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Jeffrey Wright Says Studio Hired a Replacement Actor to Dub Him After He Refused to Censor the N-Word in a Film: Nah. Thats Not Happening – Variety

Posted: January 5, 2024 at 6:35 pm

Jeffrey Wright Says Studio Hired a Replacement Actor to Dub Him After He Refused to Censor the N-Word in a Film: Nah. Thats Not Happening  Variety

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Jeffrey Wright Says Studio Hired a Replacement Actor to Dub Him After He Refused to Censor the N-Word in a Film: Nah. Thats Not Happening - Variety

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Comedian and musician Tom Smothers dies at 86: A victim of government and corporate censorship in the late 1960s – WSWS

Posted: at 6:35 pm

Tom Smothers died last week, on the day after Christmas. The comedian and folk musician was 86. He died of causes related to cancer. Smothers and his brother Dick performed as a duo for some 60 years. Their act ostensibly centered on performing folk songs, but they developed ahumorous patterrooted in sibling rivalry early on in their joint career, which established them as acomedy act.

In the late 1960s, Tom Smothers demonstrated an anti-establishment streak, in relation not only to the Vietnam War but other social issues, which led CBS executives, in April 1969, to cancelThe Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a popular and influential prime-time weekly program, at the end of its third season. Although they eventually prevailed in a lawsuit against the television network, the brothers never regained their position in the national limelight. They demonstrated principle and paid the economic and career price.

In light of the various efforts at present to suppress widespread opposition to the policies of both parties, and in particular protests against the homicidal Israeli onslaught in Gaza, funded and fully endorsed by the White House, it is worth recalling that a willingness to launch fierce attacks on freedom of speech and democratic rights runs freely in the veins of the American ruling elite. The threat that a message of resistance to official policy will reach broad layers of the population has always especially terrified the powers that be in the US. At various points in the 20thcentury, and now in the 21st, the government, in close alliance with big business, has launched vicious campaigns against performers and other figures who defy what is proclaimed to be the national consensus.

Tom (born 1937) and Dick Smothers (born 1938) at first glance would seem to have been unlikely candidates for political iconoclasm.

Their father, a career soldier, was killed in the last days of World War II, while a prisoner of war of the Japanese, apparently by friendly fire. His POW ship was mistakenly bombed by Allied pilots en route from the Philippines to Korea. Their mother, according to author David Bianculli, inDangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,was in and out of rehab and state hospitals, leaving her children with others as she tried, with little success, to conquer her alcoholism. The family (including a sister) lived in southern California.

The brothers began performing together as a duo in 1960. Their influences were Burl Ives, the Kingston Trio, the Limeliters and other relatively innocuous acts. They intended to be straightforward folk singers, but feared they lacked the necessary musical skills. What eventually made them different was Toms nervous, obviously fictitious introductions to various songs, his generally mischievous or sometimes frightened demeanor, and the conflicts that inevitably arose between the brothers. They discovered an ability to improvise, and the naturalness of the comic friction between them rapidly attracted audiences.

Repeated appearances onThe Jack Paar Show(officiallyThe Tonight Show), starting in January 1961, made them nationally prominent figures. ANew York Timesreview in 1961 observed that Toms foolery reflects the speech pattern of a frightened tenth-grader giving a memorized talk at a Kiwanis meeting, while Dicks cherubic look suggests that he may have just won a Boy Scout merit badge for bass-playing.

The brothers were featured in a situation comedy,The Smothers Brothers Show, which lasted only one season, 1965-66, on CBS. Tom fought with executives of the production company.

He was determined to wield more creative control in the brothers next television venture, a variety series,The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which was aired on Sunday nights at 9:00 p.m. starting in February 1967, against one of the most popular programs on network television, the long-running Western,Bonanza.

The shows 71 episodes appeared in the midst of highly explosive political and social events, including major inner-city riots; the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy; the eruption of mass protests against the Vietnam War and the various bloody battles and campaigns of that conflict, including the Tet Offensive; the decision by Lyndon B. Johnson not to run again for the presidency; the brutal police attacks on protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention; and many others. Globally, of course, this was a period of upheaval with revolutionary implications, in Western Europe, Latin America and elsewhere.

To their credit, the Smothers Brothers, unlike most of the television personalities of the time, had the audacity to bring many of these events, and individuals with something to say about them, onto their program.

