Posts Tagged ‘video’

Biden Unbanking And Censoring Political Enemies?

Sunday, December 8th, 2024

The Biden Administration isn’t yet done, and still more of it’s dirty dealings are coming to light. Remember Operation Choke Point, the semi-secret program to “debank” disfavored businesses like guns and weed under the Obama administration? Well say hello to Operation Choke Point 2.0, where the disfavored people being unbanked are the Obama/Biden Machine’s political opponents.

Investor Marc Andreessen made headlines last week when he told Joe Rogan that dozens of tech founders had been quietly “debanked” under the Biden administration.

Elon Musk commented on a shorter clip and asked: “Did you know that 30 tech founders were secretly debanked?”

Andreessen called the orchestrated effort “Operation Choke Point 2.0,” in reference to an Obama-era initiative targeting the gun industry which triggered anti-boycott laws in some red states.

“Debanking is when you, as either a person or your company, are literally kicked out of the banking system,” he explained. “Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there’s now a category called a ‘politically exposed person,’ PEP. And if you are a PEP, [banks] are required by financial regulators to kick them off, to kick them out of your bank. You’re not allowed to have them.”

“Basically, it’s a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran, just kick you out of the financial system,” he said. “So this has been happening to all the crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years.”

“So when Trump says the deep state, the way we would describe it is administrative power,” Andreessen said. “It’s political power being administered, not through legislation. There’s no defined law that covers this, it’s not through regulation. There’s nothing you can do — you can’t go sue a regulator to fix this. It’s not through any kind of court judgment. It’s just raw power. It’s just raw administrative power. It’s the government or politicians just deciding that things are going to be a certain way, and then they just apply pressure until they get it.”

Sounds deeply illegal, unconstitutional, and un-American, doesn’t it?

Here’s the video:

  • One person Andreessen mentions as being debanked is David Horowitz of FrontPage and the Freedom Center.
  • “You literally can’t get a bank account. You can’t get a Visa terminal. You can’t process transactions. You can’t do payroll. You can’t do direct deposit. You can’t get insurance.”
  • “Choke Point 2.0 is primarily against their political enemies and then to their disfavored tech startups, and it’s hit the tech world hard. We’ve had like 30 founders debanked in the last four years.” But lunatic tech/crypto founders like Sam Bankman-Fried get left alone despite breaking the rules because they donate to Democrats.
  • “This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump. It’s like we just can’t live in this world. We can’t live in a world where somebody starts a company that’s a completely legal thing, and then they literally get sanctioned.”
  • Here’s more of that interview with Andreessen, in which he says that the censorship regime against the enemies of the left/deep state was “widely understood.”

