called Huffmans statements self-explanatory and declined to give further details.

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The Hate-Fueled Rise of r/The_Donaldand Its Epic Takedown - WIRED

Photo: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images

On Friday night, President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he was banning the mega-popular video-sharing app TikTok in the U.S. something he and White House officials had been threatening to do for weeks over concerns about how the Chinese-owned company collected and handled American user data. Said Trump, who says a lot of things, As far as TikTok is concerned, were banning them from the United States, adding that, I have that authority, and that, Its going to be signed tomorrow.

Trump also weighed in somewhat confusingly on a developing (seemingly White House-backed) deal aimed at avoiding the ban between ByteDance, the Chinese internet company which owns the app, and Microsoft. [Its] not the deal that you have been hearing about, Trump continued, that they are going to buy and sell, and this and that and Microsoft and another one. Were not an M&A [mergers and acquisitions] country.

But Trump did not ban TikTok on Saturday; he spent the day golfing and tweeting, and he didnt ban it on Sunday, either. Its still not clear if Trumps announcement was some kind of negotiating tactic, a pure-politics attempt to sound tough on China, or just another impulsive outburst by the pronouncement-prone president. Whatever the reason, the news prompted countless TikTok users to panic, with some issuing tearful goodbyes to their followers and others vowing electoral revenge. Microsoft temporarily paused its efforts to acquire the app amid the mixed signals from the White House. And GOP leaders tried to remind Trump about the art of favoring a deal.

Below is what we know about what has happened so far with the TikTok ban, the Microsoft deal, and what might happen next.

Trump didnt appear to be in any hurry to follow through on his announcement over the weekend, and White House officials have remained vague regarding the possible timing, as well. But with the news on Sunday night that Microsoft was resuming its efforts to buy TikTok, apparently with Trumps approval the risk of a ban seems low, at least for now.

During a Fox News interview on Sunday morning, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the president would take action in the coming days to address national security risks presented by Chinese-owned software companies which may mean Trump will be targeting more than just TikTok.

Its also important to note that there have been bipartisan security concerns over the app, so Trump and his allies arent simply going it alone in this case. On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin claimed that everybody agrees [TikTok] cant exist as it does, including both the White House and congressional leaders.

TikTok has an estimated 100 million U.S. users, having enjoyed explosive growth in the past few years to become one of the most-downloaded apps of all time as well as a rare competitor to Facebook and Google. The company has an estimated value of as much as $20-40 billion, according to Bloomberg. Any deal to acquire TikTok would have to be approved by both U.S. foreign investment and anti-trust regulators, and while there may be other companies or investors interested in a deal, Microsoft had seemed to be uniquely positioned to be able to both afford TikTok as well as win U.S. government approval. Then Trump weighed in on Friday night.

On Saturday, Reuters and Bloomberg both reported that ByteDance had offered to divest 100 percent of TikToks U.S. operations in order to avoid the ban, but the Wall Street Journal later reported that Trumps comments led Microsoft to pause its negotiations to buy them:

The presidents statements spurred TikTok to make additional concessions, including agreeing to add as many as 10,000 jobs in the U.S. over the next three years, but it isnt clear if those will alter Mr. Trumps stance, one of the people said. The founder of TikTok parent Bytedance Ltd., Zhang Yiming, also agreed to sell his stake as part of any deal, the person said. Mr. Zhang was going to retain a minority stake under the deal being discussed before Mr. Trumps late Friday remarks, the person said.

The software giantwas in advanced talkswith Bytedance, gaining momentum toward a deal they believed met the White House goal for the popular app to get bought by a U.S. company, the people said. Those plans were interrupted when Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he preferred to ban the app and wouldnt support a sale.

Treasury officials reportedly told the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. on Friday morning that the ByteDance-Microsoft deal was imminent. The subsequent confusion, according to the Journal, is because some Trump administration officials favor the deal, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, while others favor an outright ban, like trade advisor (and anti-China hardliner) Peter Navarro who tried to claim on Saturday night that Microsoft could not be trusted since it already does business with China.

Several Senate Republicans and the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce expressed support for the Microsoft deal on Sunday in what appeared to be a concerted effort to save it from the fog of Trump. Then on Sunday night, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that he had spoken with the president this weekend, assuaged his concerns about the potential deal, and that the company was proceeding in its effort to acquire the app, per the New York Times:

Microsoft said it would pursue the deal over the coming weeks, and expected to complete the discussions no later than Sept. 15. Such a deal would involve purchasing TikTok offices in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, would continue to own the social media apps offices in Beijing. Microsoft may also bring on a series of outside investors, which would hold minority stakes in any deal.

The company pledged that if it acquires TikTok, it would make sure all U.S. user data is transferred back to the country and deleted from foreign servers, and said it would bolster the apps security and privacy protections. Microsoft fully appreciates the importance of addressing the Presidents concerns and is committed to acquiring TikTok subject to a complete security review and providing proper economic benefits to the United States, including the United States Treasury, the company said. It also noted that the discussions to buy the app were preliminary.

On the other hand, the South China Morning Post reported on Sunday that ByteDance insiders have come to favor spinning off TikTok as opposed to selling it, but that could just be a negotiating tactic.

For now, it appears that Microsoft is still on the inside track.

Trumps supposed ban has prompted an outpouring of grief, outrage, and attention among the apps users. TikTok videos referencing the ban have clocked more than 380 million views as of Sunday afternoon. Creators have put out emotional goodbyes, announcements to their followers about where else they could be found online post-ban, explanations for supposed methods of getting around the ban, and in some cases, attempts to dissuade Trump by appealing to his vanity:

On Saturday, TikToks U.S. General Manager, Vanessa Pappas, put out a TikTok video letting users know that their concerns had been heard and assuring them that the company expected to continue operating in the U.S. for a long time:

There has been ongoing speculation, on and off of TikTok, that Trump is specifically going after the app as an act of retaliation against its users some of whom prank-reserved tickets to his infamously under-attended Tulsa rally in June, and one of whom has become famous for lip-syncing to the president. While its never a good idea to underestimate how much Trump does anything because of personal animus, there is typically some evidence of such views from the president, who is neither known for his guile nor keeping his feelings to himself.

TikTok has insisted that no one needs to be worried about user data falling into the hands of Chinas government, but as Stratecherys Ben Thompson has noted, the concerns over data sharing are valid:

TikTok data absolutely can be sent to China, and, it is important to note, this would be the case even if [TikToks] privacy policy were not so honest. All Chinese Internet companies are compelled by the countrys National Intelligence Law to turn over any and all data that the government demands, and that power is not limited by Chinas borders. Moreover, this requisition of data is not subject to warrants or courts, as is the case with U.S. government requests for data from Facebook or any other entity; the Chinese government absolutely could be running a learning algorithms in parallel to ByteDances on all TikTok data.

He also argues that allowing China to control such a powerful and influential social media platform could have dire consequences:

[TikTok] censored #BlackLivesMatter and #GeorgeFloyd,blocked a teenagerdiscussing Chinasgenocide in Xinjiang, andblocked a video of Tank Man.The Guardianpublished TikTok guidelines that censored Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, and the Falun Gong, andI myself demonstratedthat TikTok appeared to be censoring the Hong Kong protests and Houston Rockets basketball team.

