Israel on Friday launched a wave of retaliatory airstrikes against Iran after the Islamic Republic fired a barrage of missiles toward Israelis earlier this month.
Explosions were heard near Iran’s capital of Tehran and nearby Karaj, Reuters reported, citing local media.
“In response to months of continuous attacks from the regime in Iran against the State of Israel – right now the Israel Defense Forces is conducting precise strikes on military targets in Iran,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement. “The regime in Iran and its proxies in the region have been relentlessly attacking Israel since October 7th – on seven fronts – including direct attacks from Iranian soil. Like every other sovereign country in the world, the State of Israel has the right and the duty to respond. Our defensive and offensive capabilities are fully mobilized. We will do whatever necessary to defend the State of Israel and the people of Israel.” . . .
The Israeli military action comes after Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed a “precise and deadly” response to the more than 180 missiles Iran targeted Israel with on Oct. 1, some of which were intercepted with the help of the U.S.
Last week, during the leadup to the Israeli attack, reports emerged that the Israeli Defense Forces presented a list of potential targets to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Gallant as officials conducted “sensitive coordination” with other countries in the Middle East.
“The regime is vulnerable, and it’s up to us to decide which message we want to send to them,” Israeli ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon also told Fox News Digital. “It will be very painful for the Iranian regime, and they will think twice in the future whether to attack Israel or not.” Last week, during the leadup to the Israeli attack, reports emerged that the Israeli Defense Forces presented a list of potential targets to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Gallant as officials conducted “sensitive coordination” with other countries in the Middle East.
“The regime is vulnerable, and it’s up to us to decide which message we want to send to them,” Israeli ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon also told Fox News Digital. “It will be very painful for the Iranian regime, and they will think twice in the future whether to attack Israel or not.”
Many years ago, when I worked at the Washington Times, my colleague Victor Morton was wont to speak of “secular events” affecting politics. In other words, while candidates, parties and campaign staff work to promote their various messages, wooing voters with rallies or TV commercials, sometimes the most important event in any election cycle is something beyond the control of politicians and their handlers. These secular events — e.g., the catastrophic impact of Hurricane Katrina hitting Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — frustrate the ambitions of political strategists, because there’s no way to plan for them, no tactical playbook.
So, here we are, barely 10 days away from Election Day, and Israel is at war with Iran. Gosh, now we’re teetering on the brink of World War III, who is most capable of handling a situation like this?
Voters will have a choice on who gets that job.
In response to months of continuous attacks from the regime in Iran against the State of Israel—right now the Israel Defense Forces is conducting precise strikes on military targets in Iran.
The regime in Iran and its proxies in the region have been relentlessly attacking… pic.twitter.com/OcHUy7nQvN
In a wide-ranging new interview with ABC News, Vice President Kamala Harris suggested there could be “consequences” for Israel if it moves ahead with a planned invasion of Rafah in its pursuit of Hamas fighters. . . .
“We have been clear in multiple conversations and in every way that any major military operation in Rafah would be a huge mistake,” Harris told ABC News’ Senior Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott in part of the interview that aired Sunday on “This Week.”
“Let me tell you something: I have studied the maps. There’s nowhere for those folks to go,” Harris said.
Well, what happened? Last week, the Hamas leader who masterminded the October 7 massacre was killed during a “major military operation in Rafah.” The most interesting aspect of this was that, while the Israelis had been hunting him for more than a year, it wasn’t any kind of targeted raid that finally put an end to his terrorist career:
It was a routine patrol for a unit of Israeli soldiers in the southern Gaza Strip. Then a firefight erupted and the Israelis, backed by drones, destroyed part of a building where several militants had taken cover, Israeli officials said.
When the dust cleared and they began searching the building, the soldiers found a body that bore a striking resemblance to someone they had not expected to find, a man their country had been hunting for since Oct. 7, 2023: Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas.
For more than a year, as tens of thousands of Gazans were killed, Mr. Sinwar had eluded the full force of Israel’s military and security establishment, which had dedicated every means at its disposal to finding and killing him. Many believed he was hiding underground in Gaza and had surrounded himself with hostages taken from Israel.
In the end, the Israeli officials said, he was killed above ground on Wednesday, alongside two other militants, with no sign of hostages nearby. The Israeli authorities said they had confirmed his death on Thursday, using dental records and fingerprints. His DNA was also tested for confirmation, according to one Israeli official and the White House.