  • MA: “There’s nothing that happened at Twitter in the Twitter files that wasn’t happening to the all the other companies.”
  • MA: “It’s a consistent pattern. If you got the YouTube files, they would look exactly the same.”
  • MA: “The Biden White House was directly exerting censorship pressure on American companies to censor American citizens, which I think is just flatly illegal. I think it’s actually subject to criminal charges.” That would be willful denial of rights under the color of law.
  • MA: “There were also members of Congress doing the same thing, which is also illegal.”
  • MA: “Then there was a lot of funding of outside third party groups that were that were bringing a lot of pressure down on censorship.”
  • MA: “There’s a unit at Stanford, you know, right next door. The internet censorship unit that was funded by the US government [that] exerted tremendous pressure on the companies to censor, and it was very effective.”
  • JR: “One of the things that I found really kind of shocking was when they revealed how much money the Democrats had spent on the election, and how much money was spent on activist groups. It’s like more than $100 million, right?”
  • MA: “There’s extensive Government funding of politically oriented NGOs. NGO is one of those great terms, right? Non-governmental organization, all right. Like what what the hell is that?”
  • JR: “What is that? Tell me. I don’t know.”
  • MA: “It’s sort of a charity. But most of the time it’s a political entity. It’s an entity with a political agenda, but then it’s funded by the government. In a very large percentage of cases, including the the NGOs in the censorship complex. Like the government grants, National Science Foundation grants, like direct State Department grants, right? Then its okay. Now you’ve got an NGO funded by the government. Well, that’s not an NGO, right? That’s a GO.”
  • MA: “You’ve got government officials using government money to fund what what look like private organizations that aren’t.”
  • MA: “What happens is the government outsources to these NGOs the things that it’s not legally allowed to do.”
  • JR: “Like what?”
  • MA: “Like censorship. Like violation of First Amendment rights. What they always say is the First Amendment only applies to the government. The First Amendment says the government cannot cannot censor American citizens. And so what they do is, if you want to censor American citizens, if you’re [what] you do is you fund an outside organization and then you have them do it.”
  • JR: “That’s like hiring a hitman. Like it’s not okay to murder someone, but you can hire someone to murder someone and you’re clean.”
  • MA: “When the government does that, [that’s] a very powerful message. Like it’s a message from a mob boss. ‘Don’t you want to do me a favor?’ ‘Yes, Mr. Gambino, I do right. I’d like my corner store not to catch on fire tonight.'”
  • Also this tidbit: “In her book, Melania Trump, the former first lady, claimed her bank account and that of her son Barron were shut down in the wake of the Jan 6 riots. ‘This decision appeared to be rooted in political discrimination,’ she wrote.” Ya think?

    If Democrats didn’t hesitate to go after a First Lady and her son, they certainly wouldn’t hesitate to come after me or you…

    Is Damascus Falling? Update: Yep.

    Saturday, December 7th, 2024

    While we were looking at the rebel advance on Homs, another rebel force seems to have boiled up to successfully invest Damascus from the south.

    Syrian rebel groups reported gains in the country’s south on Saturday, capturing swaths of territory including Daraa, the city known as the birthplace of the country’s 2011 uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, and closing in on the capital, Damascus.

    Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the armed Islamist faction that made stunning gains in the north over the past week, said its forces had begun encircling Damascus after sweeping advances by other rebel groups to the south. The group said that its forces had also carried out an operation Saturday within Homs, a strategic choke point between rebel-controlled areas in the north and the capital.

    As its grip on the south crumbled, the Syrian cabinet held an emergency meeting to address the attacks by “armed terrorist gangs” on “a number of cities and regions.” The Syrian military denied that it had withdrawn from areas of the Damascus countryside but said that its forces in the southwestern cities of Daraa and Sweida had “redeployed” to new positions after rebel fighters had “attacked the army’s checkpoints and military points.”

    The Southern Operations Room, a newly announced rebel faction in the south, announced its control of the province of Daraa and vowed to “continue until the liberation of Damascus.” Videos posted online and verified by the Agence France-Presse news agency showed a statue of former president Hafez al-Assad being toppled in the city. The Syrian state news agency SANA said that “the sounds heard in some areas of the southern Damascus countryside are of long-range targeting and shooting at terrorist gatherings in Daraa.”

    The faction also said Saturday it had taken control of Quneitra, near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in southwestern Syria. The claim could not immediately be independently confirmed. The Southern Operations Room added that its forces were working to “complete the siege of the capital.”

    Sweida, a city in southwestern Syria inhabited by members of the Druze religious minority, was under the control of Druze factions on Saturday morning after the army withdrew, said a 29-year-old local activist who spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons. The relationship of the southern rebels with HTS remains unclear, but their advance has activated and invigorated local opposition groups.

    HTS said Saturday that its forces had captured the city of al-Sanamayn, north of Daraa, and were about 12 miles away from the “southern gate” of the Damascus. The group’s forces have also been closing in on Homs. The Syrian military said forces around Homs and rebel-held Hama have been “carrying out intensive artillery and missile fire on terrorist locations and supply lines, achieving direct hits.”

