Beet L. Jooz

(RSS generated with FetchRss)

WASHINGTON – Leftist linguista Noam Chomsky thinks far too much is being made of Russian interference in the 2016 election – and not nearly enough about meddling by another foreign state.

Whom does the fiery 90-year-old atheist, socialist professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology blame? Well, the Jews … Jerusalem … Israel.

“First of all, if you’re interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support,” he told the Democracy Now TV program.

Chomsky told the program aired on NPR, PBS, Pacifica Radio and some satellite channels the media’s infatuation with supposed Russian interference in the election is “almost a joke.”

“Did the Russians interfere in our elections?” he asked rhetorically. “[It’s] an issue of overwhelming concern in the media. I mean, in most of the world, that’s almost a joke. First of all, if you’re interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Israeli intervention in U.S. elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done, I mean, even to the point where the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president’s policies – what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015. Did Putin come to give an address to the joint sessions of Congress trying to – calling on them to reverse U.S. policy, without even informing the president? And that’s just a tiny bit of this overwhelming influence. So, if you happen to be interested in influence of – foreign influence on elections, there are places to look. But even that is a joke.”

Chomsky continued: “I mean, one of the most elementary principles of a functioning democracy is that elected representatives should be responsive to those who elected them. There’s nothing more elementary than that. But we know very well that that is simply not the case in the United States. There’s ample literature in mainstream academic political science simply comparing voters’ attitudes with the policies pursued by their representatives, and it shows that for a large majority of the population, they’re basically disenfranchised. Their own representatives pay no attention to their voices. They listen to the voices of the famous 1 percent – the rich and the powerful, the corporate sector. The elections – Tom Ferguson’s stellar work has demonstrated, very conclusively, that for a long period, way back, U.S. elections have been pretty much bought. You can predict the outcome of a presidential or congressional election with remarkable precision by simply looking at campaign spending. That’s only one part of it. Lobbyists practically write legislation in congressional offices. In massive ways, the concentrated private capital, corporate sector, super wealth, intervene in our elections, massively, overwhelmingly, to the extent that the most elementary principles of democracy are undermined. Now, of course, all that is technically legal, but that tells you something about the way the society functions.

“So, if you’re concerned with our elections and how they operate and how they relate to what would happen in a democratic society, taking a look at Russian hacking is absolutely the wrong place to look,” he said. “Well, you see occasionally some attention to these matters in the media, but very minor as compared with the extremely marginal question of Russian hacking.”

In response to Chomsky’s attack on Israel for supposedly meddling in the 2016 election, Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter professor of law emeritus at Harvard Law School, reminds that Chomsky has flirted with anti-Semitism in the past.

“Remember this is the same man who defended the so-called ‘research’ of the notorious Holocaust-denier, Robert Faurisson,” said Dershowitz. “Not only did Chomsky defend Faurisson’s phony research, but he denied that Faurisson – who is a notorious Jew-hater – had said anything that qualifies as anti-Semitic.”

Dershowitz quotes what Chomsky wrote: “I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust. Nor would there be anti-Semitic implications, per se, in the claim that the Holocaust (whether one believes it took place or not) is being exploited, viciously so, by apologists for Israeli repression and violence. I see no hint of anti-Semitic implications in Faurisson’s work.”

Ever-unpredictable, however, Chomsky even had some nice things to say about President Trump.

“And I think we find this on issue after issue, also on issues on which what Trump says, for whatever reason, is not unreasonable,” he said. “So, he’s perfectly right when he says we should have better relations with Russia. Being dragged through the mud for that is outlandish, makes – Russia shouldn’t refuse to deal with the United States because the U.S. carried out the worst crime of the century in the invasion of Iraq, much worse than anything Russia has done. But they shouldn’t refuse to deal with us for that reason, and we shouldn’t refuse to deal with them for whatever infractions they may have carried out, which certainly exist. This is just absurd. We have to move towards better – right at the Russian border, there are very extreme tensions, that could blow up anytime and lead to what would in fact be a terminal nuclear war, terminal for the species and life on Earth. We’re very close to that. Now, we could ask why. First of all, we should do things to ameliorate it. Secondly, we should ask why. Well, it’s because NATO expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in violation of verbal promises to Mikhail Gorbachev, mostly under Clinton, partly under first Bush, then Clinton expanded right to the Russian border, expanded further under Obama. The U.S. has offered to bring Ukraine into NATO. That’s the kind of a heartland of Russian geostrategic concerns. So, yes, there’s tensions at the Russian border – and not, notice, at the Mexican border. Well, those are all issues that should be of primary concern. The fate of – the fate of organized human society, even of the survival of the species, depends on this. How much attention is given to these things as compared with, you know, whether Trump lied about something? I think those seem to me the fundamental criticisms of the media.”