A number of controversial decisions led to a state of almost continuous warfare with CBS executives. One of the most memorable was the decision to invite veteran left-wing folk singer Pete Seeger to perform during the second season of theComedy Hour. Seeger had been blacklisted on prime time US television for 17 years after being listed inRed Channels, which identified individuals and organizations it claimed had affiliations with, or sympathy for, the Communist Party. This publication (byCounterattackmagazine, the newsletter of facts to combat Communism, started by three former FBI agents) fed the communist witch hunts and gave ammunition to Republican senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin (Dangerously Funny).

Not only was Seeger scheduled to appear, but he planned to sing his new composition, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, a song, although set in World War II, that was an obvious reference to the ongoing Vietnam War and the role of Lyndon Johnson in prosecuting it. As David Bianculli explains, The sixth and final stanza was the one that made CBS brass the most apoplectic. Every time I read the papers, Seeger sang, that old feeling comes onwere waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on. Seeger was singing this five weeks after Johnson had committed more troops to Vietnam, and CBS found it unacceptable. CBS excised the song from the show, on a night when more than one in five US households tuned in to see Seeger sing.

Five months later, in February 1968, Seeger returned to the program, sang Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, and CBS raised no objections. As Bianculli notes, Tom Smothers had kept up a steady campaign against the act of censorship, but attitudes toward the Vietnam War, including attitudes within sections of the media and political establishment, had shifted. Also on CBS, only two days after Seegers second appearance, longtime news anchor Walter Cronkite appeared in a special and argued that it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate and that more troops would not affect the probable outcome.

The Smothers Brothers also aroused the ire of CBS by opening their third season, in September 1968, with an appearance by Harry Belafonte, another veteran radical performer, with his own history of association with the Communist Party, or its artistic periphery. In one of his segments on the program, Belafonte sang a calypso medley built around Dont Stop the Carnival, written originally about the frenzied madness of a Mardi Gras celebration, but with new lyrics added to refer to the Democratic National Convention [one month earlier]as footage from the convention, and of police dragging and arresting protesters outside the hall, is projected behind him. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was clearly shown in clips that were, to put it lightly, not at all flattering (Dangerously Funny).

CBS officials on both the West and East Coast were adamant in their refusal to broadcast the number. A bitter conflict between Tom Smothers and the CBS hierarchy erupted. The season premiere was broadcast without the Belafonte Carnival sequence. Adding insult to injury, CBS sold some five minutes of the space created by their censorship to the Republican Party as a campaign spot for presidential candidate Richard Nixon.

Conflicts between the brothers, Tom in particular, and CBS raged throughout the third and final season. Continued and sustained criticism of the Vietnam quagmire, mockery of religion (featuring comic David Steinberg), attacks on police brutality, references to interracial relationships, double entendres about drug use and sexuality and, as a new feature, the skewering of Nixon (including an Arthurian-era tale, Bianculli comments, with Sir Richard of Nixon, also known as Tricky Dicky, that probably put the Smothers Brothers on Nixons radar), all of this only added fuel to the fire.

The Smothers Brothers also made an effort to present music which young people were listening to. Among the groups and individuals who appeared on the program were George Harrison, Buffalo Springfield, Cream, the Who, Donovan, the Doors, Janis Ian, Jefferson Airplane, Peter, Paul and Mary, Steppenwolf, Simon and Garfunkel, Ray Charles and Ike and Tina Turner.

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An appearance by folk singer Joan Baez produced another bitter dispute between Tom Smothers and corporate headquarters. Baez introduced a song by explaining that it was dedicated to her husband, David Harris, who was going to be going to prison, probably in June, and hell be there for three years. The reason he was going, she continued, is because he refused to have anything to do with the draft, or selective service, or whatever you want to call itmilitarism in general.

CBS, under newly installed president Robert Wood, butchered Baezs appearance, cutting out her explanation of the reasons for Harris being sentenced to prison.

In the end, on April 4, 1969, CBS used the fact that the Smothers brothers had not provided executives and affiliates a videotape version of an upcoming show in time for them to make changes and cuts as an excuse for firing them. Murray Kempton in theNew York Post, Bianculli writes, saluted the bravery of the brothers in bringing on guests Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, and quoted Toms self-effacing but accurate assessment of the blandness of 1960s television: We stand out, Kempton quoted Tom as saying, because nothing else is being said. Wed be moderates anywhere else.

The political and social stakes were high. The urban riots, mass protests over Vietnam and unrest on college campuses and a major strike wave in major industries, in addition to the specter of revolution in France and other parts of the world, terrified the American ruling class. It should be remembered that the Smothers Brothers and their social commentary, in a different technological and media universe, were being viewed by between 30 to 35 million people a week. The show was one of the top five American television series most watched by people under 35. The satirical and other attacks, moderate as they may have been, were unacceptable.

