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PC police now working to ban literature they don’t like … ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ on censorship list

December 9, 2016 by Mary Wilder Leave a Comment

Political correctness will be the end of the great American society that we have all come to know and love. By appeasing those who demand that we completely change our way of life, we ensure that it is only a matter of time before all of our freedoms are systematically stolen.

This is why what recently happened in Virginia is so terrifying for the future. It has been reported that the Accomack County Public Schools have banned To Kill a Mockingbird from reading lists due to the fact that there are racial slurs used by characters in the novel. Yes, now even one of the greatest pieces of literature in history is under attack by the Regressive Left.

What is most frustrating about this story isn’t even the overt political correctness; it’s that those protesting To Kill a Mockingbird obviously missed the entire point of the novel. It is about as anti-racist as stories get. In fact, the entire point of the book is that racism and prejudices can destroy the lives of innocent people. Unfortunately, the Regressive Left have never been the brightest bunch and missed this very obvious point.

Adrienne Ross of Breitbart reports, “Harper Lee uses the N-word in its historical context. Students understand that. Do we expect the people in Alabama in the thirties to speak in glowing terms of this man, under these circumstances? Would we bother reading if reality were sacrificed for the sake of feel-good fiction? No, we actually feel good when we read a story that is historically accurate, as ugly as it may be, and we can learn from that hi(s)tory.”

Of course, there is always the chance that those complaining about children being assigned to read the book are completely aware that it is not even slightly racist and merely want to cause a fuss in order to fill their deep-seated need to fell as though they matter. Nothing is off limits for these people. Nothing is too sacred to attack and try to ban. They have gotten away with this for so long that they are incredibly confident that they will be able to get everything they want.

It’s time for the rest of us to stand up and call these people out for their awfulness. We have to defend art and knowledge against those who want to destroy them. For the future of our country, we cannot give up on this war.

Sources:

Breitbart.com

TheGuardian.com

LATimes.com

Widely used educational novels temporarily banned in VA schools, parents concerned for use of ‘racial slurs’

December 8, 2016 by D. Samuelson Leave a Comment

Accomac is a cozy little community situated on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, a 70 mile stretch of land tucked between the Atlantic Ocean and Chesapeake Bay. The city of Accomac is home to the Accomack County Public Schools headquarters, servicing over 5,000 children in 11 different facilities. There is currently a situation occuring, where if one parent in Accomac has their way, none of those students will be allowed to read, or even discuss two well known classic novels by award winning American authors.

As reported by Kens5.com, a formal compliant has been filed to stop the use of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” because there are 219 racial slurs embedded in Mark Twain’s classic and 49 found on the pages of Harper Lee’s chronicle. According to The Telegraph, it was “Marie Rothstein-Williams, the mother of a mixed race child,” who followed the school’s procedures in making a formal complaint. Rothstein-Williams believes that hearing these words validates their acceptability and children cannot be taught to think that these words are ok. (Out of the 5,000 students in the school system, 37% are of African American descent.) It appears Ms. Rothstein-Williams doesn’t want the students to have a learning experience where the children can hear these classic books and debate these very issues amongst themselves.

Accomack County Public Schools is making a formal inquiry into the matter by forming a committee to review the material. The books are suspended from use until the principal, library media specialist, parent and teacher(s) make the final recommendations.

This isn’t the first time Mark Twain or Harper Lee have found their literary compositions on a banned list. Virginia University’s Library points out that since 1885, when “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was first released, “it was condemned as racist” and immediately “banished” from the Concord Public Library. Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” currently holds the number four position on a list called Banned & Challenged Classics, put together by the American Library Association (ALA) who work to defend the First Amendment and protect your right to read whatever you want to read.

ALA stresses that a book challenge – like the case at the Accomack County Public Schools – is not a book ban. But, when it comes to censorship, they urge us to remember the words of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas:

“Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us. ”

Source:

YouTube censoring videos – on censorship!

November 5, 2016 by Don Wrightman Leave a Comment

YouTube has yet again censored another educational video from Prager University. The content of the banned video? Criticism of censorship; hopefully the irony of their choice to remove it isn’t lost on YouTube’s executives.