The point, though, is not just censorship, but its inverse: propaganda. TikToks algorithm, unmoored from the constraints of your social network or professional content creators, is free to promote whatever videos it likes, without anyone knowing the difference. TikTok could promote a particular candidate or a particular issue in a particular geography, without anyone except perhaps the candidate, now indebted to a Chinese company knowing. You may be skeptical this might happen, but again, China has already demonstrated a willingness to censor speech on a platform banned in China; how much of a leap is it to think that a Party committed to ideological dominance will forever leave a route directly into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans untouched?

Banning or effectively banning TikTok wouldnt be as easy as the Trump administration claims, but it wouldnt be impossible, either. According to Trump, he could use emergency economic powers or an executive order to implement the ban, and there is some precedent for that kind of strong-arming, as Recodes Shirin Ghaffary has explained:

If whats being reported is true, Trump would issue the order for ByteDance to divest from TikTok through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an interagency committee that reviews foreign acquisitions and investments in US businesses that can threaten national security. The committee, chaired by Mnuchin, has the power to block or reverse mergers and acquisitions involving US and foreign companies.

Increasingly, the agency has beenexercising its authorityover foreign-owned tech companies operating in the US. Last year, CFIUS helped block one of the biggest deals in tech history, after Trump followed its recommendations to stop Singapore-based Broadcom from acquiringthe US semiconductor company Qualcomm. The committee also forced Chinese owners to divest from thedating app Grindrand the health startupPatientsLikeMe.

As far as an actual ban of the app, that would be far more difficult, if not illegal, according to Adi Robertson at the Verge:

The most intense app bans happen at the network level, blocking any communication between the targeted servers and users in the country. Thats the approach taken by Chinas Great Firewall, and its how India enforces its recently implemented TikTok ban. (Australia, which is considering a similar ban, would likely take the same approach.) But American law doesnt have any precedent for blocking software in that way, so it seems unlikely that the White House would be able to follow through on that kind of heavy-handed network censorship.

Another option would be deplatforming:

To really take TikTok off Americans phones, the government would have to do something like make Apple and Google sever their ties with ByteDance (along with any other Chinese app makers). Getting removed from the iOS App Store and Google Play Store would vastly reduce TikToks appeal, even if you could still access it through a sideloaded app or website. The government would essentially be ordering companies to deplatform TikTok and deplatforming can be extremely powerful.

To do this, the Trump administration could repeat a tactic it used with Huawei: have the Commerce Department put TikTok on theentity listthat limits its commercial ties to US companies. The administration doesnt need congressional approval to do this, and it can cite any US company that does business with them (barring special exemptions) for violating sanctions.

The outcome of the U.S.-TikTok standoff could have far reaching implications. As Shirin Ghaffary has pointed out, a ban or forced sale could jeopardize TikToks success and weaken its ability to challenge U.S. tech giants like Google and Facebook, which are already benefiting from massive monopolies. The entertainment industry impact could also be huge, both for creators and for the businesses that orbit them and everyone got a taste of what that might be like over the weekend, according to the New York Timess Taylor Lorenz:

TikTok is known mostly for dance videos and comedic skits, but that silliness can obscure two facts: TikTok has become a powerhouse in the entertainment industry and the primary platform that music executives and talent agents use to scout the next big act. And, at the same time, especially as the election nears, the app has become an information and organizing hub for Gen Z activists and politically-minded young people.

The loss of TikTok would upend large swaths of the entertainment industry that have just been completely reoriented around the app. TikTok has rewritten the pop charts, becoming a new default for how labels and aspiring artists promote their songs. And TikTok is where major brands like American Eagle, Chipotle and others spend millions to reach the next generation of consumers.

Elsewhere, some critics like Wireds Nicholas Thompson have argued that putting aside the security concerns, banning TikTok would be a big blow to free speech, as well:

If one is an avid believer in free speech, how can one even threaten the death penalty for a social media platforrm? TikTok is full of garbage and sometimes hate. But its free and open,even in waysthat other platforms arent.

For the past several years, Ive warned thatthe biggest threat to the internetis the technological cold war between the reasonably open, free internet of the West, and the closed authoritarian internet of the East. Now, with the Presidents repudiation of free speech and open markets, I worry whether there isnt as much difference between the two sides after all.

And there could be other political consequences. In early July, a Morning Consult survey unsurprisingly found that Republicans and older adults expressed the most support for banning TikTok, while 59 percent of Generation Z respondents opposed it. Furthermore, one in four adult members of Generation Z said they were more inclined to use TikTok after learning the U.S. was considering banning it. In addition, NBC News noted on Saturday that banning TikTok could prompt first-time voters to seek electoral revenge:

The popular app that has 100 million users in the U.S. has proved especially vital to many during the coronavirus pandemic as a source of entertainment, community and education, a half-dozen users told NBC News in interviews Saturday. They said TikTok has helped them both unplug from the harsh realities of the world and plug into communities that make them feel connected. Some said that if Trump does ban the app, it could motivate many young TikTokers to vote against the president in the November election.

If it hasnt already, I think this will definitely be a game-changer in young voters going out and voting for sure, Kaylyn Elkins, 18, of Washington state, said.

The Times captured some like-minded views:

For many kids, politics feel very distant, said Eitan Bernath, 18, who has 1.2 million followers on TikTok. This might be the first time it hits home for a lot of kids.

On Sunday, nine TikTok creators with a collective 54 million followers, including Brittany Broski, Hope Schwing and Mitchell Crawford, published an open letter addressed to Mr. Trump onMedium.

Anecdotal speculation does not equal Election Day effect, of course, but Trump banning the app himself, or even just threatening to, could conceivably boost youth turnout this fall. Whether that possibility becomes a reality remains to be seen, but the Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that at least some White House officials remain concerned over the potential backlash from a ban.

This post has been updated to include additional analysis and information.

Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

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Whats Going On With Trumps TikTok Ban and Microsofts Deal to Avoid It? - New York Magazine

Several executives of Big Tech companies testified before Congress last week at a critical point for future regulation of the industry. Though the hearing was ostensibly about antitrust, in practice, it was a forum for members of Congress to air their grievances about the influence that technology companies have, especially over public discourse.

While large technology companies are still undergoing enormous growth, even in the face of the massive disruption caused by the coronavirus, they are under fire from both sides in Washington.

Democrats, still trying to delegitimize President Trumps win in the 2016 election, attribute his victory to the proliferation of fake news on social media. In practice, their definition of fake news manages to target conservative and pro-Trump content disproportionately while ignoring conspiracy theories fostered on the Left.

Twitter, Facebook, and Google (through its search and YouTube platforms), which are largely dominated by left-liberal executives and staff, have heeded Democrats and begun deplatforming and demonetizing voices on the Right.

Twitter has slapped warning labels on Trump tweets and suspended Donald Trump Jr. temporarily, even as it allows the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, unmoderated use of his account to advocate Holocaust denialism and terrorism and to call Israel a cancerous growth that must be uprooted and destroyed.

