By Beau Rothschild

The Liberty Movement is fighting back against liberal elites in corporations like Facebook, Google, and Twitter using corporate power to marginalize their message.  The Daily Beast reports that Twitter had no problem with Chinese disinformation about origins of the coronavirus.  “Coronavirus disinformation spread by senior Chinese government officials does not violate Twitter’s terms of service, a spokesperson for the company told The Daily Beast on Monday.”  This would be fine if Twitter had not already targeted conservatives for temporary and permanent bans.

The double standard is outrageous.

It is time for right-leaning users of social media to punish these companies using the free market.  One way is for users to choose new cutting-edge social media platforms, like Parler, to use the power of the consumer to drive demand away from the big social media platforms to ones more friendly to open discussion and diverse political opinions.

Government policies have enabled these companies to use politically correct rules to moderate political speech.  The giants of tech today benefit from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that provides a de facto massive subsidy for our nation’s largest social media platforms.  Many of the ideas politicians are promoting to carve out exceptions to that law miss the boat.  Section 230 has served to protect these companies when they moderate political speech in a way that violates the idea behind the First Amendment to the Constitution.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation makes the case that this law is “the most important law protecting Internet speech.”  The benefits of this law are great, yet there is a strong case to be made that Twitter, and other social media giants, have used this protection to go after conservatives.

Twitter is a classic case of how one company can abuse conservative users in a way that limits speech.  Twitter has engaged in the banning of many conservatives for a subjective violation of the platform’s rules.  Look at the case of James O’Keefe of Project Veritas.  Twitter blocked O’Keefe’s access to his Twitter account after he released a video showing a New York Democratic election commissioner admitting to voter fraud.  The company also “shadowbanned” Dilbert cartoon creator Scott Adams because he asked his followers to tweet examples of supporters of Hillary Clinton violently confronting Donald J. Trump–supporters back in 2016.  Shadowbanning is when a Twitter user’s comments are invisible to that person’s followers.  That type of politically biased activity was not considered when Section 230 was made law.

Signing up for alternative platforms as a supplement to Twitter will put pressure on the media tech giants to change behavior without a change in law.  The act of diversifying social media use will provide an outlet to conservatives who want to reach out to a targeted audience of conservatives and open-minded people who are OK reading messages they disagree with.  Twitter has a monopolistic hammerlock on short-form social media communication, but that can be broken by right-leaning social media users diversifying and signing up for other means of communication.

The new social media company Parler has taken on Twitter with a business model that is friendly to the voices that have been stifled by social media giants.  The company put out a statement after Katie Hopkins, a British conservative, was banned from Twitter for violating the subjective rules of the platform.  Parler made the case: “Big tech has once again failed to take a moral stance and protect debate, discussion, and free speech when bullied by the censorship mob.”  Parler correctly pointed out that the “cancel culture” that allows a liberal mob to stop speech it doesn’t like had won again, and Twitter showed “cowardice” in dealing with it.

At CPAC this year, Jeffrey Wernick, an investor in Parler, made a strong economic case about the “contestability of markets” with regard to social media giants.  He cited the return on investment of Google (44%) and Facebook (51%) as examples of companies ripe for competition, yet they have grown market share.  These companies are acting like monopolies with a market that is not being contested because of some obstacles to entering these markets.

It is time for conservatives to use the market power to fight back and move consuming to friendly sites like Parler.

 https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/time_for_conservatives_to_fight_back_against_leftist_social_media_giants.html#ixzz6JCYd7n2c

Claes Ruth of Karolinska University Laboratory said: “all hospitals” in the country are “strained” at the moment as virus cases and deaths surge with 106 new deaths in Covid-19. A total of 793 deaths has been registered in Sweden.

The total cases in the country now exceeds 9 100, and the hospital system in Stockholm is being overwhelmed with patients and dead bodies. Swedish authorities are storing bodies in Gothenburg and Stockholm in “refrigerated shipping containers, ice rinks, and canteen fridges,” according to RT News.

Crematoriums cannot keep up with the massive influx of virus-related deaths which has overflowed morgues.

According to the latest figures released by the Public Health Agency during today’s press conference, the total number of deaths increased by another 106 to a total of 793, which with the backlog in the reporting to the Public Health Authority means that Sweden has counter over 800 Covid-19 deaths.

By comparison, Sweden has between 500 and 700 deaths linked to influenza per year according to the Public Health Authority.