Good-bye and good riddance to this murderous monster, but if Israel had listened to Kamala Harris, Yahya Sinwar would have been safe in Rafah.
Gosh, it’s almost as if Kamala is pro-Hamas, and yet there are still Jews who will vote for her — liberalism is a suicidal psychosis.
The reason Israel is in such a strong position is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's refusal to listen to President Joe Biden, President Donald Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday night.https://t.co/GPHSuRO649
After much blowback — were college interns working the weekend copy desk? — Associated Press has changed that headline, but what was the logic? How does the journalistic “mainstream” reach a point where a bloodthirsty Jew-hater like Hassan Nasrallah gets such a fond send-off from AP? Dig the euphemism in the lead paragraph, where Hezbollah is described as a “Lebanese militant group” when, in fact, they are a gang of Islamic terrorist thugs sponsored by Iran which, to their credit, the AP more or less admits farther down in the story:
An astute strategist, the 64-year-old Nasrallah reshaped Hezbollah into an archenemy of Israel, cementing alliances with Shiite religious leaders in Iran and Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas.
Under his leadership, Hezbollah fought wars against Israel and took part in the conflict in neighboring Syria, helping tip the balance of power in favor of President Bashar Assad.
Idolized by his Lebanese Shiite followers and respected by millions of others across the Arab and Islamic world, Nasrallah held the title of sayyid, an honorific meant to signify the Shiite cleric’s lineage dating back to the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam. A fiery orator viewed as an extremist in the United States and much of the West, he was also considered a pragmatist compared to the militants who dominated Hezbollah after its founding in 1982, during Lebanon’s civil war.
You know who else was “fiery orator viewed as an extremist in the United States and much of the West”? A guy named Adolf Hitler. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. Anyway, Nasrallah is dead, as are other top Hezbollah leaders including Ali Karaki. Bibi Netanyahu is Israel’s Michael Corleone, settling all the family business. Can you imagine being a junior “militant” in Hezbollah and learning that you’ve gotten promoted because the guy above you in the terrorist hierarchy just got killed?
Netanyahu just declared “we are winning” at his UN speech.
The day after thousands of Hezbollah terror suspects were injured, and reportedly a dozen people killed, by their pagers almost simultaneously exploding, Lebanese and Iranian media reported a second wave of radio device detonations.
The second wave appears to involve two-way radio devices, such as walkie-talkies.
At least one of these explosions was reported near the funeral of a Hezbollah operative killed by the Tuesday pager explosions.
“We came out to try and find out what the sound was and people were running. People were covered in blood,” said Sky News correspondent Alex Crawford, who was in attendance at the funeral.
“There was blood on a car. One young man was running and he was very stressed. He said a walkie-talkie – which the Hezbollah security people around here are using for the funeral – exploded,” she said.
“The Hezbollah people then gathered up all the walkie-talkies and have been taking the batteries out of them. Our cameraman was surrounded by very tense and angry Hezbollah security, who told him to stop filming,” she reported.
Crawford said the funeral was “still going ahead” despite the explosions, but the crowd was “extremely tense,” and Hezbollah operatives were “furious.”
Hezbollah’s Al Manar TV news reported three new fatalities and dozens of injuries in the Bekaa region. The Lebanese health ministry reported more than a hundred injuries across southern Beirut and its suburbs. Most of the patients were treated for injuries in their hands or abdomen.
Lebanese Red Cross reported 30 of its ambulance teams are on “high alert” and responding to “multiple explosions in different areas.”
Lebanese state media also claimed some of the explosions were due not to radio devices, but home solar energy systems exploding.
Apparently, Mossad agents penetrated the supply chain by which Hezbollah was obtaining its electronic communications devices, but there’s a lot of finger-point between the Taiwanese manufacturer and the Hungarian middleman about how this could have happened. At any rate, the Mossad reportedly inserted pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), “a highly explosive material,” inside the batteries of the devices, which “were then detonated by an external signal that caused the batteries inside to overheat.” That was Tuesday’s pager attack. The second wave of explosions on Wednesday were reportedly a result of the Mossad fearing that Hezbollah would figure out that their Japanese-made walkie-talkies were also rigged, so they faced a “use-it-or-lose it” choice and BOOM!