Bianculli acknowledges that there is no smoking gun connecting the White House to the demise of the Smothers Brothers program, but there is considerable circumstantial evidence, including Nixons general vindictiveness, his drawing up of an enemies list and his determination to eliminate critics in artistic and academic circles.

In 1973, Bianculli points out, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of theWashington Postexposed the fact that a former New York City policeman had been hired to conduct more than 20 secret probes between 1969 and 1971 ordered by the White House and instigated by Watergate co-conspirators H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. One of the targets was the Smothers Brothers.

Tom Smothers refused to back down in face of the effort to suppress the series. He never apologized or exhibited repentance. He and his brother continued to perform as a duo for decades. In December 2022, the brothers announced that they would tour in 2023.

On a 1988 reunion show, they sang, to the tune of Those Were the Days, new lyrics written for the occasion by Mason Williams: Once upon a time we were on TV / Every Sunday night we knocked em dead / We stirred up trouble, so the network fired us / I guess that it was something that we said / Those were the days, my friends...

In 2008, Steve Martinone of the writers on the brothersComedy Hourpresented Tom Smothers with an Emmy award for writing on the 1968-69 series. (Smothers had excluded his name from the list of writers submitted for the award that year because he was afraid it was too volatile.)

Smothers told the audience, clearly referring to the Bush administration and the Iraq war, Its hard for me to stay silent when I keep hearing that peace is only attainable through warand theres nothing more scary than watching ignorance in action. I dedicate this Emmy, he continued, to all people who feel compelled to speak out, and are not afraid to speak to power, and wont shut up, and refuse to be silenced.

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Polish pavilion selection at Venice Biennale gets political as rejected artist cries censorship – Art Newspaper

Posted: at 6:35 pm

The artist selected to represent Poland at the 2024 Venice Biennale last year says that the new Polish governments decision to cancel his project at the worlds most prestigious exhibition is an act of censorship.

Ignacy Czwartos was selected by the previous administration led by the right-wing party Law and Justice (PiS). But in a statement issued on 29 December the ministry, under new prime Minister Donald Tusk, called off Czwartoss project.

Czwartos tells The Art Newspaper that his exhibition proposal Polish Practice in Tragedy. Between Germany and Russiawas initially selected in an open competition. On 31 October, Polands Ministry of Culture announced that it would indeed present an exhibition by Czwartos at the countrys national pavilion at the Biennale.

The announcement came at a time when Poland was waiting to see what form its next government would take, following a general election on 15 October. Czwartos was recommended by a jury convened by Warsaws Zachta National Gallery of Art.

PiS emergedas the largest party in the October election but failed to win a majority; Donald Tusk has subsequently formed a new centrist coalition government. Tusk was previously prime minister of Poland between 2007 and 2014, later becoming European Council president.

The selection took place in accordance with the legal procedures. The verdict of the competition jury was accepted by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. The contract between me and Zachta Gallery, the institution responsible for the realisation of the exhibition has been signed, Czwartos adds.

Nevertheless, on 29 December, I received the information that the new Minister of Culture and National Heritage, Bartomiej Sienkiewicz, had stopped the project. No reasons were given to justify the decision and, what is more, this decision is contrary to the regulations in force. I perceive it as censorship. The ministry was contacted for comment.

The Polish ministry of culture said in an online statement that after analysing the competition procedures for the exhibition and after [gathering] the opinions and voices of the communities, accepted the decision not to implement the project [Polish Practice in Tragedy. Between Germany and Russia]." Poland will now be represented by Open Group, a collective that includes Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga.

A spokesperson for Zacheta tells us: As per the regulations, Sienkiewicz has given the go-ahead to the back-up exhibition project, Repeat after Me, submitted by curator Marta Czy and featuring Open Group. Zachta National Gallery of Art will remain responsible for organising and producing the exhibition, as well as fully overseeing the Polish Pavilion in Venice.

In a proposal document submitted to the Biennale, Czwartoss exhibition,Polish Practice in Tragedy. Between Germany and Russia, was described as a profound reflection by a contemporary Polish artist on the tragic history of the 20th century.

Czwartos says: My project, through a set of paintings and objects, presents Polish experience of the clash between two totalitarianisms: Soviet communism and German National Socialism. The project refers also to the present day, above all to Putin's brutal attack in Ukraine. It is not an anti-European project at all, but rather it refers to the forces that had destroyed Europe in the past and today.