Approximately 470 patients are currently being treated for Covid-19 according to the Swedish Intensive Care Register, which means that they make up the majority of all intensive care patients currently. The number of intensive care patients with Covid-19 increases on average daily with between 10 and 30 patients.

Sweden currently allegedly has around 950 intensive care places, but the exact number of available places remains confidential.

Men are still the group worst affected by Covid-19. Of the total 719 people who have been, or still are, admitted to intensive care units in Sweden for Covid-19, 545 are men.

Anders Tegnell, state epidemiologist at the Public Health Authority, said that a study was carried out in the Stockholm area to test the spread of infection in the community. Of the 773 people aged between 2 and 86 in Stockholm, 2,5 percent were infected.

He further stated that with the spread rate of the Coronavirus, between five and ten percent of the population in Stockholm would be infected with the virus. “We know that there are significantly more people, it is obvious but how many more we do not know.”

At the same time, he made clear that the figures concern Stockholm which is much worse affected than the rest of the country and that there is no clear data on what it looks like in the rest of Sweden.

freewestmedia.com/2020/04/10/covid-19-death-toll-overwhelms-stockholm/

Nasr El Dbin B. was sentenced to eight years in prison this week after being convicted of manslaughter for the killing of 36-year-old Joselin H. after having sex with her in the ladies toilet at the “Katys Hütte” bar.

The victim is said to have been the last guest at the bar that evening, with the killing taking place on June 11th of last year.

After the two had sex, the 36-year-old mother allegedly bit the lip of the 37-year-old migrant who became enraged and smashed her face repeatedly into the tiled floor of the toilet and then proceeded to strangle her to death with a scarf, Bild reports.

At the trial, it was revealed that immediately after killing Joselin H., the Algerian used his phone to look up pornography before he dumped her body in a bush near the bar. Police found the body the following day.

According to Die Welt, the migrant had been working as a waiter and cleaner at the bar and is said to have received part of his salary in cocaine which made him sexually aggressive.

The case is just the latest killing to involve a failed asylum seeker in Germany since the height of the 2015 migrant crisis.

In March 2019, a 22-year-old Tunisian man was accused of fatally stabbing to death his ex-girlfriend in the city of Worms after they had engaged in an argument. The migrant was already well-known to local police for being involved and drugs and other illegal activities.

In 2018, Afghan asylum seeker Ahmad G. was arrested for murdering 17-year-old Mireille B. in Flensburg with the victim’s friends claiming he had been angered by her refusal to convert to Islam.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/04/10/failed-asylum-seeker-watched-pornography-after-killing-german-woman/

https://qmap.pub/read/3915

The Wuhan coronavirus has made the already evident insanity of reusable shopping bags so obvious that now we read this:

In 2007 San Francisco proudly became the first city to ban plastic bags. But last Tuesday the city’s Department of Health issued new guidelines, which now ban people from going to stores and coffee shops with “their own bags, mugs, or other reusable items from home.”

Virtue-signaling moonbats can’t save the planet without their filthy reusable shopping bags and coffee mugs. But even the leftists running San Francisco understand that we have real problems to deal with.

The Chancre by the Bay isn’t alone:

Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Illinois and Oregon have temporarily suspended their own bans on plastic bags, imposed new bans on reusable bags, or both.

Hawaii and Washington state have reversed their bans too.

Coronavirus epicenter New York has held off enforcement on its plastic bag ban until May 15. Since no one denies that plastic bags are not only more convenient, efficient, and economical but a clear benefit to public health, why not kill the moronic not to mention tyrannical plastic bag ban altogether? Because where liberalism has triumphed, the statist ratchet as a rule only moves in one direction: toward ever greater government control. The best you can hope for is to slow it down a little.

San Francisco’s new ban on reusable bags says nothing about plastic bags. But banning the bags that were supposed to be the smart alternative to plastic is probably as close a progressive city ever gets to admitting it was wrong.

How San Franciscans can legally carry their groceries is unclear.

moonbattery.com/san-francisco-bans-reusable-shopping-bags/

The Free Democratic Party (FDP) politician in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Lorenz Deutsch, urged the director of the music and cultural festival Ruhrtriennale to pull the plug on an appearance from an academic supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)movement targeting Israel who has also trivialized the Holocaust.Writing in late March, Deutsch told the director of the festival, “The BDS movement is not characterized by factual criticism of Israeli government acts, but aims at demolishing its existence through demonization, delegitimization, and disinformation. Achille Mbembe, who you invited, is unfortunately an example of this way of dealing with Israel.”