A witness who was at a Hezbollah funeral in the southern suburbs of Beirut has described to CNN the chaos as walkie-talkies appeared to explode at around 5 p.m. local time (10 a.m. ET).
The witness, who cannot be named for security reasons, told CNN that a loud bang went off, followed by screaming.
They said that the man whose wireless device exploded was covered in blood and his hands had been blown off.
“Those 20,000 Haitians did not show up overnight or uninvited. Though flown in by the federal government, they were not forced on the city by the federal government. Elections have consequences. Springfield voted for this. They signaled their virtue, their signal was seen, and virtue arrived. This is what they wanted. This is what they got. They’ll have to deal with the consequences.”
(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Much commentary has focused on whether it’s true that pets are being killed and eaten by the Haitians, but that’s not really the point. The point is why Springfield became the destination for thousands of Haitians (who may or may not eat cats).
It’s a long story. First of all, you’ll find liberals insisting that these Haitians are not illegal immigrants. Research further, however, and you learn that most of them entered the country illegally, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border after making their way through Central America. After Haiti descended into its latest crisis, the Biden administration granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to all Haitians in the U.S., so you may say that they have been retroactively (but temporarily) “legalized.”
Now let’s talk about Springfield, which is a “blue” island of liberalism in a sea of Republican “red.” Ohio was once a battleground state, closely contested in every presidential election, and then Trump came along and the Buckeye State has now become a GOP stronghold. Springfield was a city of 58,662 residents before the Haitian influx, and the city sits in Clark County (population 136,000) which voted 61% for Trump in 2020.
You see that, if the Democrats can turn these Haitians into voters, they can make Clark County “blue,” and a similar calculus is being applied nationwide by the Biden administration’s immigration policy. Democrats insist that the “Great Replacement” is a right-wing conspiracy theory, but we can see them doing it — blatantly, deliberately, in front of our eyes — in places like Springfield. And this brings us to the late Warren Copeland.
For most of the past three decades, Copeland was the mayor of Springfield. He was a professor at Wittenberg University, a local institution affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Anyone who knows anything about the ELCA will tell you it is the pluperfect example of degenerate liberal Protestantism. “The ELCA has drifted so far into pagan goddess worship that to call it ‘Lutheranism’ is an insult to Luther; to call it ‘Christian’ is blasphemy,” as I wrote in 2016. Copeland was a radical obsessed with “social justice,” and the fact that Springfield repeatedly elected him as their mayor tells you something about the politics of the city. Indeed, Springfield eagerly welcomed the influx of Haitians. Read this article from December 2022:
A surge in the number of Springfield residents from Haiti has resulted in an outpouring of language assistance and additional forms of help from the Springfield City School District and others who are trying to meet their needs. “Four years ago we didn’t have a Haitian population,” says Pamela Shay, director of federal programs for Springfield City School District.
Now the district has about 200 students from Haitian families, many speaking Haitian Creole, French or Spanish, she says. In the past, the district has had two or three bilingual assistants who speak students’ native languages in order to help in classrooms and communicate with parents. Now the district has nine, she says.
“I think we will see growth continue for a few years,” Shay says. . . .
Estimates about the number of Springfield and Clark County residents from Haiti vary. Shay says she has been told there are about 7,500 Haitians in the area, although she suspects the number is lower based on the number of students enrolled in the school district.
Davah Germain says there were already several thousand people from Haiti when he arrived in Springfield almost two years ago, and he suspects that number might have doubled in the meantime.
“And people are still coming,” he says.
Germain left Haiti due to political issues and moved to Miami, Fla., in 1985. The 63-year-old moved to Springfield at the urging of a friend. Word is spreading about the ease in which newcomers can find jobs, particularly in manufacturing.
“They’re coming to stay,” he says. “They’re coming to make Springfield their home.” . . .
Germain . . . translates for the Springfield District Council of St. Vincent de Paul.
Peggy Johnson is a longtime volunteer with the council, and she oversees its community navigator program to help the local Haitian and Hispanic communities.
“I applied for a grant last year when I started to see a lot of Haitians moving into town,” she says. That $10,000 grant from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, along with another $10,000 from a private organization in Springfield, is helping the program fund 20 hours of services each week. The organization also now has two Haitians employed who speak Haitian Creole and Spanish. The extra services started in September.