While belittling concerns about Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Chomsky attacked Trump for not addressing what he called “an existential threat.”

“So, of all Trump’s policies, the one that is the most dangerous and destructive, in fact poses an existential threat, is his policies on climate change, on global warming,” he said. “That’s really destructive. And we’re facing an imminent threat, not far removed, of enormous damage. The effects are already visible but nothing like what’s going to come. A sea level rise of a couple of feet will be massively destructive. It will make today’s immigration issues look like trivialities. And it’s not that the administration is unaware of this. So, Donald Trump, for example, is perfectly aware of the dangerous effects, in the short term, of global warming. So, for example, recently he applied to the government of Ireland for permission to build a wall to protect his golf course in Ireland from rising sea levels. And Rex Tillerson, who was supposed to be the adult in the room before he was thrown out, as CEO of ExxonMobil, was devoting enormous resources to climate change denial, although he had, sitting on his desk, the reports of ExxonMobil scientists, who, since the ’70s, in fact, were on the forefront of warning of the dire effects of this accelerating phenomenon. I don’t know what word in the language – I can’t find one – that applies to people of that kind, who are willing to sacrifice the literal – the existence of organized human life, not in the distant future, so they can put a few more dollars in highly overstuffed pockets. The word ‘evil’ doesn’t begin to approach it. These are the kinds of issues that should be under discussion. Instead, what’s being – there is a focus on what I believe are marginalia.”

An Iraqi court sentenced a French man and a German woman to life in prison on Monday for belonging to Islamic State, forging ahead with the trial of hundreds of people - many foreigners - captured after the militant group’s defeat last year.

Berkeleyside

Update: Car windows smashed, fires set, 20 arrests but no injuries in protests Berkeleyside Don't miss the Berkeleyside Twitter feed for the latest reports from the streets. Update, 6:15 p.m. Nearly a year after protesters last clashed on the streets of Berkeley, groups on the left and right returned Sunday ready for confrontation. But most ... 20 arrested during 'No to Marxism in America 2' march, rally in BerkeleyKGO-TV all 104 news articles »

The Justice Department won't give up its records

Gun control activists who took part in Satuday's "March on NRA" uttered numerous profundities such as their desire to ban "fully semiautomatic guns" and their belief that it is "ammunition that makes a semiautomatic [an] automatic."

Republican strategist Rick Wilson just went off on the Republicans who support President Donald Trump with some non-TV-friendly language.

“Cocaine’s a hell of a drug,” Wilson said of the GOP. “They love the fact that Donald Trump finally gives them this sort of id of the Republican Party. They’re finally given permission to say the ugly things they kind of wanted in their secret hearts for a long time, and the monster got out of its cage in terms of a lot of the populist messaging that worked to motivate Republican primary voters for a long time.”

“There’s just a huge courage deficit in this country,” he added, and as he looked to back up that sentiment, the audio cut out. Here’s what he said:

I said “Washington is full of profiles in chickenshit. You and I both get calls from members of Congress who say I can’t stand this asshole”

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) August 6, 2018

After his little outburst, Wilson looked sheepish and appears to mouth an apology as Princeton University professor Eddie Glaude Jr. lays a calming hand on his shoulder.

“Are you saying that on TV?” Mika Brzezinski asked, seeming a bit scandalized, yet amused.

“I wasn’t trying to,” Wilson replied.