The video, titled The Dark Art of Political Intimidation, was released last week and features Kimberly Strassel. Strassel is a Wall Street Journal columnist who explains tactics commonly used by the leftists to shut down free speech from the right. This included blackmail, harassment and intimidation.

Back in 2010, the IRS started to target conservative non-profit organizations intentionally. Groups were experiencing heavy delays when trying to aquire tax exempt non-profit status. This was an attempt to curb their political involvement in the 2012 election, explained Strassel.

A Democratic prosecutor in Wisconsin launched a shadow campaign of financial investigation against conservatives. Their houses were raided before sunrise, with accompanying gag orders to keep them quiet about the raids. The reason for all that was revenge for supporting the Republican Governor Scott Walker.

Kimberly Strassel highlights even more examples in the five-minute video showing censorship of political opponents. Youtube placed the video into restricted mode — which is a common filter used by schools, libraries and parents to shield their children from outrageously obscene and graphic content.

NewsBusters reports:

“Conservative radio host Dennis Prager’s idea for PragerU is to give students alternative, non-progressive takes on history, civics and other issues. there’s no cursing, no violence or any kind of indecency in any of them.”

Prager University’s videos including those that have been censored are all G rated. This leaves questions about why the popular video platform is placing restrictions on them. At least 21 additional videos produced by the conservative not for profit educational organization that is Prager University have been placed into restricted mode by Youtube.

There is a petition circulating to stop the censorship, which has aquired over 76,000 signatures so far. Hopefully, YouTube will get its act together about restricting videos that pose no threat to children. Better yet, they should make some key changes to their algorithms to prevent this from happening in the future.

A Youtube statement given to Wall Street Journal stated, “[V]ideo restrictions are decided by an ‘algorithm’ that factors in ‘community flagging’ and ‘sensitive content.’” Basically progressives tripped the algorithm in an attempt to limit free speech and political involvement from conservatives. YouTube has lifted the restriction on The Dark Art of Political Intimidation this past weekend, thanks to the Wall Street Journal giving them a very hard time over the censorship.

Sources:

TheFederalist.com

NewsBusters.org

Huffington Post is CENSORING news against Clinton, unpublishing their OWN WRITERS stories

October 24, 2016 by JD Heyes Leave a Comment

If you’ve been following something other than the crooked, lying, establishment media that is in the tank for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, you know that the same crooked, lying, establishment media has been colluding with her campaign from the outset of the campaign season. Thanks to several WikiLeaks data dumps in recent days, what tens of millions of Americans who have zero trust in the mainstream media have long suspected has now been proven.

One of those establishment media outlets is the far-left “news” site Huffington Post, which has now taken this collusion to a new level, censoring its own writers if they dare to publish truth bombs about the site’s beloved criminal candidate.

Two recent screen grabs demonstrate well that when writers dare to be honest about the negative aspects of Clinton’s campaign, her positions on the issues and her interactions and stances towards religious and cultural icons, they won’t be online for long.

When NewsTarget conducted a Google search of Clinton-related stories about recent emails showing her plotting against the Catholic Church, the following headline appeared:

But when we clicked on the link, the following appeared on the HuffPo site, indicating that, obviously, the story had been taken offline:

Honestly, no one should be surprised by this behavior by the Huffington Post. As Infowars.com reported last month, the site’s editorial team actually banned a journalist for writing about Clinton’s habitual health problems.

Infowars correspondent Paul Joseph Watson wrote:

The Huffington Post has sensationally censored an article pertaining to questions about Hillary Clinton’s health and banned the journalist who wrote it from posting on their website altogether.

He went on to note that writer David Seaman contributed a commentary piece that bought up and dissected questions surrounding Hillary’s health problems. Included in that story was a link to Watson’s viral video about those issues.

The post had been trending No. 3 on the HuffPo site but it was deleted within hours, while Seaman’s posting rights were revoked completely. And like the example above, when anyone tried to click on the story, they got the message: “This post is no longer available on the Huffington Post.”

Of course, that story was censored though pieces that questioned GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain’s health during the 2008 race were featured heavily on the site. And in more recent days, HuffPo even featured a post speculating that Donald Trump contracted cancer, though none of these authors were banned. So yes, the double standard is glaring.

But again, we should expect this now from the Huffington Post, which doesn’t engage in journalism, only propaganda.