Twitter is a leading forum for public discussion. Facebook and Google are tremendous drivers of traffic to websites. Additionally, Googles ad platform is a leading way for publishers to make money, and YouTube remains the dominant video platform for independent voices to express their views and earn money.

The left-liberal tech companies mistakenly think they can placate Democrats by targeting conservatives. In reality, philosophically speaking, the Left is much more skeptical of the concentration of power by large companies within an industry and much more willing to use federal regulatory and enforcement power to squash private businesses. Politicians such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren arent going to be satisfied because Facebook or Twitter removes a few conservative users.

On the Right, there is a split.

The libertarian streak that runs through the Republican Party and the conservative movement is skeptical of antitrust enforcement and federal regulation. This group is more amenable to having the government step aside so companies operate freely and let the market work out problems. This group believes that those who dont like the policies of Big Tech are free to start their own platforms, as they have done with Parler, an alternative to Twitter.

But faithful free-marketers are losing the intraparty battle to conservatives prominently identified in Congress with Sen. Josh Hawley. From the perspective of these conservatives, large technology firms have too much control over the content people see. According to this view, if Big Tech is going to enjoy freedom from legal liability and avoid antitrust enforcement, it should be made to provide forums that are free of bias.

These conservatives see how Democrats beat corporations into submission by taking or threatening legal action, and they believe Republicans should not unilaterally disarm by simply singing the praises of the free market and watching as conservative voices disappear behind a wall of corporate censorship.

There are reasons to be skeptical of Hawley's proposed solution, which would require social media platforms that wish to have immunity from lawsuits to go before the Federal Trade Commission every two years to obtain certification that they are removing content in a politically neutral manner. Such arrangements grant power to the government to police content and would probably lead to even more censorship, as tech companies would probably err on the side of removing any vaguely political content so as not to take any chances.

But tech companies should recognize that if they continue to demonstrate clear bias against conservatives, then Hawley's side will prevail in the intraparty fight.

This would be unwise for tech companies, for in the long run, their only allies as they get larger and more influential are going to be free-market conservatives, who arent automatically spooked when companies become successful.

If Big Tech companies continue to target and make enemies of conservatives, they will unite both sides of the political aisle against them. Democrats already have fewer qualms about going after large corporations.

The solution is not to go in the other direction and disproportionately favor conservative content, but to have platforms get out of content policing as much as possible. If content poses a direct and imminent threat to safety, few would argue with its removal. But once platforms with hundreds of millions of users try to moderate content, when there are large disagreements over what qualifies as offensive or what counts as fake news, they are inevitably going to lead to arbitrary judgment calls and bias.

As private enterprises, social media firms are allowed to set their own policies, so this is not an issue about free speech in a constitutional sense. But democracy thrives on open speech, and when companies dominating modern communication platforms restrict speech in a biased manner, the ramifications are alarming.

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If Big Tech makes enemies of conservatives, it will have no allies - Washington Examiner

This is funny but totally ineffective

Election 2020: NZ First doubles down on attacks against Greens with mocking unicorns, pixies post

New Zealand First has doubled-down on its attacks against the Greens wealth tax policy with a mocking online post that features raining $100 bills, pixies, flying pigs, and a pink-maned unicorn.

But the image that was posted by New Zealand First on its official Facebook page on Thursday may have backfired.

It lampoons Green Party co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson with the fairytale symbols, accompanied by a caption that says: But unfortunately money doesnt just fall from the sky

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

when you are using the Bad Boys of Brexit, you miss the cultural nuance.

All this advert does is make people nervous about a Labour Green Government vote Labour!

Its funny satire, where as NZ First voters require some spite and low grade ignorance in their political motivations. This just causes laughs and reminds the wider electorate to Party vote Labour to prevent the Greens having any real power.

ACT have played the culture war far better than any other Party this election. Track ACTs momentum from the Free Speech debacle last year where the Woke Left went on a deplatforming crusade that ended up benefitting ACT as David Seymour became the defender of Free Speech.

How the living Christ we on the Left have managed to lose our role as the protectors of Free Speech is a tad demoralising. The argument presented by the Identity Politics activists is that fragile intersectionalist snowflakes feel triggered and in an age of subjective rage where micro aggressions are on par with war crimes, hearing anything woke mantras are against is hate speech that causes great emotional harm.

Ugh.

ACT took this ammunition and returned fire with devastating accuracy and that has helped build them to the insane 5% they are now cruising at.

If NZ First wanted to cash in on the culture war wave ACT have crested, look no further than this joyless deplatforming of Kingi

Mori cultural appropriation, or simply a fish? Restaurateurs in stoush over kingi name

Two of Aucklands hippest restaurateurs have engaged in an online stoush over whether the name of a new restaurant, kingi, is a case of Mori cultural appropriation or merely a shortening for kingfish.

Owners of popular Auckland restaurant Orphans Kitchen, Tom Hishon and Josh Helm, are about to open a new seafood restaurant this October named kingi.

Hishon and Helm have always maintained the name is a colloquial shortening for kingfish used by fishermen the world over.

However this week, Hishon responded to some heated comments on Instagram from the founder of Auckland restaurant Cocos Cantina, Damaris Coulter, who accused him of appropriating the Mori word for King kngi.

I am a Mori woman who brought this concern to you and you have continued to ignore me, others who are also Mori have brought this concern to you, and you have continued to ignore them, Coulter said on Instagram.

Coulter said she and Hishon had lunch to discuss the sensitivities, but Hishon did not follow up on the meeting and there was no resolution to the concerns Coulter raised.

Speaking to the Herald on Sunday yesterday, Hishon said they had received endorsement from Mori advisers and mana whenua who they have been working closely with to help provide context to anyone who has concerns around the name.

Both Josh and I are keen fishermen so we just wanted to hero a bit of an icon [kingfish] in the fishing world and our love for fishing and the ocean, Hishon said.

That was where the thinking from the name came from.

It is a seafood restaurant and the kingi is referencing the fish. Were talking about an abbreviation of a word which you could call a colloquial term in New Zealand but its also around other parts of the word as a shortening for the fish.

If you search a hashtag with that spelling theres over 15,000 tags of a fish on there.

Hishon said they were very specific in making their restaurant name kingi be lower case, italicised, and have no macron on the first i as the Mori word does.

However, Coulter told the Herald on Sunday it would have been more appropriate to call a nickname for a kingfish Kingy.

For a number of reasons but mainly because I felt the i would be a Mori spelling of the sounding the word and the y would make more sense around the English abbreviation for kingfish, Coulter said.

The online back and forth was really me asking Tom, Josh his business partner, and Hotel Britomart, to respond to other peoples messages of concerns around the naming as people were messaging me and I didnt feel like it was my responsibility to unpack the guys thinking around it for them.

I just feel that we are in a time of decolonising and healing our beautiful Aotearoa, and the people who call it home, and we dont need new mamae [hurt] around things that can cause confusion or be contributing to reshaping parts of a language to make it look a certain way for personal use, Coulter said.

sweet Jesus isnt this just so delightful in its petty woke Gram insufferableness!