Joe Scarborough, while saying Wilson maybe owed him a dinner for the slip-up, explained that the show had to implement a 7-second delay due to his own “past failures,” and so the comment probably wouldn’t be heard on television.

“As long as Alex didn’t press ‘Chopper 4,'” he quipped.

Watch above, via MSNBC.

[image via screengrab]

‘The hoax is the idea that somehow the Russians directed and controlled his campaign or direct and control his administration, that there was some conspiracy or some violation of U.S. law in 2016’

White House sources told the Wall Street Journal that President Trump asked Chief of Staff John Kelly to stay in the position on Tuesday. The news came as a shock to many in the Beltway who viewed their relationship as often strained.

Journalists have long speculated that Kelly would be leaving the White House, and many expected his resignation or firing to come sometime this summer. Kelly has often looked exasperated while Trump is speaking, leading many in the press to insist he was frustrated with the president’s off the cuff remarks.

At a press conference in October, Kelly silenced the rumors that he was quitting and stated that the media had confused for irritated expressions times when he was merely deep in thought.

Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly: 'I'm not so frustrated' that I would leave White House https://t.co/qLtybat7w0 via @jmestepa

— USA TODAY Politics (@usatodayDC) October 12, 2017

However, the rumors continued beyond the fall of 2017, regaining traction in early 2018. The narrative shaped quickly. Kelly is a retired four-star general who prizes structure and order. Trump is erratic and bizarre, prone to make impulse decisions. The two mixed like oil and water, says the narrative.

Given the already volatile White House, most media suggested that Kelly might be the next departure out the administration’s revolving door. His exit was just a matter of time, and whispers from unnamed sources filled news reports. Kelly is trying to control Trump. Ivanka is searching for new blood to take Kelly’s spot.

Trump can hardly afford another high-level staff departure—but that doesn't mean John Kelly won't be the next to leave https://t.co/iraEEg5iHD

— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) January 23, 2018

Trump can’t force Kelly out through his usual bully tactics because Kelly is absolutely miserable and wants to leave anyways.

Intriguing @Axios insight into the WH turmoil & John Kelly's future.
Trump "usually makes their lives miserable, publicly humiliates them. But now he’s up against somebody who doesn’t care and would happily leave.”https://t.co/jsI0QqhQ6N

— Harriet Alexander (@h_alexander) February 10, 2018

The VP said months instead of years. Firing is imminent.

Mike Pence yesterday on COS John Kelly: “I look forward to working with him for many, many months to come.” Months, not years. Sounds like there’s some kind of (unstated?) understanding Kelly will leave at some point, perhaps after the midterms.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) February 15, 2018

The rapid rates of departure are a sign of a frantic White House, unable to function and adapt. John Kelly’s inevitable exit will surely be the nail in its coffin.

Will John Kelly be the next to leave the White House? https://t.co/OpRBvkZkKp

— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) February 16, 2018

From The New York Times to Reuters, the blue checkmarks all agreed: Kelly’s tenure as chief of staff would end before summer did.

H.R. McMaster and John Kelly may leave White House over tensions with Trump, according to four senior administration officials https://t.co/v2iadP3U11 pic.twitter.com/2Budaxehp3

— Reuters U.S. News (@ReutersUS) February 23, 2018

Is John Kelly about to leave the White House? New report says he recently went nuclear on Trump https://t.co/isoqp2Wla4

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) April 8, 2018

John Kelly has referred to Trump as "an idiot" multiple times, NBC News reports.