    Here’s a snapshot of the overall military situation, with red for Assad-controlled territory and green for that of the rebels:

    And here’s a closer view of the Damascus area:

    There’s report after report on Liveumap of Assad forces abandoning various posts throughout the city.

    With rebels already in the south of the Damascus and another rebel group coming in from the west, the situation looks pretty dire for Assad.

    Here’s a SkyNews video of rebels in the Damascus suburbs toppling a state of Bashar Assad’s father, Hafez Assad:

    Notice that many participating in the toppling just seem to be ordinary Syrians, and not members of rebel groups.

    It looks like Israel’s decapitation of Hezbollah weakened Bashar Assad even more than previously suspected, and Iran’s overreach in supporting so many regional jihadest groups at the same time has left them so dangerously overextended that they will not be able to save their most important regional ally from falling.

    This is a fast-moving breaking story, but I’d say there’s a 90+% chance that Assad’s goose is cooked.

    Update: Unconfirmed reports that Assad has fled Syria in his private plane and flown to Abu Dhabi. Update 2: Maybe not? “Axios: Israeli security sources report that their intelligence suggests Assad remains in Damascus.”

    Update 3: Rebels appear to have taken Homs.

    Update 4: Less than a day, and the map has already drastically changed:

    Update 5: Israel reportedly hits a Hezbollah column reportedly trying to bugger back to Lebanon.

    Update 6: Reuters says that Assad has left Syria.

    Update 7: There’s some evidence that Assad’s plane may have been shot down.

    Update 8: It appears that Assad has now arrive in Moscow, and that Russia has granted he and his family asylum.

    Syria’s Civil War Unfreezes

    Monday, December 2nd, 2024

    And the latest long-simmering hotspot to flare up overnight is (spins wheel) SYRIA!

    Who had their chips on Syria?

    The Syria civil war has more or less been frozen for the last, what, two years? That’s not the case anymore, as the anti-Assad forces just launched as massive attack that has Assad’s forces on their heels.

    All those green flags are anti-Assad attacks. More from JihadWatch.

    Syrian Islamist rebels appear to have made stunning territorial advances against the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad on Friday, re-entering the city of Aleppo for the first time in eight years amid the apparent collapse of government defenses in the area.

    Unconfirmed videos on social media suggest that rebel fighters from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other groups captured parts of western Aleppo, which was Syria’s most populous city prior to the country’s ongoing civil war, which broke out in 2011.

    Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) emerged as an al-Qaeda splinter faction, although it now rejects affiliation with the terror group. The United States designated HTS as a foreign terrorist organization in 2018.

    The offensive marks the rebels’ most significant advance, following years of stalemate in northwest Syria, with Turkish-backed rebels and HTS holding a narrow strip of territory around the provinces of Idlib and Afrin.

    Turkey and Russia signed a ceasefire in 2020 after agreeing to turn Idlib into a “de-escalation zone” in 2018.

    There are supposedly some pro-Assad holdouts in Aleppo.

    The interesting thing about Syria is a that it’s a back-burner conflict that ties into all the other conflicts in the region. Iran backs Syria, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah, against Egypt. Syria also backs Hezbollah, both against Israel and to maintain a level of control over neighboring Lebanon. Turkey backs some of the jihadist forces fighting against Syria, while others are backed by, I don’t know, pick a random Sunni dynastic petrostate and you’ve probably got fair odds of being right. Russia also backs Syria, and is also its number one arms supplier.

    And what do Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Russia all have in common? They’ve all been getting heir asses kicked in regional conflicts, either by Israel or by Ukraine, both of which are backed by the United States.

    Now must have seemed like the right time to settle Assad’s hash, with his catspaw Hezbollah absolutely wrecked by Israel and Russia too busy with their own conflict(s) to offer much if anything in the way of aid.

    Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) split off from al Qaeda and has evidently ruthless destroyed any al Qaeda fighters it can find, so…yay? They’re still jihadist scumbags, and have split/merged/changed acronyms five or six times since I last looked at the Syrian Civil War.