Its clearly a reference to the fucking fish.

They are a fish restaurant.

They like Kingfish.

I doubt they even had any idea that it could be construed as the Mori word for King.

These owners of Kingi are 30 seconds away from being accused on Twitter of being cross burning KKK members! The Woke are not known for their nuance when it comes to cancel culture.

This kind of micro aggression policing wokeness and its real world deplatforming impact is ripe for culture war exploitation by the Right and time and time and time again, the Woke just hand the ammunition over.

Social media is ubiquitous, many people feel self censored on it and recoil in fear of being called out by some woke mob. ACT understood that and played to it.

NZ Firsts current attempt to paint the Greens as away with the fairies is funny but will help drive votes towards Labour.

If you want to trigger culture war support the way ACT have, the target has to be far more threatening.

Being painted as racist, getting deplatformed on social media and losing your business all over the subjectivity of woke definition is pretty threatening.

Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, soif you value having an independent voice going into this pandemic and 2020 election please donate here.

If you cant contribute but want to help, please always feel free to share our blogs on social media.

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NZ First anti-Green ads will backfire, but Kingi restaurant fiasco perfect ACT Party culture war propaganda - thedailyblog.co.nz

Matthew Longley of Gun Critic About Buying Gunstreamer.com

U.S.A. -(Ammoland.com)-When Gunstreamer announced it was shutting down, Hickok45 knew he couldnt let it die. He invested a lot of time and effort to grow the site and wanted to save it. He knew the right team that was not only capable of keeping the site alive but would be able to let the website flourish.

He contacted the team over at Gun Critic to see if they would be willing to buy part of the site to keep it afloat. The Gun Critic team is not only tech-savvy business people, but they are also Second Amendment advocates. They saw saving Gunstreamer as a great business opportunity that they could use to grow the firearms community.

Without wasting time, the Co-Founder of Gun Critic, Matthew Longley, contacted the owners of Gunstreamer to make them an offer they couldnt refuse. They bought into the site and provided a lifeline to keep Gunstreamer afloat while they could figure out how to make the site profitable.

I was able to speak with Matt about Gun Critic, and why he believes the reward of buying into Gunstreamer was worth the risk.

John: What is Gun Critic?

Matt: Gun Critic is a user aggregated firearm review community. Its very similar to Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB.com, and MetaCritic but for firearms. We offer product reviews, free gun values, product price comparison, specs, Q&A, joint problems, and deals for all guns in our database (currently about 28,000 firearms).

John: Gun Critic is like the Rotten Tomatoes of the gun world. Did Rotten Tomatoes give you the idea for Gun Critic?

Matt: I got the idea because I frequented these movie review websites and thought it would be an excellent idea for the firearm industry. When reading gun reviews, I did not like that many of the reviewers are very biased and often paid for their reviews. I would much rather see 1000 user reviews about a gun than one critic reviewing a firearm.

John: You and your business partner stepped up to save Gunstreamer. How did that come about?

Matt: Hickok45 contacted us about Gunstreamer. He mentioned that he liked the platform for several reasons, mainly for backing up his YouTube videos, and he wondered if we could get involved. This was about three days before Austin announced that he was closing down the platform. So, it was a bit of a rush, but we thought it was essential to try to save the platform.

John: How do you plan on cutting costs?

Matt: First thing we did with the platform was to dive into the expenses. It appears that a lot of the expenses came from popular websites streaming our videos. We are going to cut back or charge that for now, and it should reduce costs by 50-75%.

John: Do you see a way to make it profitable?

Matt: We have a couple of strategies for making the site profitable. Mainly we are going to migrate towards affiliate marketing.

John: Is the original team staying on?

Matt: Yes, the original team is staying on in some capacity. Austin is still a minority owner of the site and would like to be involved moving forward.

John: Are you planning on integrating Gun Streamer into Gun Critic?

Matt: This is something we are thinking about. There are several ways to join the two communities together. Gun Critic has a video on every product page, and Gun Streamer could feature Gun Critic data on pages that match certain products. So, there are some easy ways to integrate the two platforms.

John: How do you plan on luring people over from YouTube?

Matt: This is the big challenge. Content creators will typically focus on where they make the most money. So, I would say its more of a waiting game with YouTube. Eventually, they will cut out monetization for gun videos and maybe ban the channels all-together. The key for us is to have a solid platform positioned for when that happens. If we focus on traffic and revenue for content creators, it will occur over time.

John: Is there a plan to implement streaming on Gunsteamer?

Matt: I spoke with Austin about this feature. He said that streaming for everyone would be very expensive, but it might be possible to allow this feature for some content creators. Its definitely something we would like to see added to the site in the future.

John: Any other upcoming features of Gun Critic or Gun Streamer you can share with us?

Matt: One, gun values. Gun Critic has quite a few new features coming out. We are making our gun values more real-time and increasing our data sources to improve accuracy. Gun values fluctuate almost daily, so gun value books are out of date before they are printed.

Two, the gun community. We recently built a Reddit style community for users to share content related to the firearms industry. One nice feature of this community is the ability to create best-of lists with voting. We will also have official lists and offer awards to manufacturers and retailers. For example, awards for Best Shotgun 2020, Best 9mm Pistol 2020, Best Hunting Rifle 2020.

Three, a popularity score for firearms. We are currently working out an algorithm to figure out the most popular guns each week. Each gun would have a score based on their popularity, and this will become a search filter on the platform. This will be nice to be able to look up the most popular items by caliber, style, manufacturer, etc

Four, firearm stats This feature will take some time to perfect but should be pretty interesting. For about 30 years, video games have utilized stats for users to compare firearms. They typically use stats like accuracy, damage, mobility, fire rate, range, and other similar stats. These stats would be somewhat based on our own algorithms and community feedback. Stats like this will be handy for new gun owners to understand how the firearm would function. It would also be very familiar for most gun owners younger than 50 because many of them grew up playing First-Person-Shooter video games and would quickly digest the stats.

About John Crump

John is a NRA instructor and a constitutional activist. He is the former CEO of Veritas Firearms, LLC, and is the co-host of The Patriot News Podcast which can be found at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/patriotnews. John has written extensively on the patriot movement including 3%'ers, Oath Keepers, and Militias. In addition to the Patriot movement, John has written about firearms, interviewed people of all walks of life, and on the Constitution. John lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and sons and is currently working on a book on leftist deplatforming methods and can be followed on Twitter at @crumpyss, on Facebook at realjohncrump, or at http://www.crumpy.com.

Continued here:

Matthew Longley of Gun Critic About Buying Gunstreamer.com - AmmoLand Shooting Sports News

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump last night declared that he would ban the social media site Tik Tok.

As far as TikTok is concerned were banning them from the United States, Trump said, calling the action a severance.

Trump did not specify whether he will act through an executive order, or another method. such as a designation, according to NBC News.

Well, I have that authority. I can do it with an executive order or that, Trump said.