Sources:

NaturalNews.com

NewsTarget.com

Turkey attempts to control email leaks by blocking Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and GitHub

October 18, 2016 by JD Heyes Leave a Comment

Authoritarian governments have historically had control of, or have attempted to control, the media – which is why our founding fathers put freedom of the press and freedom of speech at the very beginning of our Constitution.

Most other countries, however, have not adopted governing documents that recognize free speech and freedom of the press as inalienable rights that are natural and therefore not subject to the whims of government rulers. Count Turkey as one of those countries.

The website Turkey Blocks, which maps Internet freedom in real time, reported recently that Ankara, the capital of Turkey, has blocked access to Dropbox, Microsoft Onedrive, Google Drive and other transfer services in an attempt to keep a lid on leaked emails. The decision by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (pronounced ER-doh-wan) comes after hacktivist group Redhack leaked some private emails of the president’s son-in-law, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Berat Albayrak.

The Next Web speculated that the decision was “likely a means to stop people from hosting the email dumps on their accounts and making it more widely available.”

The leak of about 17 GB of data is believed to cover some 57,623 emails that date from April 2000 to the end of September of this year. An order from a court in Ankara regarding the investigation of the hacking collective provides some authenticity of the leak.

The Daily Dot, which received the email dump, say the emails show how Erdogan used his position of power to influence the Turkish media and guide the publishing of select information in friendly newspapers (sound familiar?).

In addition to the radical censoring measure, the Erdogan government also banned any newspapers from reporting on the leak – thereby depriving Turkish citizens of the right to a) hear about the leak itself; and b) know whether or not the emails revealed any government corruption.

But also, according to The Daily Dot, the hack and resultant leak of the data underscore the Turkish government’s vulnerability regarding operational security (OPSEC). Minister Albayrak “shared business deals with partners and discussed government policy documents over U.S.-hosted email servers” including those belonging to Google, Apple (iCloud), and Yahoo, a very questionable practice, The DD noted.

The Next Web reported as well that Turkey has a long history of Internet censorship and blocking Internet services because it seeks to control what its citizens get to see and read about the government. In July Ankara blocked WikiLeaks after a leak of emails belonging to one of Turkey’s political parties, Motherboard noted. That decision came shortly after a failed military coup in the country.

And in March the Erdogan administration banned Web users from accessing Twitter and Facebook following a car-bomb explosion in the capital.

As secretive as the Obama administration has been and as corrupt as Hillary Clinton is, without our First Amendment we would have never found out about all the things that have been going on to protect the latter from prosecution and to help her defeat GOP rival Donald J. Trump. That said, the political Left in America – those who side with Obama and Clinton – want to change that.

Sources:

Bypass Twitter censorship by using alternative information sources FETCH.news and GoodGopher.com

July 29, 2016 by D. Samuelson Leave a Comment

Before you read this, bookmark FETCH.news and GoodGopher.com. You’ll want to use these independent alternative search engines that do not engage in censorship!

The internet is a weapon used by the prevailing scientific dictatorship as they march the masses to global totalitarianism. The means to collect and control information is unsurpassed in human history. And in a this culture of relativity, materialism and narcissism, folks gleefully and willingly are treading their path to destruction. And while you must know that every jot and tittle, every tweet and twitter concerning your purchases, your communications, your friends, family and foes, your likes, dislikes, travel habits, work history, education level, entertainment preferences, your social, political or spiritual proclivities, your selfies, Skype chats and video downloads are all snuggled up into a bank of NSA computers – except when the controllers determine that a particular piece information needs to be removed because it doesn’t cater to the party line.

The term used to describe the deleting of data without informing the user is called shadow banning, and Twitter admitted to doing it, as described in this exclusive Breitbart report:

“Shadowbanning, sometimes known as “Stealth Banning” or “Hell Banning,” is commonly used by online community managers to block content posted by spammers. Instead of banning a user directly (which would alert the spammer to their status, prompting them to create a new account), their content is merely hidden from public view.

“Twitter [also] maintains a ‘whitelist’ of favoured Twitter accounts and a ‘blacklist’ of unfavored accounts. Accounts on the whitelist are prioritized in search results, even if they’re not the most popular among users. Meanwhile, accounts on the blacklist have their posts hidden from both search results and other users’ timelines.”