However, Czwartoss project faced a backlash from critics last year who said it was too closely aligned with the agenda of the Law and Justice (PiS) party. Those criticising Czwartos nomination included some former Zachta staff and three members of the museums jury: Jagna Domalska, Joanna Warsza and Karolina Zibiska-Lewandowska.

They told The Art Newspaper: To us the decision to select Ignacy Czwartos seems like a tragic Endspiel after eight years of right-wing rule... we regret that after the most open, welcoming, transnational and complex art of Magorzata Mirga-Tas [who represented Poland at the 2022 Biennale], we move to the most narrow-minded, ideologically paranoid and shameful position.

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Wartime censorship is necessary, but must be responsible – editorial – The Jerusalem Post

Posted: at 6:35 pm

This past Friday, an op-ed was published in The Wall Street Journal by former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett in which he revealed two operations carried out by Israel in Iran in 2022: an attack on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base in Iran and the assassination of a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander.

The one problem: The article was never approved by the IDF Military Censor, the unit responsible for the censoring of information that, if published, may be harmful to Israels security.

Bennett wrote, After Iran launched two failed UAV attacks on Israel in February 2022, Israel destroyed a UAV base on Iranian soil. In March 2022, Irans terror unit attempted to kill Israeli tourists in Turkey and failed. Shortly thereafter, the commander of that very unit was assassinated in the center of Tehran.

Israeli media revealed shortly after Bennetts article was released that, despite revealing sensitive information, the former prime minister did not seek permission from the censor before he filed his op-ed.

In response to the criticism, Bennett said, The problem with Iran is not the publication of the moves we made against it that were already known in the past, but that Iran attacks us through Hamas and Hezbollah and even the Houthis, and the governments of the past decade talk and speak, but do not exact a painful price from the leaders of Iran.

In other words, Bennett attempted to shift the blame from himself, without responding directly to criticism, to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While much can be said in the way of criticism of actions in terms of Israeli security carried out by Netanyahu and his governments especially the present one this was not the context to do so. This was the context to confess to having made an error at a time, not only of war, but of peak tensions with Iran.

A similar situation had occurred in February 2020 when Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman revealed that then-Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and then-IDF Southern Command head Maj.-Gen. Herzi Halevi met with top Qatari officials to work on a deal with Hamas. This news was under gag order by the censor.

That being said, there is cause for concern over the modus operandi being practiced at the Military Censor.

On a regular basis, publications within themselves find their articles shot down, while other publications have the same exact story approved for publishing.

The Journalists Union of Israel sent a letter to Military Chief Censor Kobi Mandelblit last month saying that it had recorded three recent cases in which reports by one news outlet were rejected, while the same reports were approved for other outlets.

We understand that in a security situation, certainly in wartime, it is vital to maintain national security, and the censor is one of the tools that help in maintaining this, the union said, but the accumulation of three cases within a few days raises the suspicion that there is a preference for one media outlet over others.

In one such case in August, KAN was allowed to publish that security forces had thwarted an Iranian weapons smuggling attempt into Israel from Jordan in July while all other news outlets were told this was under gag order.

Haaretz revealed a month ago that Mandelblit was being pressured by Netanyahu to block reports without national security justification, some of which related to private matters concerning the prime minister and his wife. Mandelblit disqualified the report per request, claiming that it was for the security of the couple.

This came shortly after Netanyahu attempted to pass a law that would make it illegal for the censor to approve publication of leaked cabinet meeting conversations. He claimed that the leaks endangered national security, despite the majority of the conversations being arguments between coalition members, demonstrating fissures in the emergency government.

The censor, at a time of war more than ever, is crucial for preventing security information leaks that could put Israelis in harms way. That being said, recent reports demonstrate that the ability to reject news reports is being used and abused, both for political gain and by giving preferential treatment to one publication over another.

This hurts both the medias ability to report the news and the publics right to know it.

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Jeffrey Wright Says a Replacement Actor Dubbed His Lines When He Refused to Censor the N-Word – PEOPLE

Posted: at 6:35 pm

Jeffrey Wright is recalling a time when he refused to censor an explicit word in a line reading for Ride with the Devil.

In the 1999 western drama, Wright, 58, played Daniel Holt, a freed Black man fighting in an informal Confederate militant unit during the Civil War, alongside a cast that included Tobey Maguire, Jewel and Skeet Ulrich.

While promoting his new movie American Fiction, Wright shared during an appearance on Entertainment Weekly's Around the Table series with costars Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling K. Brown and Erika Alexander that he was asked to censor the N-word in a pivotal scene while re-recording dialogue for a version of the film intended to play on airplanes.