Some current and former officials said they expect Kelly to leave by July, and that Trump and Kelly seem to have tired of each other. https://t.co/LltG93gcaM

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) April 30, 2018

White House Memo: John Kelly now finds himself in the position where several others who have worked for Trump have landed: aware that their jobs have become close to untenable and knowing that it is only a matter of when — not if — they will have to leave https://t.co/YEDSeg5t8i

— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) May 3, 2018

Chief of Staff John Kelly Expected to Leave WH This Summer: Reporthttps://t.co/yUht6pcAQV

— IJR (@TheIJR) June 29, 2018

John Kelly to leave White House in next few weeks: report https://t.co/HHpn2gGVGD pic.twitter.com/Skvi4MTMfa

— The Hill (@thehill) June 28, 2018

These tweets are only scratching the surface of commentators and outlets who were confident that Trump would give Kelly the boot. For months, media reported that Kelly’s days were numbered. You can find more examples here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Even after the WSJ confirmed that Kelly would stay through 2020, and CNN had reported that this was the case, CNN political commentator Chris Cillizza voiced doubts that Kelly would actually last that long. Cillizza showed some self-awareness in one of the first paragraphs of an article on the subject, asking, “How the heck did we go from ‘Kelly is a dead man walking’ to ‘Kelly is in through 2020’?”

Will John Kelly last as chief of staff through 2020? (HINT: He won't.)https://t.co/xGK6S1Yz7v pic.twitter.com/vwnl57lmkf

— Chris Cillizza (@CillizzaCNN) August 1, 2018

From there, Cilizza doubles down on the original premise that all of the media couldn’t have been wrong and compares the relationship to two middle schoolers vowing to be best friends forever. The agreement is shallow and won’t last the test of time, he says. Trump is too volatile, Kelly too structured.

The media’s reporting on Kelly’s status gives the impression that the media really wants there to be problems between the president and his chief of staff. Despite consistently being wrong, predictions from unnamed sources keep coming on how Kelly only has days left.

I don’t doubt that Trump is a difficult person for a former Marine to follow. However, Kelly has a deep devotion to America and a sense that he’s needed in his role. Likewise, at the very least, Trump wants to spite the media intent on running “White House in shambles” stories. His commitment to that likely runs deeper than any annoyance with staff.

Congratulations to General John Kelly. Today we celebrate his first full year as @WhiteHouse Chief of Staff! pic.twitter.com/JWCaJ3GhHV

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 30, 2018

The breathless takes of the past year feel foolish. The widespread consensus in them is even more troubling. Perhaps Trump asking Kelly to stay was actually that big of a surprise. But maybe the press was looking for a story that it wanted to see, rather than the one actually at hand.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office was infiltrated by a Chinese spy who worked as her driver and attended official functions on her behalf for 20 years, according to new reports from Politico and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Feinstein reportedly had no idea that her office was being infiltrated by a man who was feeding information to an individual linked to China’s Ministry of State Security. She was “mortified” when the FBI showed up at her Washington DC office five years ago to warn her about the mole.

Feinstein, who was serving as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, had access to classified intelligence that would be extremely valuable to the Chinese government. She forced her driver to resign shortly thereafter and did not tell her staff about the incident, according to an unnamed source cited in the Chronicle.

In her capacity as a ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Feinstein unilaterally released testimony from Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson to the public earlier this year, violating committee precedent. When she released these records, she failed to disclose that one of her former staffers, Daniel Jones, had hired Fusion GPS and ex-British spy Christopher Steele to dig up dirt on Donald Trump after the 2016 election.

Jones, who runs a private investigative outfit called Penn Quarter Group, told the FBI last year that he was being bankrolled by 7 to 10 wealthy donors who are primarily from New York and California to look into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russian officials to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. These donors gave him $50 million he used to hire Fusion GPS, which contracted with Steele to compile the now-infamous dossier riddled with salacious and unverified claims.

The dossier, which was also funded by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party, was used as evidence in the FBI’s warrant to secretly surveil Trump campaign associate Carter Page for more than a year.

The Washington Post ran a stunningly disingenuous fact check Friday on Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ claim about the way the press treats her, excusing vicious harassment of the White House press secretary and rating obviously true claims as “bogus.”

Among the most bizarre findings by Aaron Blake: The media don’t think Sanders should be “choked,” they just want to “wring” her neck. And it’s crazy for her to say anyone said she should be “harassed as a life sentence,” when they really said she should be made “uncomfortable” as a “life sentence.”

“Nobody advocated for Sanders being choked,” Blake wrote, before explaining about the time an MSNBC reporter called for another reporter to wring her neck. Sanders’ comparison of wringing a neck to choking is “uncharitable,” he claimed.