Susan Duclos, from allnewspipeline.com proposes another critical query:

“Many believe those running giant social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are censoring information sharing based on ideological viewpoints, but after seeing the nature of those censored, blocked, “shadowbanned” as well as how Facebook is actively helping governments persecute those who oppose offical government stances, it begs the question of whether these social media giants are actually being paid as government agents to become a propaganda arm for them?”

I would say the answer is yes. There is a precedent and it’s not good news. It’s documented that IBM Hollerith machines were used in the 1930s and 1940s to create and catalogue identification programs in Nazi Germany. Historian and author Edwin Black documents this collusion in his book, IBM and the Holocaust:

“Only after the Jews were identified – a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately – could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation.”

Meditate on that for a moment. They did it with punch cards. Now they’ve got Twitter, or Facebook and Google and a host of willing helpers utilizing a much broader and deeper method of collection – and control. The end game is removing your right to say, think or even exist independently of the new speak. It’s past time to stop bowing down to the beast in our hands. And it’s not too late to repent on our knees.

(Photo credit: uwm.edu)

Sources:

IbmandTheHolocaust.com

Science.NaturalNews.com

Twitter’s hypocritical war on expression: won’t shut down ISIS accounts, censors conservatives, yet unleashes Trust & Safety Council

June 2, 2016 by Greg White Leave a Comment

Twitter has created a newly formed Trust & Safety Council to help mitigate online harassment, but it’s not just cyber bullies who the social network is trying to silence. In the past few weeks, the tweets of populist conservatives and cultural libertarians have mysteriously vanished.

Many people have ceased using Twitter because of abuse online. Twitter’s most recent initiative claims to be taking a stand against online bullying; however, many feel this new system is limiting free speech. Members of the newly formed Trust & Safety Council include anti-bullying pro, anti-defamation league, childnet, feminist frequency, National Cyber Security Alliance, among others.

These organizations are wearing a facade that masks what Twitter is really up to. Rumors that Twitter is “shadowbanning” politically incorrect tweets have been verified by a source inside the company, according to Breitbart Tech. According to the inside source, Twitter intentionally whitelists and blacklists users. Tweets can easily disappear if they don’t align with Twitter’s left-wing political stance.

Shadowbanning isn’t just for cyber bullies and scammers

Shadowbanning, otherwise known as “Stealth Banning” and “Hell Banning,” is optimized by online community managers to prevent spam. Rather than ban a user, their content cannot be seen by the public. Best case scenario is that spammers do not realize their content is being shielded from public eyes.

The problem is Twitter isn’t just after spammers. Over the last few weeks, members of the alternative right have had their tweets censored – not because of cyber bullying – but because they do not mesh with the political ideology of Twitter.

Twitter users like sci-fi writer Vox Day, culture blogger Daddy Warpig and Trump supporter Ricky Vaughn have had problems with shadowbanning recently. Former World of Warcraft team leader, Mark Kern, and adult actress Mercedes Carrera, have also had their tweets disappearing from the timeline of their followers.

Since Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council consists mostly of left-wing advocacy groups, it should be unsurprising that victims of shadowbanning fall on the political right. These instances of shadowbanning libertarians and conservatives just so happen to coincide with the 2016 presidential election.

Twitter’s history of political censorship

This isn’t the first time Twitter has censored user timelines without their consent. Twitter came under attack last May after installing mandatory filters, which couldn’t be switched off. The system blocked the newsfeeds of users against their will. Many users could not send message to friends and followers, demanding that Twitter let them switch off the system.

Since shadowbanning has been confirmed by an inside source, it is no longer a mere rumor that Twitter is intentionally suppressing the views of conservatives and libertarians. They value free speech, as long as it is to serve the interests of the political left. Anything contrary to the political left is being censored on the grounds that it is politically incorrect.

It’s not yet known how successful the Trust & Safety Council will be in preventing online harassment, but they are enjoying a great deal of success in suppressing the political right. If this type of censorship continues to take place, libertarians and conservatives will have to seek an alternative media outlet to make their voices heard.

Sources include:

(1) TechTimes.com

(2) BreitBart.com

(3) BreitBart.com