"In this scene in which he has kind of the apex of his awakening, his need to emancipate himself, he says 'being that man's friend was no more than being his n----- and I will never again be anyone's n-----,' " Wright recalled. "It's such a self empowering, empowering statement and understanding of the word."

When Wright said he completed "the airplane version of dialogue," he was asked to substitute the N-word in that scene and instead walked away from the dialogue recording session entirely.

"There were a few curse words, and they [said] the [N-word] here, we'd like to change that to Negro or whatever the choice was," he recalled. "And I said, 'Nah, nah that's not happening,' and I headed out the door to my car."

The actor then added, "They found some other [actor] to come in and do that one word, apparently, so that the airplane folk would be comfy and in the darkness of their own ignorance of the language of race."

Everett

Both Ross, 51, and Brown, 47, appeared visibly surprised by Wright's story. Ross placed her hand on Wright's shoulder and said, "No they did not!" Brown, meanwhile, could be heard reacting with, "Wow" and "Are you serious?"

Ride with the Devil, which came roughly a decade after Wright first broke into Hollywood, did not make a significant impression on audiences. It only ever grossed $635,096 in its limited theatrical release, per Box Office Mojo.

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Wright shared the story as he and his costars spoke to the themes of America's relationship with race at play in American Fiction. He said the anecdote relates to "understanding the meaning or meanings of the N-word," as it is used in the new movie.

Bryan Bedder/Variety via Getty

In American Fiction, Wright plays author Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, described in an official synopsis as "a frustrated novelist whos fed up with the establishment profiting from 'Black' entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes."

"To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name to write an outlandish 'Black' book of his own, a book that propels him to the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain," the synopsis adds, stating that the film "confronts our cultures obsession with reducing people to outrageous stereotypes."

American Fiction is in theaters now.

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Judicial Watch Sues Biden Censorship Agency for Records Targeting Judicial Watch and Its President Tom Fitton – Judicial Watch

Posted: at 6:35 pm

Press Releases | January 04, 2024

(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for failing to respond to an October 11, 2023, FOIA for all records regarding Judicial Watch and its President Tom Fitton held by DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) (Judicial Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (No. 1:24-cv-00003).

The request specifically asked that the search for responsive records include email accounts of CISA officials publicly implicated in censorship operations.

On November 6, 2023, the House Judiciary Committee released a report detailing how the Department of Homeland Securitys (DHS) Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Global Engagement Center (GEC, within the State Department) coordinated with Stanford University and other entities to create the Election Integrity Partnership to censor Americans speech in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton is listed as a target of this censorship operation.

Judicial Watch and I have been censored again and again by government and Big Tech, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. That we had to file a federal lawsuit to get basic information about this targeting is another sure sign that CISA has been up to no good.

Judicial Watch has been in the forefront of uncovering government efforts to censor free speech and suppress opposition.

On November 9, 2023, Judicial Watch reported that CISA records show government involvement in the EIP [Election Integrity Partnership] pressure on Google, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit and other platforms to censor disinformation.

In October 2023, Judicial Watch sued the Department of Justice (DOJ) for records of any payments made by the FBI to Twitter (now known as X). The payments were disclosed in internal Twitter documents (the Twitter Files) made available by Elon Musk to journalists.

Also in October, Judicial Watch sued the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) for records concerning censorship of social media users.

In April 2023, Judicial Watch filed two lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal agencies for communications between the agencies and Facebook and Twitter regarding the governments involvement in content moderation and censorship on the social media platforms.

In a separate lawsuit file in June 2023, Judicial Watch sued DHS for all records of communications tied to the Election Integrity Partnership. Based on representations from the EIP (see here and here), the federal government, social media companies, the EIP, the Center for Internet Security (a non-profit organization funded partly by DHS and the Defense Department) and numerous other leftist groups communicated privately via the Jira software platform developed by Atlassian.

In February 2023, Judicial Watch sued the U.S. Department Homeland Security (DHS) for records showing cooperation between the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) and social media platforms to censor and suppress free speech.

Judicial Watch in January 2023 sued the DOJ for records of communications between the FBI and social media sites regarding foreign influence in elections, as well as the Hunter Biden laptop story.

In September 2022, Judicial Watch sued the Secretary of State of the State of California for having YouTube censor a Judicial Watch election integrity video.

