Least Surprising “News” of the Day

Mitt Romney would be “happy” voting for a Democrat for President instead of Trump or Vivek Ramaswamy, who also wants to put America’s interests first.

https://www.westernjournal.com/video-mitt-romney-finally-admits-real-allegiance-whole-time/

Something to consider

Interesting story about movie actress Natalie Portman, who first came to fame at age 12 in the movie, “Leon: The Professional.”

https://nypost.com/2023/11/25/entertainment/natalie-portman-says-children-should-not-be-working-in-hollywood-after-she-was-sexualized-in-first-movie-at-age-12/

Now a mother of two, her advice to parents whose kids want to work in Hollywood is DON’T. Portman said she was talked about in sexual terms when she was still a young teen; it made her feel afraid and disrespected; and “it was almost an accident of luck that I was not harmed, also combined with very overprotective, wonderful parents.” She said it’s fine if you want to be in movies as an adult, but “I think kids should play and go to school.”

Yet another thing to think about the next time a Hollywood liberal gives Americans a moral lecture on how we’re not raising our kids right and should have more sexually-explicit books in elementary schools.

Israeli company office vandalized in New Hampshire by Hollywood actress and friends

You probably haven’t heard of actress Bridget Shergalis. She was on the Disney Channel sketch series “So Random!” in 2011 and on several TV shows, including appropriately enough, “Criminal Minds.” But this might get her some publicity: she and two other “activists” from the group Palestine Action US (which claims it’s devoted to “dismantling the Zionist war machine”) were arrested in New Hampshire for allegedly vandalizing the office of Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems. They threw red paint on the building and wrote pro-Palestian slogans on it, took over the roof and lit flares, and shut down their business for a day.

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/11/25/disney-channel-actress-bridget-shergalis-arrested-for-vandalizing-israeli-companys-offices/

The group melodramatically tweeted that their “3 comrades have been handed a slew of trumped-up charges, & are being held on preventative detention without bail or a hearing. Even with the phony charges, there is no precedent for this in the ‘Free State of New Hampshire.’  This is political targeting…They should not be locked up for this; they should be celebrated.”

Celebrated for vandalizing and shutting down a business that’s owned by Jews because it manufactures jet vision technology that enables Jews to target terrorists who kill Jews? I wonder if they might have some ulterior motive? And yes, there's actually precedent for arresting people for committing crimes, as out of style as it is in blue cities.

In fact, despite their very real crimes, they were quickly released on bail (proving they aren’t Republicans.) And Ms Shergalis might get more gigs in Hollywood, now that she’s proven she’s got the same attitude toward Israel as some of our leftist celebrities.

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/11/27/model-gigi-hadid-blasted-for-latest-israel-conspiracy-theory-vile-antisemitic-blood-libel/

Disney update

Speaking of Disney, the once-king-of-family-entertainment continued its losing streak as its latest animated film “Wish” tanked at the box office. “Wish” was touted as a return to Disney’s non-political fairy tale movies, but families have apparently lost their trust in the brand. “Wish” was expected to top the box office, but it came in third, making just $31.7 million over the five-day Thanksgiving weekend and just $17.3 million internationally, only slightly better than last Thanksgiving’s woke Disney turkey, “Strange World.”

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/11/26/disneys-wish-was-expected-to-debut-at-1-but-loses-to-hunger-games-napoleon-at-box-office/

Well, they say the first step to making change is recognizing that there’s a problem, and maybe after all the billions in losses, the cratering stock price, the alienation of its customer base, the threat of a hostile takeover and the well-deserved mocking by "South Park," Disney is finally ready to admit that trying to turn innocent kids’ entertainment into a leftist propaganda delivery medium was not a good idea.

Last week, Disney filed its annual financial report with the SEC, and they actually admitted, "We face risks relating to misalignment with public and consumer tastes and preferences for entertainment, travel and consumer products,” and "Our businesses create entertainment, travel and consumer products whose success depends substantially on consumer tastes and preferences that change in often unpredictable ways." They reiterated their dedication to “diversity” and inclusion in their workplace, but confessed that their environmental and social goals present "risks." And in an epic bit of excuse-making, they said their products are sometimes "introduced into a significantly different market or economic or social climate from the one we anticipated at the time of the investment decisions."

https://www.theblaze.com/news/walt-disney-company-wokeness-culture-wars

Like a blindfolded bumblebee, they’re buzzing around the target but can’t quite find it. So I’ll help them by giving them a basic primer in how not to go out of business.