“Nobody said Sanders should be harassed as a life sentence,” Blake wrote, in an even more brazen denial of the facts. “[Jennifer] Rubin said nothing directly about people ‘harassing’ Sanders, although she did say being ‘uncomfortable’ should be a ‘life sentence’ for Sanders …”

Blake also claimed Sanders is wrong to say reporters brought comedian Michelle Wolf on stage to mock her at the White House Correspondents dinner. “Sanders makes it sound as though the press tasked Wolf with ridiculing her,” Blake wrote. Of course, that’s exactly what the reporters who invited Wolf to the dinner tasked her with, which is why the White House Correspondents Association felt the need to apologize for her appearance.

In fact, Sanders’ statement about harassment is totally accurate. “The media has attacked me personally on a number of occasions, including your own network — said I should be harassed as a life sentence, that I should be choked,” she said, adding: “When I was hosted by the [White House] Correspondents’ Association, of which almost all of you are members of, you brought a comedian up to attack my appearance and call me a traitor to my own gender.”

Blake’s “fact check” in the Washington Post is one more example of Sanders’ unfair treatment from the press. His attempt to excuse vicious and violent calls for harassment of a woman comes one day after the Washington Post excused a virulent racist hired by The New York Times, claiming Sarah Jeong’s pile of overtly racist tweets against white people were just “making fun.”

The New York Times’ Frank Bruni really upped his game this week. In an atrociously brutal piece, he called Vice President Mike Pence a “holy terror,” claiming he’s multiple degrees more sinister than President Trump, the otherwise most sinister person on the planet. Bruni actually warns the best case against impeaching Trump is the much greater danger of Pence.

Think about that a moment though. For all the venom and apocalyptic hysteria being spewed at everything Trump has ever said, done or probably even thought — and there is plenty there of concern — there is someone even “worse” than this president. Bruni makes Chicken Little seem measured.

So what makes Pence so evil, other than the fact that he is, as Bruni has it, “self-infatuated,” “a bigot,” a “liar” and “cruel”? Pence’s original and most damning sin is that he’s a Christian who actually believes what Christians actually believe. Imagine that.

Pence is really no different than your run-of-the-mill evangelical, like millions of Americans. He believes that God governs the affairs of men, that prayer is effectual and worth doing, that marriage and family are best when built upon a married mother and father, that life is sacred and abortion destroys life, and that God appoints our government’s leaders, even those who are hostile to Him.

Bruni adds that Pence is a greater threat to the universe than Trump because he holds, “…the conviction that he’s on a mission from God and a determination to mold the entire nation in the shape of his own faith, a regressive, repressive version of Christianity.”

Besides sliming the Blues Brothers, he fails to appreciate that he has done so to millions of simple middle-Americans who believe that seeking to serve God in one’s life and work is a profound virtue and desirable life trait. Bruni continues on this remarkable trail: Trade Trump for Pence “and you go from kleptocracy to theocracy.”

How does one even respond to such meteoric hyperbole masquerading as thoughtfulness? Every person in government who’s possessed any measure of traditional Christian conviction and has the temerity to live by it has been accused of wanting to start a theocracy. The charge has grown quite thin and it has never even come close to happening. Chicken Little again.

Bruni fails to see — as do most of his peers — that it is precisely this kind of elitist bigotry that fueled Trump’s ascendency. But they keep topping off that tank with tanker-truck after tanker-truck of high-test vitriol. Bruni knows Pence is guilty of all of this and it disqualifies him, not only as a leader of our nation, but as a sane person, because there’s a new book coming out that says so. Bruni says the book “presents an entirely damning portrait of Pence,” but rest assured, it does so in a “mostly measured tone.” Yes, he actually modifies the phrase “entirely damning portrait” with the reassuring phrase “measured tone.”

In the book’s 300-plus mostly measured pages, the author cannot come up with one salutary thing to say about our nation’s vice-president? A book that only offers sentence after sentence from first page to last of how bad a person is is called “not worth reading,” because it’s hard to take seriously. However, Bruni and the book’s author believe the book is a must-read and serves an essential national interest because, as the author explains, “People don’t understand what Pence is: a religious zealot.”

