Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Greetings! Welcome to an extra-late Friday LinkSwarm! I had a doctor’s appointment and have been running behind all day. This week: #BlackLivesMatter activists raking off that sweet, sweet graft, mainstream media keeps up its assault on independent thought, and a bunch of Texas news.

• Hustling the rubes for #BlackLivesMatter Dane-geld must really pay well for “trained Marxist” Patrisse Khan-Cullors, because she just bought herself a $1.4 million home in an exclusive Los Angeles neighborhood where “the vast majority of residents are white.” Evidently disdaining “whiteness” is for .
• But her buying spree didn’t end there! She bought a total of four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone.
• Cullors isn’t the only BLM biggie buying houses on the grift. The FBI arrested Toledo, Ohio #BlackLivesMatter activist Sir Maejor Page for allegedly spending “over $200,000 on personal items generated from donations received through BLMGA Facebook page with no identifiable purchase or expenditure for social or racial justice” and is facing “federal wire fraud and money laundering charges for allegedly spending the money on tailored suits, a home in Ohio, and guns.”
• Biden Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wants a global minimum corporate tax. Since other countries aren’t stupid, I doubt she’ll get it. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
• “Teachers union power, not rate of COVID transmission, determines whether schools are open for instruction.”
• After an embarrassing hidden camera footage of CNN personal admitting their liberal bias, Twitter permanently bans Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe.
• Here’s what Twitter doesn’t want you to see:
  

  "You can shape an entire people's perception about anything. . .just by forcing a story"

  James O'Keefe and Project Veritas got a CNN director admitting on camera what most people already knew…and Twitter banned him for it.

  Wake up. https://t.co/p6fjZObZFi

  — PragerU (@prageru) April 15, 2021

  
  

• And now O’Keefe is suing them for defamation.
  

  I am suing Twitter for defamation because they said I, James O’Keefe, ‘operated fake accounts.’” O’Keefe wrote in an emailed statement to The Federalist. “This is false, this is defamatory, and they will pay. Section 230 may have protected them before, but it will not protect them from me. The complaint will be filed Monday.”

  The discovery process for that is going to be lit…
  

• Speaking of Twitter being petty, they will “not allow the National Archives to make former President Donald Trump’s past tweets from his @realDonaldTrump account available on the social media platform.”
• Also, they locked the account of black journalist Jason Whitlock for daring to criticize Cullors for her house-buying spree. Presumably there’s a secret Twitter algorithm setting for “Uppity.”
  

• Speaking of censorship, the Epoch Times had to suspend printing of its Hong Kong edition after its presses were busted up. For the fourth time.
  

• “NYT Journalist Erases ENTIRE Twitter After National Pulse Unearths Posts Admitting “Working For The Chinese Communist Party.” That would be one Jonah K. Kessel.
• Why Iranians are furious at New York Times reporter Farnaz Fassihi.
  

  There are three main elements in what @nytimes reporter @farnazfassihi does which infuriates Iranian people.

  1. She consistently spreads misinformation regarding Iran. All this misinfo is in one direction: whitewashing the IR regime's actions against its people. Examples follow.

  — Guy (@ip_Guy_) April 12, 2021

  2. She has blocked almost all Iranians who may point out the falsehood of the information she spreads.
  She used to do that on any instance of noting the lies. But as I will show below, she is now using a bot to block ANY mention of her name in Persian.#NYTimesPropaganda

  — Guy (@ip_Guy_) April 12, 2021

• How Biden’s “job plan” would hurt the American economy.
• College threatens to fire professor unless he takes “mandatory diversity training.” Professor tells them to get stuffed. College blinks.
• Truth:
  

  Woke signage won’t save you from the woke mob. pic.twitter.com/lQ4Qg1f1ED

  — Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) April 13, 2021

• “Black Lives Matter, So Refund the Police“:
  

  Public officials across the country are only now discovering the foreseeable consequences of these decisions. City legislatures are realizing that in their attempt to make life better for marginalized groups, they have only contributed to the disproportionate hardships they already face. As it becomes apparent that moves to defund the police have exacerbated criminality, some local authorities are reversing cuts to police budgets passed last year amid much radical breast-beating but without much thought for who would bear the likely consequences.

  Minneapolis is the epicentre of the defund movement—the city in which George Floyd died last May as he was being taken into police custody. In spite of a spike in crime there in 2020, including a 70 percent increase in homicides, the Minneapolis City Council decided in December to redistribute $8 million from the police budget to other violence prevention services. At the time, Mayor Jacob Frey said there were “good reasons to be optimistic about the future in Minneapolis.” The move to reallocate funds away from the police department was proclaimed a “Safety for All” plan by its supporters. Unfortunately, it has made the streets of Minneapolis considerably less safe. In the first three weeks of 2021, Minneapolis saw a 250 percent increase in gunshot wound victims from the same time last year.