First of all, you claim to know that your business is to “create entertainment, travel and consumer products whose success depends substantially on consumer tastes.” Yet you admit you’re filling these products with environmental and social messages that risk angering and repulsing those very consumers. That’s pretty Goofy. Your goal is to make money for your stockholders by entertaining your customers, not to lecture them on social issues.

There’s also nothing wrong with having a diverse workforce. But your employees don't seem to grasp that their job is to create consumer-pleasing entertainment products, not shove their personal political agendas down people’s throats, like their "no-so-secret gay agenda."

Finally, consumer tastes haven’t changed in unpredictable ways. People loved classic Disney family movies 50 years ago, and they still love those movies. They just hate the groomer garbage you’re pumping out now. I could’ve predicted that before you ever greenlit any of this hooey.

In fact, if you really want to stop losing billions by trashing Disney’s reputation with leftist propaganda, get rid of CEO Bob Iger and offer me the job. I could turn around that Mickey Mouse outfit in two weeks.

Public trust in elections continues to fall

If you don’t believe that the 2020 election was the most honest, scrupulous, unquestionably accurate election in history, then you’d better not say so or you’ll be silenced, slandered, demonetized and possibly prosecuted for a RICO violation. Ironically, the more some people keep insisting that there’s no such thing as voter fraud, the more the level of public trust in elections has fallen.

So if the people who want us to trust our elections are ever going to accomplish that goal, they need to come up with better responses to stories like these than “Shut up or else!”

https://www.westernjournal.com/key-swing-county-sounding-alarm-bells-voting-machines-ahead-2024-election/

https://joehoft.com/breaking-exclusive-the-errors-the-lie-and-the-cover-up-in-georgias-2020-election-part-i/

https://www.westernjournal.com/gop-candidates-loss-1-vote-prompts-calls-whole-new-election-issue-shady-count-raised/

And people who care about our elections actually being trustworthy, rather than just stumping for blind trust, need to get more adamant about cleaning up the voting process to ensure not only that there’s no provable cheating but that there's no opportunity for cheating.

Headed into Election Year ‘24, it’s all about message control by the left

It’s no longer a secret that the U.S. government has collaborated with private entities such as social media companies to control what it labels “mis-, dis-, and mal-information.”  (In fact, those very words should tip you off that not only opinions but facts are being suppressed.)  And the Supreme Court has already held that this strategy for censorship is unconstitutional.  But what might not be sufficiently recognized is that the left is so wedded to this strategy that it has chosen to double-down as we head into the election year of 2024.  That’s right: even exposure by the “Twitter Files” and the lawsuit Missouri v. Biden didn’t make a dent in their effort.  The left is just getting warmed up, and as far as they’re concerned, if they have to shred the Constitution to silence opposing viewpoints ahead of what might be the most consequential election in our lifetimes, so be it.  Everything is on the line.

That document is just an inconvenience for them, anyway.

The subject came up around here a couple of days ago when a reader sent a link to an article on an unrelated topic that happened to have been written by one of the creators of “The Democracy Toolkit.”  We’ve written about the “Toolkit” before, in the context of how well-organized the left is, particularly when it comes to shaping the so-called narrative (also raising money, but that’s a topic for another day).  The Democracy Toolkit was created as a resource for journalists --- or, might we say, “journalists,” with quotation marks, as it works overtime to blur the line between actual journalism and advocacy “journalism.”  There is hardly any actual journalism left today, and that’s the way the Democracy Toolkit likes it.

I say this as someone who presents opinion but who never professes to be doing otherwise.  The problem we have today is that factual stories --- the ones that neutrally offer both sides --- are practically extinct, and they’re mixed up indiscriminately with opinion pieces, often all on the front page.  Sometimes the very people yelling the loudest about “FACTS!!!” are the ones guilty of misrepresenting the truth or leaving out the most pertinent facts.  (Case in point:  Alexandra Pelosi, from yesterday’s newsletter story about second-generation propagandists.)  We try even with “opinion” pieces to include the important facts that they leave out.