Microsoft is negotiating to buy Chinese-owned Tik Tok, which would fill a social-media hole in the tech giant's lineup of consumer offerings. But commentators think Trump is mostly just upset that the platform is an explosively-growing social media platform that will not supplicate to him as Twitter and Facebook have.

Vox recently gamed out how Trump might accomplish a "ban" on Tik Tok, but the experts consulted found it an unlikely scenario.

To really take TikTok off Americans phones, the government would have to do something like make Apple and Google sever their ties with ByteDance (along with any other Chinese app makers). Getting removed from the iOS App Store and Google Play Store would vastly reduce TikToks appeal, even if you could still access it through a sideloaded app or website. Apple, in particular, keeps tight control over iOS devices; its App Store policy is so restrictive that its spurred antitrust lawsuits. The government would essentially be ordering companies to deplatform TikTok and deplatforming can be extremely powerful.

To do this, the Trump administration could repeat a tactic it used with Huawei: have the Commerce Department put TikTok on the entity list that limits its commercial ties to US companies. The administration doesnt need congressional approval to do this, and it can cite any US company that does business with them (barring special exemptions) for violating sanctions. The entity list has stopped Google from working with Huawei on Android phones, and if TikTok were successfully added to the list, Apple and Google would have a hard time keeping them in the App Store.

James Lewis, director of technology policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says putting TikTok on the list would be extreme, unusual, and legally dubious.

Foreign Policy agreed.

Because the attempted ban by the United States is likely to rely on novel theories and will be imposed in haste, the companies are likely to have an opening to challenge the U.S. government action in court as lacking factual and legal support. A legal challenge might also put pressure on the U.S. government by forcing it to risk disclosure of sensitive intelligence on the Chinese companies if it chooses to fully defend court actions. Given the dearth of public evidence to date that TikTok provides any data to the Chinese government and the Trump administrations less-than-stellar record against procedural challenges to its executive orders, it is possible that a well-structured challenge might be able to overturn, or at least delay, any ban.

Impotus Americanus is one of the heaviest leaders in the animal kingdom, and is famously known to be an orange, ruddy color not found in nature.

Over atVanity Fair, Katherine Eban goes behind the scenes of the Trump administrations abject failure at coordinating mass testing for coronavirus and perhaps unsurprisingly, in all connects back to Jared Kushner empowering all his trustfund baby friends, and Donald Trumps precious ego crushing every opportunity just to make some political gains: The plan called []

Wake Up, a short film by The Lincoln Project, depicts what it might be like for a republican to wake up after being in a coma for nearly four years and have his family tell him everything thats happened since Trump came into power. It was directed by Jon Turteltaub.

If you ever dropped a quarter into a Space Invaders game, youve likely fantasized about having your own arcade cabinet in your house. Of course, you likely thought better of it for several reasons, including the idea that a giant cabinet dedicated to just one game isnt very practical. Polycade understands the urge though very, []

Most of us have a love-hate relationship with banks. Okay, its actually probably more like a tolerate-hate relationship. We understand their role in holding and securing our money so we dont have to stuff it in a mattress somewhere. But we dont trust the bank not to gouge us on fees whenever they can. And []

If youve ever worked on a video project or engineered a podcast and thought youd make your own sound effects howd that go for ya? We assume it was a bigger undertaking than youd probably bargained for. From using stalks of celery to replicate breaking tree limbs to frying bacon to reproduce the sound of []

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Trump says he'll ban Tik Tok, to hoots of derision - Boing Boing

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed a uniquely unflattering side of American leadership. Desperate for good news, those in power have sought to fabricate it. The virus will just disappear. Cases are only up because testing is up. Bleach may provide a refreshing cleanse.

These ramblings might be dismissed if the man who delivered them were not the president. But they are also emblematic of an effort to make science a political and cultural chess piece in the United States of America.

Look no further than the fact that, after being suspended from Twitter for sharing false medical information, Donald Trump Jr. decried on national news the deplatforming of those preaching conservative values.

And yet the strain of anti-science thought in America is less infectious than the virus it seeks to minimize. Americans, on the whole, still overwhelmingly trust the experts. Republicans, of whom two-thirds trust President Donald Trump, confide even more in medical scientists and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

As a result, Dr. Joseph Gastaldo has been working around the clock. Gastaldo is an Infectious Disease Specialist working for OhioHealth, the hospital system which services Columbus, Ohio, and 47 counties throughout the state.

With over 24 years of experience in the medical field, Gastaldo has been a chief resource for the public and other physicians during the pandemic. He had already done 94 TV, radio, and print interviews by the time he sat down with The Globe Post to discuss public policy on coronavirus.

The following interview has been lightly condensed and edited for length and clarity.

The Globe Post: Just for context, can you say a little bit more about your specific expertise and what youve been doing with the coronavirus situation?

Gastaldo: Im a board-certified infectious disease doctor. Im the Assistant Medical Director for infectious diseases [at OhioHealth]. Specifically back in January or February, I was called by leadership at OhioHealth, who said, Hey, Dr. Gastaldo. We need you at the Internet command center to help us, as a system, define policies and procedures for us to follow all the mandates by the governors office, and to provide the highest quality and safest patient care that we could have in the setting of COVID-19.

And were in a very different situation now than we were. The first barrier that was very challenging for us, as physicians: this is a brand new disease that we know nothing about, so one of the things that I had to do was stay current and learn about COVID. I still do it today, and I educate physicians and medical staff members on whats going on with COVID treatment-wise.

The other challenging thing was testing. When COVID first was on the scene, it was very challenging to test people and really confirm that they had COVID. Ill never forget when COVID first came out; we had to do testing on people, send it to a reference lab, and wait five, six, or seven days before we got test results back.

In late March, as a system, we were first able to do testing at OhioHealths lab, and we were only able to do 80 a day. We thought that was a lot it really wasnt and there are still limits on our testing. But now, we are able to do about 1,400 tests a day, which is good. And having that testing capacity allows us to open up and get back to business in the safest way possible, so we can test people who come in for non-COVID-related surgeries. Now were seeing people who have had their healthcare delayed cancer screening, cardiovascular screening. People had detrimental things happen to their health, but they delayed treatment because of COVID.

The Globe Post: I want to start with the big question right now, which is school. The CDC guidelines currently suggest things like sending kids in on different days, moving the desks apart, and disinfecting regularly. If we do these things, can we avoid another surge in the fall?

Gastaldo: Schools alone are not going to cause another surge. Right now, schools arent even in session and rates are going up even in Ohio; it has more to do with the settings that are riskier for COVID-19. We always talk about social distancing, wearing a mask, and washing your hands. All of those things need to be done in schools, but the bigger thing that I think people dont realize and that really trumps everything else I just mentioned are enclosed spaces.

Specifically, enclosed spaces where there isnt much air circulation. Crowded spaces where people talk loud. Those are things which put people more at risk of getting COVID-19, and they all describe schools. But schools alone are not going to contribute to another spike.

The Globe Post: So do you think that, if we implement all these guidelines, itll be safe to reopen in the fall?