    A Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-led Syria would probably be just as hostile to Israel…but not aligned with Iran.

    Half a yay?

    Russia responded to the collapse of Assad forces in Aleppo by…buggering out of Hama.

    Is the Assad regime about to fall? Maybe, as military collapse can become contagious, but Aleppo is a long way from Damascus. Remember, the Islamic State was racking up victory after victory right up until it wasn’t.

    I imagine Assad’s forces will be able to hold the capital, where resistance will stiffen up. Even before then, Homs probably won’t be a cake-walk either, but there’s also speculation that anti-Assad forces will try to take various Syrian post cities, which would put considerable economic pressure on Assad.

    Assad looks to be in deep trouble, but he’s slithered out of sticky predicaments before. Odds are he’ll survive this time as well, though no doubt seriously weakened.

    Ryan Long On “Activists”

    Sunday, December 1st, 2024

    “Lazy Thanksgiving Weekend Video Blogging” continues here at BattleSwarm, with a random Ryan Long comedy bit on activists.

    “I feel like vegans are the most hated activist group vegans get so much shit. People will be like ‘FUck you. You’re like that pedophile. They’re like ‘behind him there’s a vegan!'”

    Plus a bit on cryptocurrency.

    USA vs. Russia: Who Wins?

    Saturday, November 30th, 2024

    A certain commenter on a certain thread asserted that the Russo-Ukrainian War continued because “Putin determined that he could thoroughly degrade the military power of the United States.”

    Yeah. No.

    Rather than a detailed, point-by-point refutation, I’m going to let Habitual Linecrosser do they heavy lifting on this one.

    Plus Thanksgiving weekend is seriously impacting my blogging bandwidth, so it’s going to be a few days before you get any sort of LinkSwarm…

    A Babylon Bee Thanksgiving

    Thursday, November 28th, 2024

    Happy Thanksgiving! A hope all of you have a great day eating too much food with your family and love ones!

    For those left-wing sorts, the Babylon Bee provides a handy guide (in their usual helpful way) for “How to Talk to Your Racist MAGA Uncle This Thanksgiving.”

  • “I’m a good, tolerant person and they’re all terrible, intolerant people. And how can I find common ground with these rednecks who are literally Hitler?”
  • “First, try slowly and articulately explaining to him how he is a racist, a bigot, a Nazi, and just an overall garbage person.”
  • “Sometimes your family might disagree with you and attempt to use far right tactics such as facts and logic.” So obviously you should run away and hide in your safe space…
  • Enjoy!

    Walmart Abandons Wokeness

    Wednesday, November 27th, 2024

    It’s pretty big news when the largest retailer in America abandons wokeness.

    Anti-woke crusader Robby Starbuck has been on a mission to shift the corporate landscape in America from insanity and rainbows to what he considers “sanity and neutrality.” He has successfully pressured companies such as Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Polaris, Indian Motorcycle, Lowe’s, Ford, Coors, Stanley Black & Decker, Jack Daniel’s, DeWalt Tools, Craftsman, Caterpillar, Boeing, and Toyota to move away from toxic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices.

    Now, Starbuck is at it again. He wrote on X that America’s largest employer, Walmart, has decided to end its woke policies after he “had productive conversations to find solutions” with management.

    He stated that the changes Walmart committed to “will send shockwaves throughout corporate America,” adding that their executives deserve “major credit” for wanting to end corporate wokeness.

    “This is the biggest win yet for our movement to end wokeness in corporate America,” Starbuck said.