In May 2022, YouTube censored a Judicial Watch video about Biden corruption and election integrity issues in the 2020 election. The video, titled Impeach? Biden Corruption Threatens National Security, was falsely determined to be election misinformation and removed by YouTube, and Judicial Watchs YouTube account was suspended for a week. The video featured an interview of Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. Judicial Watch continues to post its video content on its Rumble channel (https://rumble.com/vz7aof-fitton-impeach-biden-corruption-threatens-national-security.html).

In July 2021, Judicial Watch uncovered records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which revealed that Facebook coordinated closely with the CDC to control the Covid narrative and misinformation and that over $3.5 million in free advertising given to the CDC by social media companies.

In May 2021, Judicial Watch revealed documents showing that Iowa state officials pressured social media companies Twitter and Facebook to censor posts about the 2020 election.

In April 2021, Judicial Watch published documents revealing how California state officials pressured social media companies (Twitter, Facebook, Google (YouTube)) to censor posts about the 2020 election.

Judicial Watch has produced a four-part documentary, Censored and Controlled, that details the coordinated effort by the FBI and other government agencies and Big Tech to censor and suppress information on topics such as Hunter Bidens laptop, Covid-19, and election debates.

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Judicial Watch Sues Biden Censorship Agency for Records Targeting Judicial Watch and Its President Tom Fitton - Judicial Watch

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Jeffrey Wright Says He Refused To Censor The N-Word In Ride With The Devil & Walked Away From Dubbing Film – Deadline

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Jeffrey Wright Says He Refused To Censor The N-Word In Ride With The Devil & Walked Away From Dubbing Film - Deadline

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White People Are Going to Colonize Mars, and Other Fears From Today’s Campuses – Tablet Magazine

Posted: at 6:33 pm

It was a belated awakening. For many American Jews, Oct. 7 uncovered the deep rot in the elite institutions they had invested in for decades, psychically and financially. A recent poll found that 73% of Jewish students experienced or witnessed antisemitic incidents since the beginning of this academic school year, a 22-fold increase over the year before. Jewish students have been punched, spat upon, assaulted with sticks, shouted at, and corralled by students in kaffiyehs.

But it shouldnt have come as a surprise that the DEI regime has fostered the flourishing of campus antisemitism under the Palestinian banner. Having established Jews as members of the oppressor class and defined justice as the dismantling of this class, the officially sanctioned ideology has given license to the Palestinian vanguard to demand fulfillment of the progressive promise, by any means necessary, while turning Jewish students into piatas.

In New York City public colleges, a kippa-wearing, red-headed leprechaun named Ilya Bratmanformer U.S. Army tankist, applied linguist, long-distance runner, and immigrant from the former Soviet Unionhas witnessed up close the socialization of young Americans into this toxic worldview. A teacher of English composition at Baruch and John Jay colleges who holds a Ph.D. in education from the Jewish Theological Seminary, he also serves as executive director of Hillel at eight CUNY and SUNY colleges.

On the day we met, Bratman was hosting dinner for 200 Jewish students at a synagogue on 23rd Street near Lexington Avenue. After passing a phalanx of security guards into a social room, they began filling their plates with grilled meat and salads prepared by Bratmans favorite Georgian caterer.

The narrative of victimhood has become welded to these young peoples identity, leading to a sense of grievance toward America.

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After the students use cookie cutters to shape chocolate chip cookie dough into Stars of David, Bratman grabbed a microphone and stepped forward. Last week, everybody was already seated in my 8:00 a.m. class, and a student comes in and she says to me, Wow, I cant believe you bombed that hospital last night and killed all those people.

The social room, for the first time, went dead quiet.

The student of course was referring to deaths and injuries at the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, whose courtyard was hit on Oct. 17 by a rocket misfired from inside Gaza by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but which was widely misreported as having been the result of an Israeli missile.

Bratmans reaction, as a teacher, was to affirm the importance of sound reasoning and argumentationand, of course, language. I told her, Wow, I cant believe you forgot completely everything I taught you about the accusative voice and the proper use of the pronoun you, because you just said that I did this, he recounted. I bombed the hospital. What hospital? Where? Who?

He went on. Did you hear that Hamas said they did it? Bratman said he asked the student, referring to a conversation Israel had recorded between two terrorists apparently acknowledging the bombing was an own goal.

The students response was emblematic of the sectarian worldview into which young Americans are regimented, whereby the value, even the truthfulness, of an argument or action is assessed based on the identity of its author, rather than on its own merits. I will never believe that, she told him, even if they came to my face and say, Hamas, we did it. I will never believe it.

Bratman told me the students think hes a fool to read the newspapers and interrogate different sources in search of the truth. They tell him that mainstream media is all fake news, and they get their information from TikTok, which is real people talking about real things. Ive seen it, they tell him. On Instagram, on TikTok, Ive seen it.