Gastaldo: Well, nothing with COVID is a zero risk, but its easy to have guidelines. The guidelines that have come out, like those from [Ohio] Governor DeWine and the other governors, are subject to interpretation. COVID-19 has really brought out health disparities, but youre also going to see COVID-19 school district disparities. Private schools and public schools with deeper pockets can do different things, but I think youre going to see disparities in how schools execute their governors guidelines based on the financial support they get.

The Globe Post: So, if the school doesnt have the resources to distance properly or suffers from classroom overcrowding, for example, then that could affect its ability to follow the guidelines?

Gastaldo: Yes. There are private schools versus suburban schools; in inner cities, you may be dealing with people who are in a lower socioeconomic class, and theyre more at risk for COVID anyways because healthcare disparities are working against them too. Everything is synergistic.

Are schools zero-risk? No, nothing is zero-risk. Schools can reopen safely, but there are so many different variables with school districts and how schools are. Look at a new building versus an old building; newer buildings have better ventilation. When were talking about closed spaces with suboptimal circulation of air, that poses more of a risk. If youre in an overcrowded school system, how are you going to do social distancing? Look at the age of the kids; its more challenging to do face masks and social distancing with first-graders than it is with high-school seniors.

The Globe Post: If we move beyond schools to the general public, one of the top issues right now are the mask mandates. Right now, over 20 states have these mandates. The Columbus Dispatch just published an editorial on the front page calling on Governor DeWine to move past Ohios county-by-county mandate. If we assume that most people follow these mandates at a time when cases are surging, is this the only way to avoid another lockdown?

Gastaldo: Absolutely. Is wearing a mask alone going to prevent COVID-19? No. Wearing a mask is just one of the things we have in our toolbox, along with all of those other things I just mentioned good hygiene, avoiding enclosed spaces, and social distancing as much as possible. The 6 feet rule we talk about is actually kind of arbitrary. Twelve feet is better than 8 feet, which is better than 6 feet, which is better than 4 feet. Again regarding the mandates, wearing a mask will help, but thats just one thing we have in our toolbox in addition to all of these other things.

The Globe Post: One of the other things that we might have in our toolbox, which youve talked about extensively, is contact tracing. Can you explain what that is and how we go about implementing it?

Gastaldo: Contact tracing is another area that highlights financial disparities. Its been done in public health forever. We did contact tracing for measles recently when we had an outbreak. Public health, historically, when it comes to government, is kind of like the ugly duckling. We all need it, but some things, depending on where you live, are oftentimes underfunded in less metropolitan areas.

Contact tracing is like this. Reportable diseases like COVID get reported to health departments. Health departments get the names of people with COVID, and their job is to reach out to the people who have COVID. Those people who reach out are contact tracers. Contact tracers have to be trained. There is a unique art to what they do and how they engage patients.

In general, when it comes to COVID there are four things that are very, very important. Number one is testing; we have to test people as much as possible. The second thing is isolating those who have a diagnosis of COVID-19. The third thing is contact tracing.

Contact tracers contact those who have COVID-19 to make sure they are isolated. Then theyll say, Go back 48 hours and, as best as you can, tell me everybody youve had contact with for less than 6 feet for greater than 15 minutes. And some people may remember, some people may not remember. Some people may feel threatened and not give that information.

After that, the contact tracer will call the people who had contact with that person. Theyll make an anonymous call, and theyll say, This is Dr. Gastaldo from the COVID health department. I am calling to let you know that you may have been exposed. You could expose somebody to COVID, and we recommend that you be in a 14-day quarantine. The issue with that is, if youre in a metropolitan area, where there are too many people getting diagnosed, there arent enough contact tracers to do all that.

The Globe Post: Nationwide, the latest WHO numbers say that weve had about 45,000 to 65,000 new cases every day for the past couple of weeks. Have we already reached that point of no return where we simply dont have enough resources to do contact tracing?

Gastaldo: Well, for example, there are counties in Ohio where they probably only get 5 or 6 new diagnoses a day, and those areas are manageable. Where diagnoses are low, they can do it. In countries in Europe Italy, where their rates are low they can do it there, but it depends on them having the infrastructure in place to do it. And I dont know what public health is like in rural counties in Ohio. We could do it in Columbus, but do they have the infrastructure in place? Do they have enough contact tracers? Public health can be overwhelmed if there are too many cases, and dealing with thats really hard to do.

The Globe Post: You mention having the infrastructure to deal with contact tracing, but if youre talking about the hospitals in general, is COVID hindering our ability to provide healthcare to people with other health problems? Are we having to divert our resources?

Gastaldo: Well, not here in Columbus. However, when you go back in time, to March and February, when Governor DeWine did the stay-at-home order, all elective cases elective surgeries, cardiovascular procedures everything was put on hold.

The message we told to patients was: Dont go to the hospital, and dont go to the doctors office unless it is urgent or life-threatening. The reason we did that was because we were anticipating a surge of COVID patients, but because of everything being closed, everybody staying home, people not congregating in bars or restaurants we did such a good job with not bringing people together that we stopped the curve and were able to handle the COVID cases.

Right now, in Columbus, our hospital capacity is fine, but thats not the case in Houston, Texas. Thats not the case in Arizona. Thats not the case in Florida.

The Globe Post: Do you expect that its only going to get worse from here, as the weather gets colder?

Gastaldo: Yes and no. In Ohio, yes. It depends on what the governor does, but, again, the riskiest thing to do is to have a lot of people in a confined space.

Right now, we have the weather on our side because in Ohio we do things outside. Look at Arizona and Florida super hot down there, and when it gets really hot down there a lot of people are inside because of the air conditioning.

I look at the trends every day; the Ohio Department of Health, on their website, gives you all the statistics, and the thing that I look at, most importantly, is the 21-day trend. We have a 21-day trend of newly diagnosed patients, of hospitalizations, of ICU admissions, and of deaths. And since July 1, our trend of newly diagnosed patients has gone up, and as a lagging indicator now were certainly seeing the trend of hospitalizations go up.

The Globe Post: Is there a dialogue between the hospitals and the state or federal government when it comes to providing enough supplies to deal with the number of patients?

Gastaldo: There is, but the leadership has really come from the governors. Each governor has different advisors and there are political overtones, of course, but there hasnt been a really strong federal policy on it. The federal government gives guidelines, the governors give guidelines. The people in the trenches, its up to them to follow the guidelines that come out. And sometimes its very confusing. Look at the mask guidelines.

The city of Columbus has a mask guideline, and then the governor has a mask guideline, and theyre each a little bit different. So it can be hard and confusing for people to follow the mask guidelines, with all the different ones that are out there, and guess what? Who enforces the mask guidelines? The responsibility of enforcing the mask guidelines isnt the polices; its the health departments. The health departments not there 24/7 like the police.

The Globe Post: I remember when Columbus city officials went around and there was that picture of the bar that was publicized of all those people not distancing. The city threatened businesses in Columbus, that they could lose their license to serve alcohol. But they can only reach so far, no?