A religious zealot, in the parlance of Christian antagonists, is merely a person who strongly believes things of faith that you disagree with. It’s a very subjective word and thus makes it easy to throw around with equal parts casualness and moral superiority. But it is likely true that most people do understand that Pence is a man of serious faith, and they like him for it.

It’s interesting that when Joy Behar said on “The View” that Pence was mentally ill because he says he sometimes hears from God when he prays, she was answering the panel’s question as to whether Pence would be a worse president than Trump. (She later apologized.) She was willing to call Pence psychotic, but she would not go as far as to say he is worse than Trump, because she explained “No one could be worse than Trump.” Saying Bruni is rhetorically more extreme than Behar is certainly saying something.

Publically pronounced hatred of Evangelicals, faithful Catholics and white men are the only allowable bigotries, and that prejudice seems to be demonstrated with greater nastiness with each passing day. Bruni’s is simply the latest installment. It is sad that those who put themselves out there as those who singularly carry the burden of dividing fact from delusion not only regularly trade in such bigotry, but can’t even see it for what it is. And they wonder why their readership is declining and people continue to vote for candidates they believe are crazy.

77 people were shot last week in Chicago, 9 fatally, but the rate of shootings has accelerated aggressively today as 'HeyJackass' reports "30 shot in 3 hours is the most shot in the least amount of time we’ve recorded in 5+ years. The previous record was July 4-5, 2016 w/ 29 shot in 6 hours."

Amid this carnage, ABC7Chicago reports that, police said there was a "trauma lockdown" at Stroger Hospital with only immediate family members of victims are being allowed in the emergency room. A spokeswoman for Stroger Hospital disputes the police account.

"Over the past 24 hours, Stroger's trauma unit received an unusually high volume of patients. At no time did Stroger go on bypass or 'lockdown' its trauma unit," the spokeswoman said. "We are asking the families of trauma patients to limit visitation at this time to immediate family members only so staff may focus on patient care. "

This comes just days after Superintendent Eddie Johnson visited ABC7 and talked about decreasing crime numbers and overall violence in Chicago.

"I think some of our more challenging, communities, it's just imperative that police and the community work together to reduce this gun violence," Superintendent Johnson said. "We just have too many guns on the streets of Chicago."

But, judging by the protests this week - that will shock the mainstream media narrative out of much of America - Chicagoans (particularly black inner city citizens) are furious at Mayor Rahm Emanuel's impotence and are asking President Trump for help.

VIDEO: Mayor Rahm Emanuel busts a move at South Side music festivalhttps://t.co/oyld95UDz8

(like he's dancing on the graves of the children that have been gunned down. look at me mommy, look at me!)

— SnorkyJr (@SnorkyJr) August 5, 2018

As Fox News reports, demonstrators took to the streets of Chicago this week to call for the resignation of Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D), blasting his administration for failing to curb the city's gun violence epidemic.

Protesters expressed their outrage over the lack of economic development on the South and West Sides of the city, compared to the North Side, as gang violence continues to plague their neighborhoods.

"Rahm Emanuel is a con man. His whole job is to keep black folks divided," one man told Fox News' Gianno Caldwell, who covered the march.

One woman said Thursday that Emanuel "doesn't care about anybody" except his own neighborhood and his own family, while another woman said Emanuel seems to care more about illegal immigrants in the city.

"African-Americans, we're citizens, and our ancestors built this country," she told Caldwell, whose younger brother survived a shooting last year that killed his best friend.

Rev. Ira Acree, one of the organizers of Thursday's protest, said residents are tired of the "tale of two cities," where one area is thriving and others are crippled by poverty and gang violence.

And finally, in the most shocking twist in today's divided nation, it is interesting to see Democratic leaders in Chicago calling for President Trump to involve the National Guard.

State Rep. La Shawn Ford, a Democrat who represents the West Side of Chicago, called on President Trump to help the city.