They dont read anything. They just read headlines and pictures and memes. And they base their whole worldview on a set of memes.

Ilya Bratman was born in Moscow. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1992 with his parents, graduated from college at the University of Pittsburgh in 1999, then joined the U.S. Army, where he served four years in active duty and four years in the reserves.

Bratman believes strongly in America and the American dream. Teaching American students in New York City has brought him face-to-face with an entirely different worldviewone that appears to be particularly common among students from officially sanctioned minority backgrounds. The students dont appreciate what a gift theyve been given to live in America. Instead, they are lost in a zero-sum game of calculating relative oppressions. This fixation stops them from learning, Bratman believes, in part because it assures them that they will fail.

More on DEI and Campus Antisemitism

In his composition classes, he explained, he tries to get his students to create and support an argument. One week, he asked them to write about space exploration. Should we go to space? Or should we not?

One girl argued in favor of space travel because white people will move to space, maybe to Mars, or wherever, creating a gap, or an opening into which the indigenous brown and black people can move up in the class structure and fill that gap left behind by the white people who will move to Mars.

Theres a lot to unpack there, isnt there? Bratman responded. First of all, the belief in this structure where white people are on top, everybody else on the bottom, and the only way to move up is if the white people leave.

Another girl wrote that no, we should not have space travel because then the white people would colonize the Martian people, as they always do, and ruin the Martians lives.

Bratman said he asked, Does it help you to blame somebody? Do you actually become better? Do you strive further? Do you succeed better because you can blame someone?

He told me the students have no answer, but they know life is a victimhood competition. Im a victim and therefore you owe me, and therefore I dont have to do anything because I cannot succeed.

The narrative of victimhood has become welded to these young peoples identity, leading to an increased detachment from, and a sense of grievance toward, Americathe irony of course being that they and their parents chose to immigrate here. One girl in the class told him: I am here in this country against my will. Bratman asked her: Whos holding you? Tell me, please. Im frightened for you, showcasing his high-energy, high-drama style. Everybodys laughing, and I asked her, Where are you from? And she says, Haiti. OK. And where were you born? And she says, Brooklyn.

So youre actually from Brooklyn. Your parents are from Haiti, he repeated. Whos holding you back? Do you really want to go to Haiti today? You should actually go and see what life is like in a noncapitalist, depressed country that is in a desperate economic struggle. Or go to Gaza to a totalitarian, autocratic, hateful, homophobic nation. Or go to North Korea, go to Iran, go to all the places as a young woman, and see what life is really like.

None of that is understood, he told me. The students are pawns of teachers who want them to believe they can never succeed. And these teachers have been spectacularly successful at convincing them it is true.

Bratman teaches his Jewish students to adopt a different approach to the worldone anchored in tradition, learning, and the study of Jewish texts. At the dinner in the 23rd Street synagogue, he invited the students to let him know if theyd like to join him in studying Pirkei Avot in honor of IDF soldiers called up for duty. He also has a club of about 80 boys who are laying tefillin every day.

Bratman told me that, in spite of the recent stresses, hes not worried about his Jewish students. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them are rational people who go out and get jobs, they get married and I go to their weddings and brises.

But there is something terribly wrong with the others, he believes. A lot of these students, theyre nice, theyre wonderful people, right? But they look at me as a Jew, and say, well, you know, because youre supportive of this Israel story and Israel narrative, you kind of stand with the oppressor, you know, and Im Hispanic or Black and I have to stand with the oppressed. Or Im gay and I have to stand with the oppressed.

Bratmans worry is that these students, by adopting a worldview of grievance, are keeping themselves down with imaginary obstacles and denying their own volition. What they dont understand is that [these invented obstacles] are all surmountable. Its my mission to uplift and empower these young people to actually strive for the opportunities that exist and to dispel the false and limiting idea that its all impossible.

Bratman told me he had a student at John Jay whom he will never forget, a student struggling mightily at school. I had many conversations with him, Bratman said. Id say, come, come on, keep going, keep going. And he said, No, Im thinking of dropping out.

And Im like, no, no, get through this class. I got you. I got you. And I carried him through this course. And on the last day he came to see me, and he said, I dropped out of all the classes except for yours. Everybody in my family, including my mother and my grandparentsI dont know my fathermy uncles and everybody said, What are you doing? Why are you going to college? You can get a job now for $20 an hour, and when you graduate, youre gonna get a job for $20 an hour. Whats the purpose?