• Since defunding, murders are up 64% in Minneapolis.
• “Texas Supreme Court Delivers Dallas Salon Owner Shelley Luther a Delayed Victory.” “The remaining five days in jail and $7,000 fine ordered by the district court is now off the table entirely.”
• “Majority of Voters Say Preventing Fraud in Elections Is More Important Than Making Voting Easier.”
• “China Fighter Jets Will Fly Over Taiwan to Declare Sovereignty.” What could possibly go wrong?
• “Biden is making the Trump presidency seem like a golden age of unity.”
  

  Until Biden came along, every single covid-19 relief bill was approved with overwhelming bipartisan support in both houses. Congress passed three covid relief packages in March 2020 with margins of 96-1, 90-8, and 96-0 in the Senate, and with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House. This was followed in April by the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act, which passed 388-5 in the House and by unanimous consent in the Senate. Indeed, the votes were so bipartisan that Democrats blocked another covid relief package until after Election Day — because they did not want to let President Donald Trump claim credit for another bipartisan victory before voters went to the polls. But after he lost and they finally allowed another covid bill to come up for a vote in December, it passed both houses of Congress with similar margins.

  Yeah, but bipartisan doesn’t curry favor with the hard left who want massive graft payoffs and total control.

• Speaking of graft: “Nancy Pelosi’s Husband Uses Call Options To Buy Microsoft Ahead Of Big Govt Contract.”
• “Former House Speaker John Boehner Falsely Claims Ronald Reagan Was ‘Pro-Abortion.'” He was no Newt Gingrich…
• The Russian bounty story was always a complete lie. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
• Texas Republican U.S. Representative Kevin Brady announces his retirement.
• Former Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst was arrested on Class A Misdemeanor Assault Family Violence charges in Dallas after a scuffle over a laptop. “Hotel management told police officers that the woman was assaulted by Dewhurst. Officers spoke with the woman who said that Dewhurst was boarding a bus when the woman remembered that she had his laptop. It was a shared laptop that they both had access to, the affidavit said.” I wonder if the woman is the same 40-year old “live-in girlfriend” Leslie Caron who allegedly broke two of his ribs last year. Also makes you wonder: 1. Just what was on that laptop, and 2. What Dewhurst, a man with a reported net worth of over $200 million, was doing riding a bus…
• Yesterday was Everybody Blog About Rebekah Jones Day.
• Mike Rowe on why raising the minimum wage is a stupid idea:
  

  I want everybody who works hard and plays fair to prosper. I want everybody to be able to support themselves. But if you just pull the money out of midair you’re going to create other problems, like there is a ladder of success that people climb and some of those jobs that are out there for seven, eight, nine dollars an hour, in my view, they’re simply not intended to be careers.

• The problem with Austin this time of year is that the air is just filled with pollen:
  

  pic.twitter.com/3TryJu94Iz

  — Dudes Posting Their W’s (@DudespostingWs) April 15, 2021

• Spotify keeps deleting Joe Rogan podcasts.
• The line between reality and Titania McGrath grows ever thinner:
  

  Thrilled to see someone FINALLY calling out Idris Elba for not being black enough.

  Quite frankly, with all my pioneering work for social justice, I’m far blacker than Idris Elba could ever hope to be. pic.twitter.com/AvC540sq4U

  — Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) April 14, 2021

• “$251 Billion State Budget Passes Texas Senate, Stays Below Target Spending Line.”
• SB10, a taxpayer funded lobbying ban, also passed the Texas Senate.
• “Texas House Approves Constitutional Carry, Bill to Be Sent to Senate.”
• “Nigeria’s Muslim communications minister: “We are all happy whenever unbelievers are being killed.'”
• The public doesn’t want to read books by corrupt scumbag crackhead adulterous whoremongers? Do tell… (Hat tip: Mollie Hemingway.)
• Evidently the “new” case against Woody Allen is as shoddy as the old case:
  

  There is no doubt that part of the goal of Allen v. Farrow was to finish off both Allen’s career and his legacy by presenting a definitive guilty verdict in the court of public opinion. The filmmakers, aided by a mostly uncritical press, have undoubtedly won over a large segment of the public—those who come to this subject for the first time through their HBO subscriptions, or who aren’t inclined to question “survivors.” But for those of us who are familiar with the story, or who take the trouble to check it out, the effect is the opposite. If making the case against Allen requires his cultural prosecutors to weave this kind of intellectually dishonest, emotionally manipulative, selectively edited account of the underlying drama, then the case for acquittal becomes stronger, not weaker.

• Florida Man floors it.
• Murica table.
• “Minneapolis Target Holds Semi-Annual ‘Everything Is Free‘ Sale.”
• “In Fun, Innovative Science Project, Middle Schooler Makes A Battery Out Of Brian Stelter.
• Smile:
  

  As crooked as my body may be 😉

  And after all the things I've been through 🤔

  I can still strut my stuff going down the hallway 😊
  🐶pic.twitter.com/MYTri1KHZC

  — Templar⚔️ (@aTeXan575) April 15, 2021

For some reason, WordPress is now putting random gaps between bullet points in the LinkSwarm, so I’m having to tinker with the look and feel a bit. I may even have to update to a more current version…