"Not everyone believes Chicago is a Trump-free zone. If he's serious about helping the people ... I accept his help. We can't turn any help away," said Ford, adding that seniors and children need to have safe streets and federal authorities need to help the local police.  

Update: According to Bloomberg, the Alex Jones Channel Page, the Alex Jones Page, the InfoWars Page and the Infowars Nightly News Page “have been unpublished for repeated violations of community standards and accumulating too many strikes,” Facebook says in statement.

Facebook said it reviewed content “glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies”

* * *

Apple has completely removed five of Infowars' six podcasts from its iTunes and Podcast apps under their hate speech guidelines, reports BuzzFeed News - including the daily Alex Jones podcast and the show "War Room" - in "one of the largest enforcement actions intended to curb conspiratorial news content by a technology company to date." 

Apple did not host Jones's shows, but it offered an index that allowed anyone with an iPhone to find and subscribe to them. Though Apple is far from Jones and Infowars' only distribution platform, the decision to pull Jones' content will considerably limit the outlet's audio reach — as of 2018, Apple's Podcasts platform amassed 50 billion all-time downloads and streams. -BuzzFeed

"Apple does not tolerate hate speech, and we have clear guidelines that creators and developers must follow to ensure we provide a safe environment for all of our users," a company spokesperson told BuzzFeed.

"Podcasts that violate these guidelines are removed from our directory making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming. We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions.”

Apple's decision is the latest in a string of technology companies which have taken action against Jones and Infowars, which he founded 19 years ago in 1999. Last month, YouTube and Facebook each pulled down four videos by Jones and Infowars. Facebook suspended Jones for 30 days, while YouTube hit the news outlet with a "strike." Meanwhile, Spotify and the podcast app Stitcher followed suit, removing specific episodes of Jones' show they deemed to contain hateful content. 

Apple's decision comes on the heels of liberal outrage directed at Jones and his network, most recently spearheaded by online activists Sleeping Giants - which has lobbied for tech platforms in general to cut all ties with Jones; condemning Apple last week for their reluctance. 

Okay...what is happening here?@iTunes @apple, are you really choosing to host Infowars on your platform after Alex Jones’ harassment of Sandy Hook parents and Vegas shooting victims and threats to the Special Counsel? How does this not break your Terms Of Service? https://t.co/Bfhwf6NXYN

— Sleeping Giants (@slpng_giants) July 30, 2018

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, Sleeping Giants praised the removal on Sunday night. "While companies like Facebook, YouTube and Spotify have been twisting themselves into pretzels inventing ways to avoid having to enforce their own Terms Of Service on Alex Jones, it’s great to hear that Apple, whose reach is so broad, is willing to do it," a spokesperson for the company wrote. -BuzzFeed

So while they are not exactly free speech advocates, it is useful to observe how simple it is for today's online media giants and global distributors of discourse to incite a modern-date book burning simply by labeling speech as hateful.

As of Sunday night, the only remaining podcast linked to Infowars is a daily news recap show called "Real News With David Knight," however it's not clear why it was spared the "axe of cleansing."

Commenting on the action, Infowars' Paul Joseph Watson said that "according to Apple, if you don’t respect people with different views, you will be banned. Does this mean it is necessary to respect people who advocate child marriage and honor killings simply to have a platform?"

According to Apple, if you don’t respect people with different views, you will be banned.

Does this mean it is necessary to respect people who advocate child marriage and honor killings simply to have a platform? pic.twitter.com/O89PQ8mUPo

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) August 6, 2018

He also reported that Infowars has now also been permanently banned by Facebook.

Facebook bans Infowars. Permanently.

Infowars was widely credited with playing a key role in getting Trump elected.

This is a co-ordinated move ahead of the mid-terms to help Democrats.

This is political censorship.

This is culture war.https://t.co/HkGOdjxhhk

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) August 6, 2018

Police in Italy say one person has died in the explosion on a highway near the northern city of Bologna that collapsed part of a raised highway.

When The New York Times named Sarah Jeong to its editorial board despite a history of racist statements on Twitter (a history vaster than originally reported), non-leftists observed that similar comments directed against any group other than whites would be unacceptable in polite society. Turning Points USA communications director Candace Owens decided to prove the point, and Twitter obliged her.

