Well, this was a bit of a surprise. Over the past couple of weeks I wrote about how Senator Josh Hawley was planning to try to hotline his terrible No Section 230 Immunity for AI Act. As we have explained multiple times, the bill is so poorly drafted that it would make a mess of the entire internet. After rumors of two attempted hotlines (effectively trying to sneak the bill through if no Senator objects) planned for last week, and then a rumor of a Tuesday night attempt, Hawley finally took to the floor Wednesday morning to make the push. If C-SPAN’s clunky embed feature works, you can watch it here:
Despite several jokes about Al Gore inventing the internet, it’s clear that the former Vice President has revealed that he knows little about how the internet works – or the First Amendment, for that matter.
Empirical data demonstrates that, although US warmongering may fatten the pockets of military contractors, the consequences for citizens around the world have been dire.
…We can expect more of this when the war against the “deep state” begins in earnest. According to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), there is a whole cabal determined to undermine American security, a “Uniparty” of elites made up of “neoconservatives on the right” and “liberal globalists on the left” who are not true Americans and therefore do not have the true interests of America at heart. Can such “anti-American” behavior be criminalized? It has in the past and can be again.
So, the Trump administration will have many avenues to persecute its enemies, real and perceived. Think of all the laws now on the books that give the federal government enormous power to surveil people for possible links to terrorism, a dangerously flexible term, not to mention all the usual opportunities to investigate people for alleged tax evasion or violation of foreign agent registration laws. The IRS under both parties has occasionally looked at depriving think tanks of their tax-exempt status because they espouse policies that align with the views of the political parties. What will happen to the think-tanker in a second Trump term who argues that the United States should ease pressure on China? Or the government official rash enough to commit such thoughts to official paper? It didn’t take more than that to ruin careers in the 1950s.
Their panic just shows how out of touch they are with the working class! As for Kagan, there’s so much more that I could say, but for now I’ll just roll my eyes! 🙄
Twelve days ago, I was asked by the Opinion section of the New York Times to write an essay on the JFK assassination nearly 60 years later. This was a major breakthrough because the newspaper of record has always embraced the official version of the assassination, even as the Warren Report, based on the “magic bullet” and all that nonsense, has grown increasingly tattered over the years. In 2015, when The Devil’s Chessboard — my book about CIA spymaster Allen Dulles and the national security state’s war with President Kennedy — was published, the Times refused to review it. (Nonetheless, the book was a New York Times bestseller.)
As many as 36 groups advocating free speech, the Free Speech Alliance, have turned to US Congress with a request to stop any further funding of NewsGuard.
NewsGuard is very neutral. Its Board of Directors is secret, but its Advisory Board includes one of the co-founders of Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales) as well as the former director of the CIA and the NSA (General Michael Hayden), the former Secretary General of NATO (Anders Fogh Rasmussen), the former Secretary for Homeland Security (Tom Ridge) or the former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy – i.e. Propaganda (Richard Stengel)
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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