Deutsch termed the BDS an “antisemitic movement” and noted that, in 2018, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia banned public funds for institutions that provide BDS activists a platform. The Ruhrtriennale festival, which runs from  August 14 to September 20, is a recipient of tax-payer money.Deutsch, who is the cultural spokesman for the FDP, noted that Achille Mbembe signed a petition calling for an academic boycott of the Jewish state.The FDP politician said he finds this education boycott “attitude fundamentally questionable among academics. In addition, he [Achille Mbembe] also stands out in a recent publication with theses on Israel and the occupied territories, which have no factual basis and fall under the categories mentioned above.”Deutsch cited Achille Mbembe’s essay titled, “The Society of enmity” in the publication Radical Philosophy from 2016 to show that he equates Israel with South Africa’s former apartheid system, which is well-known from BDS circles.Deutsch wrote that Mbembe even surpasses attacks of comparing Israel with the former apartheid system. He cited additional passages from Achille Mbembe’s essay: “However, the metaphor of apartheid does not fully account for the specific character of the Israeli separation project. In the first place, this is because this project rests on quite a unique metaphysical and existential basis. The apocalyptic and catastrophist elements that underwrite it are far more complex, and derive from a longer historical horizon than those elements that used to support South African Calvinism. Moreover, given its ‘hi-tech’ character, the effects of the Israeli project on the Palestinian body are much more formidable than the relatively primitive operations undertaken by the apartheid regime in South Africa between 1948 and the early 1980s.”

The 62-year-old Cameroonian philosopher Mbembe continued that “This is evidenced by its miniaturization of violence – its cellularization and molecularization – and its various techniques of material and symbolic erasure. It is also evidenced in its procedures and techniques of demolition – of almost everything, whether of infrastructures, homes, roads or landscapes – and its fanatical policy of destruction aimed at transforming the life of Palestinians into a heap of ruins or a pile of garbage destined for cleansing. In South Africa, the mounds of ruins never did reach such a scale.”Deutsch responded to the academic paper, stating that “Here completely different situations become the same in an impermissible way,” adding that Mbembe uses terms such wall, border separation, destruction, etc. in an attempt to create supposed connections.Deutsch wrote that “a second apartheid comparison [in Mbembe’s essay] has left me speechless. Here the South African apartheid system is compared with the Holocaust, the two ‘manifestations’ of a ‘separation fantasy.'”Achille Mbembe wrote: “The apartheid system in South Africa and the destruction of Jews in Europe – the latter, though, in an extreme fashion and within a quite different setting – constituted two emblematic manifestations of this phantasy of separation.”Deutsch accused Mbembe of “relativizing  the Holocaust” and “placing the Jews of Israel today in the logic of the overall argument of national socialist white criminals – a well-known pattern. It seems to confirm that many people can deal better with dead Jews than with living Jews.”Mbembe did not immediately respond to a Jerusalem Post press query sent to his South African email address at The University of the Witwatersrand.In his public letter, Deutsch cited a quote from the American author and expert on antisemitism, Bari Weiss: “Anti-Semitism that originates on the left is a far more subtle and sophisticated enterprise [than on the right]. It’s typically camouflaged in language familiar to Jewish tongues and ears: the language of social justice and anti-racism, of equality and liberation.”Mbembe was a guest professor at the University of Cologne in 2019 and is slated to talk at the festival about “planetary life.” Carp, who oversees the festival in the city of Bochum located in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, has faced criticism over the years for her sympathy with the BDS campaign.

https://www.jpost.com/BDS-THREAT/German-politician-urges-festival-to-disinvite-BDS-academic-624161

On Wednesday, the Berlin Fire Department reported a blaze in a new building connected to Berlin’s city castle. The building stands on the Palace Square in central Berlin, just off Alexanderplatz. It is a reconstructed copy of the old royal and imperial palace of both the Kingdom of Prussia and the German Empire.

The fire department stated that one person was reported injured and that at least 80 firefighters were working to put out the fire. A spokesperson for the city fire department told the newspaper, Bild, that the fire must have started after an explosion that took place outside the castle.

royalcentral.co.uk/europe/fire-at-rebuilt-imperial-palace-in-berlin-140461/

A knife attack between residents of the refugee shelter on the Friedberg in Suhl has turned into a mass brawl.