Owens tweeted comments Saturday worded identically to those made by Jeong, but she substituted “Jewish people” and “Black people” for white people, and she expressly noted that the comments mimicked Jeong. Twitter promptly suspended her account, then restored it after an online backlash and an internal review.

Twitter apologized to Owens for the “error,” but that strains credulity, since Owens expressly stated the political purpose of the tweets within the tweets themselves. The incident sheds further light on Twitter’s political biases. It can also tell us something more about the left’s general disregard for the supposed “rules” it would have everyone else observe on racial matters.

As The Daily Caller noted in reporting the story, the suspension here is part of a pattern. There are individual suspensions, such as happened to Kathleen McKinney, for a tweet opposing transgender people serving in the military and another opposing the practice of “honor killings” by Muslim fundamentalists. Comments about LGBTQ issues by conservatives seem to be a particular trigger for Twitter, even as they turn a blind eye to homophobic content from alleged comedienne Chelsea Handler and worse still from Nation of Islam founder Louis Farrakhan.

But Twitter censorship has extended to other issues, such as their initial ban on a video from Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn criticizing Planned Parenthood. As in many of these cases, Twitter ultimately reversed their censorship, but the pattern – and the extra burden carried by non-leftists on the platform – is evident.

Beyond these individual cases, there are systemic actions Twitter takes that suppress conservatives and non-left viewpoints. Twitter recently reprogrammed the platform in ways that prevented various Republican accounts from being suggested when users searched for them by name – programming that did not affect similar Democrats. The reprogramming was supposed to “reduce people’s ability to detract from healthy public conversation.”

True to form, the establishment media decided to focus on whether the practice should be termed a “shadow ban,” rather than on the practice itself. Although the initial reports focused on search results, Twitter’s own blog post on the controversy stated in part: “You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile).” That description sounds pretty close to a shadow ban.

As with the individual cases, public protest prompted Twitter to fix the supposed glitch. But the right will distrust Twitter’s explanation, given that current and former Twitter employees were caught on video admitting to the practice of shadow banning.

The behavior of top Twitter officials increases suspicion. In April, Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey and former CEO Evan Williams promoted an article he wrote with Democratic strategist Ruy texeira titled “The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War.” They argue the only way our current political polarization can end is by reducing the Republican Party to the sort of permanent minority status it currently occupies in California.

Per usual, Dorsey attempted a walkback after a wave of complaints from the right. He explained that he merely took the authors to be employing the Civil War as a metaphor, although the analysis he thought “interesting” was explicitly based on the Civil War. As an aside, conservatives routinely get torched on Twitter for writing columns using a civil war metaphor to describe our current political turmoil.

Twitter’s official explanations may be found lacking in any one of these instances. But by current standards of progressivism, they should be scrutinized even more heavily when taken together as a pattern of behavior.

Since the passage of the civil rights acts in the ’60s, progressivism has focused on the concept of systemic or institutional bias. Corporate HR departments, police departments, schools and universities, and even The New York Times rely on a flawed test of implicit or unconscious bias in attempts to address institutional bias.

Applying the concepts surrounding institutional bias, Twitter’s emerging pattern of supposed “errors” should take on a more sinister cast. For example, assume for the sake of argument the claim that Twitter was not intentionally targeting Republicans when it changed its programming. Twitter claims that the changes were meant to target behavior, rather than content.

Twitter’s concept of who is making discussion on their platform “unhealthy” was based on their concept of who behaves like a troll – and that concept somehow does not catch a Sarah Jeong who spent years on their platform spewing hatred of white people. It captures Republican members of Congress, but not their Democrat colleagues. Is that result sheer coincidence, or evidence of an implicit, subconscious bias?

If the party or ideological labels were reversed, progressives (and their ample representation in the media) would be shouting that it was the latter. Instead, there is silence. You might call it a shadow ban of their own “rules” when they are inconvenient to their political narrative.

Former Jefferson Parish reserve deputy became a Russian citizen in 2016.