Bratman seemed genuinely sadnot angry or offended, just sadabout what he heard next. No one ever believed in me, the student said. I cant believe that the first and only person whos ever believed in me is a white Jew.

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White People Are Going to Colonize Mars, and Other Fears From Today's Campuses - Tablet Magazine

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Bizarre yogurt experiment could be key to colonizing Mars but there will be disgusting consequences, say… – The US Sun

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Bizarre yogurt experiment could be key to colonizing Mars but there will be disgusting consequences, say...  The US Sun

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Bizarre yogurt experiment could be key to colonizing Mars but there will be disgusting consequences, say... - The US Sun

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SpaceX Must Build 1,000 Starships In 10 Years To Reach Mars Goal. So Far, 0 Starships Have Made It To Space – Jalopnik

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Elon Musk is all about leaving Earth behind and heading to Mars on one of his rockets and taking a whole bunch of people with him. Hes previously said that to make regular flights back and forth between Earth and Mars a reality, his company SpaceX would need to build about 1,000 Starships.

According to Bob: Public Transit Is a Car Enthusiast's Best Friend

Thats going to take a while, considering theres only a few Starships in various stages of construction right now and it hasnt you know been to space, let alone Mars. In a recent Twitter (or X, I do not care) post, Musk suggested SpaceX may actually need to build Starships even faster than he initially anticipated to make his weird Mars colony a reality.

To achieve Mars colonization in roughly three decades, we need ship production to be 100/year, but ideally rising to 300/year, Musk wrote on Twitter. That is a shit ton of ships. To put that in perspective, over the past three decades, Boeing has built an average of about 300 of its 737 aircraft per year. Keep in mind, 737s are a lot easier to build than rocket ships meant to go to Mars, and Boeing is really good at building them something SpaceX cannot say at this point about Starship.

The 737s pace of production isnt the only airline-related goal SpaceX is after. Gwynne Shotwell, Musks second in command at the company, said last year that engineers have ...designed Starship to be as much like aircraft operations as we possibly can get it We want to talk about dozens of launches a day, if not hundreds of launches a day, Ars Technica reports. This needs to happen for SpaceX so it can lift millions of tons of equipment into space for a theoretical Mars settlement. Many of the launches will reportedly be Starship refueling tankers needed to make the interplanetary trip a reality. Think of them like space gas stations in a way.

Heres how Musk and SpaceX plan to make the Starship and Super Heavy booster work over and over again and what exactly theyll be used for, according to Ars Technica:

SpaceX still aims to make the Starship and its Super Heavy booster rapidly reusable. The crux is that the ship, the part that would travel into orbit, and eventually to the Moon or Mars, wont be reused as often as the booster. These ships will come in a number of different configurations, including crew and cargo transports, refueling ships, fuel depots, and satellite deployers.

The booster design will be the same across the different types of ships in the fleet. The Super Heavy, with more than 30 Raptor engines, will also return to SpaceXs launch sites about six minutes after liftoff, similar to the way SpaceX recovers its Falcon boosters today. Theoretically, Musk wrote, the booster could be ready for another flight in an hour.

With the Starship itself, the laws of physics and the realities of geography come into play. SpaceX will initially have Super Heavy and Starship launch and landing pads in South Texas and Cape Canaveral, Florida, although the company has flirted with the idea of offshore launch and landing platforms.

As an object flies in low-Earth orbit, the Earth rotates underneath it. This means that a satellite, or Starship, will find itself offset some 22.5 degrees in longitude from its launch site after a single 90-minute orbit around the planet. It could take several hours, or up to a day, for a Starship in low-Earth orbit to line up with one of the recovery sites.

The ship needs to complete at least one orbit, but often several to have the ground track line abc up with the launch site, so reuse may only be daily, Musk wrote, according to Ars Technica. This means that ship production needs to be roughly an order of magnitude higher than booster production.

Despite Musks general shittiness and desire to overpromise and underdeliver, Ars Technica says hes actually been fairly level-headed when it comes to SpaceX. Hell, hes even apparently said his schedule predictions are often aspirations. Yeah bud, you think?

Only time will tell if Musks goals for SpaceX can happen. His past successes and failures have had about as wide a range as the companies hes owned. Will Mars travel end up like the Tesla Supercharger network which is pretty much the gold standard of charging right now? Or will it end up like his underground Las Vegas tunnels which are really just a joke at this point?

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SpaceX Must Build 1,000 Starships In 10 Years To Reach Mars Goal. So Far, 0 Starships Have Made It To Space - Jalopnik

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