In the night to today’s Thursday there had been “tumultuous incidents within the area”, as Daniel Wiegmann, the head of the Suhl fire brigade, said during the night. The perpetrators caused fear and terror in the facility. This turned into a brawl between about 50 residents. The men allegedly attacked each other with wooden sticks, iron bars and stones, according to the police. In the facility itself, fire extinguishers were used to spray around, which also triggered fire alarms. According to the fire department, there was no fire. In the widespread panic, a woman jumped out of the window on the third floor and broke her leg. She was taken to hospital. When the paramedics arrived, several men attacked the ambulance and hit it. A total of about seven people have been injured. Some of them so badly that they needed medical care. One man is in hospital with stab wounds, according to the police. But he is not critically injured. To treat numerous residents on site, the ambulance staff had erected a tent in front of the facility.

.insuedthueringen.de/region/suhl_zellamehlis/suhl/Massnahmen-nach-juengster-Massenschlaegerei-in-Fluechtlingsheim;art83456,7207905?fbclid=IwAR0tYJhSp50-1yX6KusMRc-zB0ThE1qX6Aee3gLwLbzRSWxE6ix85euxOyY

In a few small ways, Pope Francis is a traditionalist. He opposes abortion, gay marriage (although he supports gay civil unions), and the notion of infinite genders.

In most other ways, though, the Pope constantly demonstrates that he emerged from a Marxist background. Despite being the Catholic Church’s preeminent man of God, he has a Gaia-centric view of nature. He also brings a Marxist’s understanding of economics (i.e., simplistic and wrong) to the papacy.  That’s why, on Wednesday, the Pope suggested that COVID-19 is the earth’s revenge for climate change and then implied that politicians concerned about the economy are akin to Hitler in 1933.

To understand how the head of the Catholic Church can make statements so perfectly aligned with leftism, one has to go back to the left’s long March through the Church.

The Latin American Catholic Church went Leftist in the 1950s and 1960s, when it developed “liberation theology.” This was also when Pope Francis came of age as a Catholic priest. “Liberation theology” is a pure Leftist doctrine tacked onto Catholicism:

Liberation theology proposes to fight poverty by addressing its alleged source: sin. In so doing, it explores the relationship between Christian theology — especially Roman Catholic theology — and political activism, especially in relation to social justice, poverty, and human rights. The principal methodological innovation is seeing theology from the perspective of the poor and the oppressed.

Liberation theology’s defining concept is “social justice.” That’s how a Latin American leftist now heads the institution that, under Pope John Paul II, once stood firmly with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the West’s existential fight against socialism.

Francis’s push to the left began early in his papacy when, in December 2013, hepreached economic Marxism to the flock. The Pope’s Marxist world view also means he supports the whole idea of anthropogenic climate change. In his 2015 encyclical on ecology, Laudato Si, Pope Francis said that climate change is realand is primarily “a result of human activity.”

Both these beliefs came to the fore on Wednesday when The Tablet andCommonwealth magazines published an email interview with the Pope. Regarding COVID-19, Francis reverted to animism – that is, the view of Nature as a living, god-like being:

“We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that 18 months ago a boat could cross the North Pole because the glaciers had all melted? Who speaks now of the floods?” the Pope said.

“I don’t know if these are the revenge of nature, but they are certainly nature’s responses,” he added.

Ignore the silliness of glacial melt. What’s significant is that this viewpoint is totally antithetical to Judeo-Christian doctrine. The Bible, both in the Old and New Testaments, long ago abandoned animism in favor of a single divine entity, that created the earth and all that is upon it.

In the same interview, Pope Francis took a swipe at Donald Trump, who is very worried that extreme measures against COVID-19 will destroy the American economy, leading to Depression and everything that flows from it (e.g., suicide, depression-related health events, drug addiction, alcoholism, etc.). That’s not how Pope Francis sees things, though:

The Pope also warned against the rise of populist politicians — who he said are giving speeches reminiscent of Hitler in 1933 — and others who are focusing solely on the economy.

The Catholic Church has survived for close to 2,000 years, so it’s not likely that a single Marxist pope can destroy it. Nevertheless, traditionalists have to be worried when the Pope starts speaking of Gaia with the same immediacy he speaks of God. Moreover, everyone should look askance at a Pope who joins with the world’s Marxists to attack Trump with Hitler insults because Trump is worried about the economic costs attendant upon flowing from the same questionable models that have led to twenty years of climate change hysteria.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/pope_franciss_approach_to_covid19_is_a_reminder_that_he_is_a_leftist.html

https://vladtepesblog.com/