Gastaldo: Well, that was a learning curve, too. Ill tell you this: Ive talked to business leaders before. These guidelines came out, and a lot of business leaders didnt really know that it was the restaurants responsibility to enforce the mandates from the health department. Its their responsibility. The restaurants were under the impression that it was the peoples job to follow the rules, and thats not the case. Its the responsibility of the restaurants and the business owners to follow the rules.

The Globe Post: And when you combine that with COVID fatigue, as youve said, the situation only gets more muddled.

Gastaldo: You know, everybodys job is affected by COVID. The things that we do in life that give us pleasure, those are all affected by COVID. COVID fatigue, you cant get rid of it, and people either consciously or subconsciously dont want to talk about it anymore.

The Globe Post: No, theres a sort of collective denial going on throughout the country, or specific regions of it at least.

Last question: Whats the strangest thing anybodys ever asked you about coronavirus?

Gastaldo: *laughs* So, I stay current on coronavirus news for medical reasons, of course, and whenever theres a new thing that comes in the news, the local news latches on it. And Ill never forget a suggestion this came up in the news, and there was some Chinese publication that said it too that coronavirus was detected in semen. I do all these news channels things, and that came up on a live news feed as a question. Someone asked if we had to worry about COVID as a sexually transmitted infection. And that caught me off guard as something Id never heard of at all. It was one of the strangest things Ive ever heard on live TV.

Also, people always say, Well, the prominent way this is spread is from droplets and from micro-droplets. This business about going to the grocery store and thinking groceries are a biohazard that is a very, very minor way that you can get COVID-19. You remember a couple of months ago when people went to buy groceries and were so scared to buy groceries. I thought that was very much overblown in the media, when people were afraid to go out.

The craziest thing I ever saw was a woman at Kroger, back in March or February. She went into Kroger wearing a beekeepers outfit.

The Globe Post: A full-on covering?

Gastaldo: Yep, a full-on beekeepers outfit.

More here:

COVID Fatigue: The State of Public Policy on Coronavirus - The Globe Post

East Hartford police union president says some department-issued pistols dont shoot straight

HARTFORD, CONN -(Ammoland.com)-The East Hartford police union is accusing Gen 4 Glock 17s of shooting to the left.

According to a blog post by East Hartfords police union President, Officer Frank Iacono, the police issued pistols tend to have the sights misaligned, causing the guns to hit to the left of the target.

My members have guns with sights cocked to the side and are being told to aim to the right of what they want to hit, Iacono said. This is completely unsafe and unacceptable and shouldve never been allowed to happen.

The East Hartford Police Department pushed back against the claims that Iacono made in his blog post. The agency contends that all officers on the force qualified with the same guns that Iacono claims are defective. They stressed that all department-issued firearms are safe, and the public is not in danger.

According to Iacono, the pistols get worse over time. The officers in the East Hartford Police Department have been using the Austrian based guns for over three years. Iacono said when the Department contacted Glock for a solution, the manufacture told the agency that the officers were holding the pistols wrong and suggested that they adjust the sights. Iacono claims to fix the problem that the sights had to be pushed to one side so much that they hung over the edge of the guns slide.

Our firearms staff has run this issue up their chain of command and has been in touch with representatives at Glock, Iacono wrote in a blog post. and the only solutions (Glock representatives) have offered is to tell them to instruct our members to compensate by aiming to the right of the target, and moving the sights on some of the guns so far to one side that theyre hanging off the slide.

According to East Hartford Police Department Training Officer Jeffrey Otis, a small number of the Department issued Glocks were shooting high and to the left. He said Glock sent out a representative who verified the issue. The Glocks in question had sight adjustments made on the range to alleviate the problem.

Initially, the Department said they made sight adjustments on the range as a stopgap until new parts arrive for a permanent fix for the pistols. The Department did not say what parts other than sights would fix the reported problem.

Internet users and I personally have experienced getting a Gen 4 Glock 17 with sights that the factory shipped that were pushed slightly to one side. Most users were able to fix the sights with a common sight pusher to dial them in. Most occurrences didnt require swapping out parts or sending the guns back to Glock for repair.

In an update, in February, the Department said they sent the small number of Glocks with the misalignment issues back to the company for repair. The Department was satisfied with the repairs from Glock.

Officer Iacono is not happy with the fix and would rather have the Department switch to another gun. He did not offer a replacement suggestion

About John Crump

John is a NRA instructor and a constitutional activist. He is the former CEO of Veritas Firearms, LLC and is the co-host of The Patriot News Podcast which can be found at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/patriotnews. John has written extensively on the patriot movement including 3%'ers, Oath Keepers, and Militias. In addition to the Patriot movement, John has written about firearms, interviewed people of all walks of life, and on the Constitution. John lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and sons and is currently working on a book on leftist deplatforming methods and can be followed on Twitter at @crumpyss, on Facebook at realjohncrump, or at http://www.crumpy.com.

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East Hartford Police Union Claims GLOCK Pistols Are Defective!? - AmmoLand Shooting Sports News

Image by holocaustfacemasks.com

A face mask for sale at https://www.holocaustfacemasks.com/.

(JTA) The face masks arent subtle: One is emblazoned with the famous photo of a Jewish mother and child, their hands raised, at Nazi gunpoint. Another shows an unmistakable image of a concentration camp crematorium.

The product description below the mother-and-child mask reads: Another bold image that gets the point across without being overly offensive. It sells for $12.44.

Those masks, and others like them, are sold online at HolocaustFaceMasks.com. Other products on the site feature photos from Nazi rallies or a Japanese internment camp in the United States. A T-shirt sold on the site shows three pictures in numerical order: first, a generic face mask; second, a photo of Jews lining up to enter a ghetto; third, a photo of a Nazi concentration camp.

You probably get the point. But in case you dont, the websites founder explained his objective on the homepage. Our goal here is to provide a reminder of what can happen when millions of people follow seemingly innocent orders and rules, the site says. In the times of the [H]olocaust people may not have had such a recent example of evil to keep them vigilant and weary [sic] of evil to come. We do.

Despite the product description, the idea of comparing a public health mandate to the genocide of 6 million people seemed pretty offensive to me as it has to people in the many places where such comparisons have been made. (A Minnesota GOP official resigned just this week after posting a meme to that effect.)

So I emailed the address on the website, hoping to find out who was behind it and whether that person had considered that the products he is peddling might be seen as hurtful or even anti-Semitic.

The sites founder responded quickly. Identifying himself as Tyler Kozdron, he told me that he believes requiring face masks could lead to something like the Holocaust or even more sinister. And he doesnt feel bad about saying so.

I chose holocaust images because I couldnt think of a better group of images to express the feeling of having everything taken away, and I guess some people really just dont get it because they havent felt that feeling yet in their lives, Kozdron wrote to me. Or maybe they just cannot equate having to wear a mask with that feeling, but I do.

In the subsequent emails we exchanged, Kozdron was reluctant to tell me much about himself, due to what he called the endless death threats I am receiving. But he did share that he is 28, the descendant of Polish immigrants who came to the United States just before World War II, and a former gas station worker somewhere in the U.S. His experience working at the gas station during the pandemic, he said, convinced him that measures in the U.S. to prevent COVID-19 are fundamentally unserious, because many of the rules at his workplace did not make sense to him and did not seem to him to be effective.