The Democracy Toolkit isn’t training people to be journalists.  It’s training them to be advocates for the Democrat Party.  Here’s their homepage…

https://democracytoolkit.press

Of course, these groups profess to be “non-partisan,” which is a real hoot when you look at their affiliations.  The Democracy Toolkit is affiliated with the Center for Journalism and Democracy…

https://cfjd.howard.edu

...and Election SOS, which is “supporting journalists in responding to critical election information needs”…

https://electionsos.com

Scroll down the Election SOS homepage, and in the lower right you’ll find a video called “Reaching Republicans.”  It features experts in such fields as psychometrics who break down the spectrum of those on the right --- yes, there’s even a handy visual aid --- the better to communicate with you, their implied intellectual inferiors.  They’ll even listen to you, but it’s just to see how they can position you on their spectrum and perhaps be more persuasive.  It’s not as if you might have something of value to impart to THEM.

If you’ve wondered why so many newsrooms come out with the same takes on stories, and why they leave out the same information, and why they so very often lean left, organizations such as these probably have a lot to do with that.  I’d encourage you to check out more of the videos and see what those on the left are doing to make sure it’s their narrative that prevails in newsrooms, such as concerns about “new restrictive voting laws.”  (We assume any law that makes it harder to cheat, such as requiring signature matching or regulating vote harvesting, is considered restrictive.)

Legal analyst Margot Cleveland at THE FEDERALIST has been keeping up with the left’s efforts to unconstitutionally censor speech, and her latest column is about for-profit “censorship giant” (her description) NewsGuard, which has received a grant for $750,000 in taxpayer funding.  You might have seen that name in the news lately because of their effort to take down Elon Musk’s “X” platform, but Cleveland believes that government funding of the censorship-industrial complex --- with NewsGuard as a prime example --- is the bigger story.

NewsGuard was already developing what it calls the Misinformation Fingerprints tool, to detect “state-sponsored disinformation campaigns” (editorial aside:  like Hunter Biden’s laptop?)  In September 2021, they were awarded $750,000 from the Department of Defense (!!!) under the Small Business Innovation and Research program for further development and testing.  

Already, Misinformation Fingerprints has been used by a new platform popular with Gen X-ers called the Ethos Network, which has integrated their “debunks” into their user interface.  NewsGuard brags that its technology enables users to “verify the content of their posts before publishing them.”

Are you getting the picture?

As Cleveland writes, “NewsGuard currently markets its Misinformation Fingerprints technology to a variety of entities, including tech giants and organizations with AI and social-listening tools. That technology, NewsGuard promises, allows false claims to be intercepted, while facilitating the sharing of accurate information.”

I can hardly find the words to tell you how dangerous this is.  Whoever controls it, controls what is considered “verified” information.  You and I are helping develop it with our tax dollars, just so it can turn around and control what information gets to us.  Given the state of the technology now, if we don’t win the next election and completely dismantle this, we’ll almost certainly be at the mercy of the information gatekeepers forevermore.

As Cleveland reports, “...because NewsGuard worked with the Department of Defense, ‘to test the effectiveness of the Fingerprints in detecting state-sponsored disinformation campaigns,’ it seems likely the government had some input in determining what qualified as ‘disinformation.’”

NewsGuard has started calling this $750,000 grant a “licensing fee.”  But it makes no difference.  Our government is financing the development of censorship technology that can and will be used to silence American speech.

According to Cleveland, NewsGuard is just one example, “with the federal government awarding more than 500 contracts or grants related to so-called mis- or dis-information since 2020.”  Yes, that’s shocking, and it doesn’t even count the “collusion” the government was already doing with social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.  The people involved, both inside and outside of the administration, are technological Winston Smiths who know, deep down, that if people were permitted to know the truth, they’d have every reason to move right.

As Cleveland says, it’s not enough to fight NewGuard’s attack on free speech.  The left will not stop.  If we don’t stop the federal government from their compulsion to “verify” information, our freedom of speech will be only a memory.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/27/newsguard-is-selling-its-government-funded-censorship-tool-to-private-companies/

NOTE:  Cleveland also refers to NewsGuard’s attempt to “destroy the financial survival of disfavored outlets…”  Ah, that would be this newsletter!  As you know, the Huckabee Post has been singled out in reports to advertisers as purveyors of “flagged” information, though we are an opinion site and have made no statement that is factually incorrect.  We simply disagree.  But we dare to tell you what the left doesn’t want you to know.

That’s why part of the left’s political strategy is to put conservative outlets like this one out of business.  It’s why I continue to ask those who read the advertiser-supported version of my newsletter to please help us stay independent --- support us by subscribing to our Substack edition:

 (4) Subscribe to The Morning Edition (substack.com)