You see? According to the school system official, as recently as 2018, Springfield didn’t have any Haitians, but by 2022, the number had reached an estimated 7,500, and now it’s believed to be at least 15,000. And the city did everything to assist and support the Haitians, effectively encouraging still more to come. The Biden administration’s decision to grant TPS to all Haitians — no matter how they got into the country — means that no Haitian can be deported, and every Haitian in the country is now eligible for employment, Social Security cards, Medicaid, etc. The liberals in Springfield, the ones who made Warren Copeland the city’s mayor for nearly 30 years, voted for this policy. They approved it.
A Haitian man charged with causing a bus crash in which 11-year-old Aiden Clark was killed and more than two dozen other students were injured was previously caught and released at the US border.
Hermanio Joseph, 35, was driving with an invalid license when his Honda Odyssey minivan veered over the center line and collided with a Northwestern Local Schools bus on Troy Road in Lawrenceville, Ohio, on August 22. . . .
Aiden was ejected from the bus and was pronounced dead at the scene. Another student suffered life-threatening injuries and 26 children sustained minor injuries. . . .
Joseph and his passenger, Roberto Mompremier, 37, suffered non-life-threatening injuries and were taken to hospital for treatment.
He produced a Mexican driver’s license to Ohio State Highway Patrol officers at the scene but this was invalid due to his immigration status.
Joseph is registered as a Haitian immigrant in the state of Florida and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman confirmed he arrived at the US-Mexico border in August 2022.
He was given notice to appear in federal immigration court by the Department of Homeland Security before he was released under the Biden Administration’s border policies.
Hermanio Joseph
So never mind if Haitians are eating cats, because the fact is that Haitians are killing actual human beings, including this 11-year-old kid from Lawrenceville, a crossroads about 7 miles north of Springfield.
It was not Aidan Clark’s fault that the Biden administration adopted a “catch-and-release” policy for illegal immigrants. It was not Aidan Clark’s policy that the liberals in Springfield welcomed thousands of Haitians to their city. Hermanio Joseph has been sentenced to prison, but this hardly suffices to clear the blood-guilt for Aidan Clark’s death, and the people responsible are not just the residents of Springfield. Yet they have brought a curse upon their city, which I expect will soon cease to be recognizable as an American city. Springfield, Ohio, is going to turn into a cesspool of misery, bearing no resemblance to what it was when the first Haitians arrived there. This sad fate is not something I approve — were it in my power, I would prevent it– but at the same time, I cannot deny that it is what Springfield deserves. They have invited their own destruction.
Remember: Whenever a "disinformation expert" tells us that something is a "baseless claim," it always turns out to be 100% true. https://t.co/SL61iLTzEc
To quote Sarah Hoyt, “The suspicion that this was a setup honeypot with full knowledge of our government is inevitable,” which was the first thing that crossed my mind when I heard about it. Folks, I’ve known Benny Johnson since 2007, when he was a college kid having fun at a Young Americans Foundation conference in California that I attended (as did Ace of Spades, Jeff Goldstein and other conservative bloggers). So when I saw him named in connection with what FBI Director Christopher Wray calls a “covert influence campaign,” I knew it was bullshit.
Two alleged Russian operatives, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, are “charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.” Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva are said to have set up a shell company that funneled money to Tenet Media, which was created last year by YouTuber Lauren Chen and her hsuband Liam Donovan. Tenet Media in turn contracted with such well-known conservative personalities as Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and my friend Benny Johnson. Let me quote the DOJ press release here:
The Justice Department today announced the ongoing seizure of 32 internet domains used in Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns colloquially referred to as “Doppelganger,” in violation of U.S. money laundering and criminal trademark laws. As alleged in an unsealed affidavit, the Russian companies Social Design Agency (SDA), Structura National Technology (Structura), and ANO Dialog, operating under the direction and control of the Russian Presidential Administration, and in particular First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Sergei Vladilenovich Kiriyenko, used these domains, among others, to covertly spread Russian government propaganda with the aim of reducing international support for Ukraine, bolstering pro-Russian policies and interests, and influencing voters in U.S. and foreign elections, including the U.S. 2024 Presidential Election. . . .