So, he wrote, he got to thinking, well what if this IS part of something much bigger. I have read a lot about the holocaust, I understand how people can be manipulated. And for me personally, something just is not right here.

As of Tuesday night, Kozdron said he had sold fewer than 10 masks. Public health officials like those at the CDC strongly recommend wearing masks to help stop the spread of COVID-19.

Anti-Semitism watchdogs are pretty united in asserting that comparing the Holocaust to events that are not genocide is an unacceptable trivialization of the tragedy, and theyve had multiple opportunities to press the point amid a wave of face mask-Nazi comparisons in recent months. On July 5, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, tweeted, To compare COVID-19 rules to the slaughter of millions in the Holocaust is disgusting, wrong and has no place in our society.

This is the first time hes done anything like this, Kozdron said. And given the experience hes had, he probably wont do it again. But hes not apologizing. He doesnt think hes trivializing the Holocaust. He thinks, in fact, that hes un-trivializing it by bringing it back into conscious awareness in this specific context.

You know who he thinks is trivializing the Holocaust? Jews.

It appears to me that there are a lot of Jewish people out there that want to keep the Holocaust as some kind of virtue pedestal for them to raise a knee on when they want an opportunity in their own lives to talk down to somebody else without fear of retaliation or interrogation, he wrote, echoing an anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews invoke the Holocaust to shield themselves from criticism. If you asked me, I would say Jews who constantly use the event to embolden whatever they might have to say, is what really trivializes the holocaust.

He did write that if an actual survivor emailed him and asked him to take down the site, he would. That apparently has not happened.

Meanwhile, he seems pretty disappointed in Jews, who, he wrote, of all people, can be so blind to what is happening in the world today.

Then again, he added, the stereotypical rumors would say that Jewish people are directing the societal change.

The post Who would sell Holocaust-themed face masks? This guy. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Who would sell Holocaust-themed face masks? This guy.

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Who would sell Holocaust-themed face masks? This guy. - Forward

Last week, Twitter announced that after over two years of almost unchecked growth by the QAnon conspiracy theory, it was taking steps to crack down on the activity of believers, including targeted harassment and sharing of links to QAnon websites.

The effectiveness of that measure, however, is questionable. Major promoters, supposedly banned, are still rampantly posting.

QAnon, which holds that a military intelligence team is using the message board 8kun to leak clues to their upcoming (and forever delayed) purge of deep state sex traffickers, has grown explosively on Twitter since late 2017.

Twitter has outsized importance in the Q movement, as popular QAnon promoters use it to decode Qs posts, share videos and memes, alert Q acolytes to possible deep state comms hidden in tweets, and attempt to win over new converts.

From March to June 2020, there were over 12 million tweets that mentioned Q or one of its associated catchphrases, according to a new report from extremism research think tank the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

Many of these tweets are also part of direct harassment swarms carried out against high-profile users who have fallen afoul of the Q movement, including Chrissy Teigen, Lady Gaga, Patton Oswalt, and Tom Hanks. And since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Twitter has seen a massive spike in QAnon disinformation and harassment, driven by the unchecked spread of coronavirus conspiracy theory videos like Plandemic. And just weeks earlier, Twitter was part of an explosive, QAnon-driven conspiracy theory that furniture giant Wayfair was using its website to sell missing children to traffickers.

So the site taking steps to curb the conspiracy theorys reach was greeted as positive news by journalists and Twitter users alike, even if Q fans rolled it into their conspiracy theory that the site was hopelessly under the sway of deep state-linked celebrities.

Twitter initially announced it would suspend 7,000 Q-related accounts responsible for abuse or ban evasion, stop recommending QAnon accounts in searches, suppress QAnon-friendly hashtags in trending topics, and prevent links to QAnon sites from being shared.

A week later, Twitter has indeed taken some of these steps. Some high-profile Q accounts have been banned, and its no longer possible to send direct messages with links to Q sites.

Overall, mentions of QAnon and its related hashtags are down across the board.

From July 15th to the 22nd there were one million QAnon posts from 427,000 unique authors, extremism researcher and Ph.D. candidate Marc-Andr Argentino told the Daily Dot. From the 22nd to the 28th there have been 809,000 posts, down 34 percent, from 302,000 unique authors, a number down 14 percent from just before the ban.

But a large-scale crackdown of QAnon believers and total suppression of the conspiracy theory either hasnt happened yet, or never was going to. Twitter never said it would entirely deplatform Q, the way Reddit did in 2018 when it banned dozens of Q subreddits. It would merely reduce the ability of users to find material related to the conspiracy and to limit its public reach.

More than that, almost all of the major banned accounts have already come back to the site with a new or alternate account and picked up right where they left off.

Within a few days of the news breaking, Twitter suspended several high-profile QAnon-promoting accounts. The first to go was Inevitable ET, an influential user with over a quarter of a million followers that had been banned well over a dozen times, only to create a new account each time.

A few days later, Twitter banned QAnon promoter and podcaster Tommy Tommy G. Gelati, after he had unleashed a swarm of harassment on Daily Beast writer Will Sommer, who had written a story about Gelatis previous conviction for bank robbery. Then on Monday, Twitter once again suspended QAnon promoter and conspiracy theorist Joe M, who had rebuilt his following under the name @SheepKnowMore after previously being banned in April as @StormIsUponUs.

These three QAnon promoters, with well over half-a-million followers total, were notorious for spreading conspiracy theories, harassment, and disinformation, as well as for creating new accounts to get around bans. They are just the sort of accounts tailormade for Twitter to ban as part of a sweeping crackdown on a violent conspiracy theory thats gotten out of control and made the site less safe for regular users.

But as of July 30, all three were already back on Twitter under newly created or reactivated alternate accounts: Joe M as @ToddBurgun, Tommy Gelati as @ReturnOfTheGedi and Inevitable ET as @mrbotus_520.

None of the three made any real effort to hide who they were, dropping easily deciphered clues into tweets on their new accounts or on Parler, where Q promoters tend to go to complain about their Twitter bans. They let Q fans know what new account to check out and instantly picked up tens of thousands of followers.

Together, they have racked up over 100,000 followers already, swiftly encroaching on their pre-ban reach.

Beyond allowing banned accounts to sneak back on, many other high-profile QAnon promoters are still active and prolifically spreading conspiracy theories. QAnon-driven disinformation is still going viral, including a recent video of a group of pro-hydroxychloroquine doctors that got millions of views in hours, thanks in part to being shared by Q promoters.

And Q believers are using alternate hashtags to get the word out, including #CueAnon and #17Anon, while regular favorites like #WWG1WGA are still easily searchable.

Twitter is by far the most important digital battlefield in the war that Q followers see themselves fighting against the deep state. Q believers wont give up on Twitter and migrate to a free speech site like Parler for this simple reason: Twitter is too popular with normie and awake users alike to walk away from.

So unless Twitter implements a real ban, QAnon is here to stay.

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QAnon accounts banned by Twitter have already returned, with over 100,000 followers - The Daily Dot