    Here are the changes Walmart committed to:

  • Surveys: Walmart will no longer participate in the HRC’s woke Corporate Equality Index.
  • Products: Monitor the Walmart marketplace to identify and remove inappropriate sexual and / or transgender products marketed to children.
  • Funding of Grants: Review all funding of Pride, and other events, to avoid funding inappropriate sexualized content targeting kids.
  • Equity: We will not extend the Racial Equity Center which was established in 2020 as a special five-year initiative.
  • Supplier Diversity: We will evaluate supplier diversity programs and ensure they do not provide preferential treatment and benefits to suppliers based on diversity. We don’t have quotas and won’t going forward. Financing eligibility will no longer be predicated on providing certain demographic data.
  • LatinX: Walmart will no longer use the term in official communications.
  • Trainings: Walmart will discontinue racial equity training through the Racial Equity Institute.
  • DEI: Walmart will discontinue the use of DEI as a term while ensuring a respectful and supportive environment. Our focus is on Belonging for ALL associates and customers.
  • Starbuck continued:

    Remember, Walmart is the #1 employer in America with over 1.6 Million Employees and they have a market cap of nearly $800B. This won’t just have a massive effect for their employees who will have a neutral workplace without feeling that divisive issues are being injected but it will also extend to their many suppliers.

    We’ve now changed policy at companies worth over $2 Trillion dollars, with many millions of employees who have better workplace environments as a result. I’m happy to have secured these changes before Christmas when shoppers have very few large retail brands they can spend money with who aren’t pushing woke policies. Companies like Amazon and Target should be very nervous that their top competitor dropped woke policies first. I think Target specifically will suffer serious sales problems as a result and Walmart will benefit.

    Our campaigns are now so effective that we’re getting the biggest companies on earth to change their policies without me even posting a story outlining their woke policies. Companies can clearly see that America wants normalcy back. The era of wokeness is dying right in front of our eyes. The landscape of corporate America is quickly shifting to sanity and neutrality. We are now the trend, not the anomaly.

    We are winning and one by one we WILL bring sanity back to corporate America.

    Kevin O’Leary on Fox Business had some choice things to say:

  • “Target is a great example. When they got into the gender identity stuff, they got slaughtered.”
  • “You’ve got to start punishing stupidity at the management level.”
  • They now teach Bud Light in schools as a cautionary example of what not to do.
  • Indeed, O’Leary called the Bud Light debacle “a complete combination of idiot management and the inability to read the room.”

    This particular turn of phrase stuck out to me, because I remember, very clearly, that the phrase “read the room” was used like a club  to justify whatever woke idiocy was coming down the pike at the time: Football players kneeling, defunding the police, treating #BlackLivesMatter riots as justification to break Flu Manchu quarantine, etc. It was a lie based on systemic preference falsification then, but more than true now, as America as a whole is done with wokeness.

    Walmart is a big, big domino, and expect most of American companies looking to toss all their woke idiocy on the dunghill of history, no matter how much their HR department might object.

    Pink slip by pink slip, progress is made.

    Babylon Bee On Democrats Rethinking Their Approach

    Tuesday, November 26th, 2024

    The Babylon Bee just dropped a video on Democrats “rethinking” their approach.

  • “The election did not go as we planned it.” “Only because the voters are racist, misogynist garbage.”
  • “I don’t understand. We all said that if Trump won, it’d be the end of democracy, and that there would never be another election.”
  • “So one group that we have to get better with is Latinx men. Okay. They don’t like us and they don’t like being called Latinx men.” “Stupid idiots.”
  • “We cannot just start calling them Latino and Latina. That would be buying into the patriarchal gender binary.”
  • “So is there another letter that we can tack on to Latin?”
  • “Latine. But we but we actually pronounce it Latiné. Like, with one of those Mexican line thingies on the top. Yeah, it’s not as cumbersome as Latinx, but it’s still forced and pretentious enough to make it clear that we’re better than anyone else that doesn’t say it this way.”
  • “A lot of people are frustrated with the performative announcement of pronouns, the drag queen story hours, the chopping off of children’s body parts.” “Stupid idiots.”
  • “You know, when people don’t agree with us we usually just yell at them. ‘You’re transphobic!’ Well, what if instead of that, we yell it even louder!”
  • “I’d rather lose being right, comforted by the knowledgethat everyone else is garbage, than win being wrong. I’d rather get the approval of Rachel Maddow, the ladies of The View, and those kids out there calling for the murder of the Jews than pander to a bunch of lousy racists for a couple of votes.”
  • ShoeOnHead Rips The Dems

    Monday, November 25th, 2024

    Back before I was suspended on Twitter (I’m still suspended, since the Twitter/X appeals process is broken), I followed ShoeOnHead, who frequently had sane things to say about the lunacy of the left. I think she blocked me because I noted she was wrong about transexism, but this nice rant showed up in my feed recently.

  • “New York was closer to flipping red than Florida was to flipping blue.”
  • Where she’s coming from: “I voted for Bernie in the primaries in 2016 and I watched as the Democratic party did everything in their power to destroy this man. Twice. So it is safe to say I am a little biased when it comes to the Democratic Party.”
  • “You idiots! You morons. You imbeciles! Kamala Harris? Really? That’s who you threw up there? The one who dropped out before Iowa? The one who got blown the out by Tulsi Gabbard. Why didn’t you hold a primary? Aren’t you the saviors of democracy?
  • “Oh, big congratulations to Tim Walz on being the first white male DEI hire. It didn’t work. The DNC completely neutered that guy, reduced him to this weird token white man. “Hello, fellow men. I do play football.”
  • A nice slam on the Liz Cheney/#NeverTrumper idiocy.
  • A discussion of how young came out in force to vote for Trump…and of feminists openly wishing for them all to die.
  • “‘We need a liberal Joe Rogan!’ You had a liberal Joe Rogan! His name was Joe Rogan!” Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson (among others) have made this point as well.
  • “Democrats can’t have a Joe Rogan, because everything that makes Joe Rogan Joe Rogan is not allowed on the left.”
  • Plus a discussion of populism.
  • I’d advise watching the whole thing. You probably won’t agree with everything, but you might with a good 80-85% of it…

    Jaguar Stepped In It. How They Can Step Out Of It.

    Saturday, November 23rd, 2024

    Everyone and their dog has been commenting on Jaguar’s outbreak of woke idiocy.

    Initial reaction:

    Not only is it woke gender bending nonsense, its sins are compounded by the meaningless platitudinous nature of the generically rebellious message, a sad technicolor echo of Apple’s “Think Different” campaign more than a quarter-century after the original.

    I wasn’t going to comment on this, because I didn’t think I had a new angle on it. Then I realized I did!

    Ever see the 1990 Dudley Moore movie Crazy People? There’s no reason you should, as it’s not particularly good. In it, an ad executive snaps and starts producing ads that tell the truth. Including this gem:

    “Jaguar: For men who like handjobs from beautiful women they hardly know.”

    The thing is, if they had actually run that ad rather than the Colorform Gender Bending Extravaganza, they would have done less damage to their brand. Feminists would scream at it, but it wouldn’t offend its core male car-buying target demographic, who would just laugh at it.

    Because I’m a problem solver, I’m going to tell Jaguar (or, more accurately, Tata Jaguar Land Rover, as they’re now part of an Indian automotive conglomerate) how to fix their problem overnight with a new ad.

    Step One: Fire Jaguar Managing Director Rawdon Glover, the man who just tried to Bud Light your brand.

    Step Two: Pay Richard Hammond $1 million. You want Hammond because he’s a famous, well-liked car personality who happens to own a superb classic Jag:

    Step Three: Have Hammond cut a one minute ad. At the beginning he says “I love old Jags” and then natters on for 25 seconds about what he loves about his restored Jaguar XK150. Then he says “I love new Jags,” and natters on for 25 seconds about the latest F-Type or whatever sports car you’ve given him along with the $1 million. Then at the end he says “I love Jags. There’s nothing wrong with loving something that’s beautiful.”

    That’s it. That’s the message. Do that and people will stop talking about your idiot social justice stunt and you can get back to selling sports cars to slightly cadish, slightly affluent men who can’t afford a Ferrari or Lamborghini.