“The Justice Department is seizing 32 internet domains that the Russian government and Russian government-sponsored actors have used to engage in a covert campaign to interfere in and influence the outcome of our country’s elections,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. . . .
“The Department’s seizure of 32 internet domains secretly deployed to spread foreign malign influence demonstrates once again that Russia remains a predominant foreign threat to our elections,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. “At Putin’s direction, Russian companies SDA, Structura, and ANO Dialog used cybersquatting, fabricated influencers, and fake profiles to covertly promote AI-generated false narratives on social media. Those narratives targeted specific American demographics and regions in a calculated effort to subvert our election. Our republic depends on elections that are free from foreign interference, and we will not rest in our efforts to expose foreign malign influence operations and protect our democracy, without fear or favor.”
Does that seem clear to you? Because it’s far from clear to me. They’ve posted a 277-page affidavit in PDF, so maybe some of y’all can go read that and explain it to me. My two questions are these:
Question 1: What, if anything, did these “32 internet domains” have to do with Benny Johnson, Tim Pool or Dave Rubin? Did they even know about these sites? Did any of the “Russian disinformation” content from these “32 internet domains” actually make it into any videos posted by the aforesaid personalities?
Question 2: At what point did the feds get involved?
Because I’m with Sarah Hoyt on this hunch: Never in my life have I seen anything that looked more like an FBI “sting” setup.
Both Benny and Tim say they’re the real victims in this case:
A statement on the leaked DOJ indictment today:
A year ago, a media startup pitched my company to provide content as an independent contractor. Our lawyers negotiated a standard, arms length deal, which was later terminated. We are disturbed by the allegations in today’s…
My statement regarding allegations and the DOJ Indictment
Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims. I cannot speak for anyone else at the company as to what they do or to what they are instructed…
For years, I’ve said it’s impossible to have peace negotiations with the Palestinians because, to the Palestinians, “peace” means dead Jews.
Insofar as “Palestinian” describes a national identity, the essence of that identity is killing Jews. That’s all they care about. As a people, collectively, the Palestinians are devoted to revenge — the complete destruction of Israel, and the death of every Jew — and this is why the past 30-plus years of “peace negotiatians” have been a waste of time.
The bodies of six hostages abducted alive by Hamas on October 7 were recovered from a tunnel in southern Gaza’s Rafah overnight, shortly after they were murdered by terrorists, the Israel Defense Forces announced Sunday.
The hostages were Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, Eden Yerushalmi, 24, Ori Danino, 25, Alex Lobanov, 32, Carmel Gat, 40, and Almog Sarusi, 27.
Goldberg-Polin, Yerushalmi, Lobanov, Sarusi and Danino (an off-duty noncommissioned officer) were abducted from the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, while Gat was taken from Kibbutz Be’eri.
Their bodies were found with multiple gunshot wounds, Israel’s Health Ministry said, citing an examination carried out by Abu Kabir Forensic Institute.
The ministry said that the hostages were murdered between 48 and 72 hours before their autopsy, meaning between Thursday and Friday morning.
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the six were “brutally murdered” by Hamas shortly before troops arrived — possibly only a day or two before they were found.
“According to an initial assessment… they were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists a short while before we reached them. They were abducted alive on the morning of October 7 by the Hamas terror group,” Hagari said in a press conference.
“Their bodies were found during the fighting in Rafah, in a tunnel, about a kilometer away from the tunnel from which we rescued Farhan al-Qadi a few days ago,” he said.
This was sadly predictable. Ever since last October, when dozens of hostages were kidnapped by the same Hamas terrorists who killed more than a thousand Israelis, I knew that the chances of any of the hostages surviving were practically non-existent, and any negotiations for their release were futile, because the raison d’être of Hamas is to kill Jews.
What kind of childish naïveté leads some people to think it’s possible to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with a gang of bloodthirsty killers, and they’ll just turn the hostages loose? And yet, even as I write these words, CNN is showing protesters in Israel who evidently believe this.
??? Huge Protest – Tel Aviv, Israel
Estimates of up to 300,000 people on the Israeli Capital’s Streets protesting the war on Gaza.
Had the Biden administration’s will not been bent and twisted in the months following the attack by the fiendish propaganda campaign causing them to worry about the war’s effect on Joe’s chances in Michigan—due to a population that effectively supported the terrorist monsters and cared not a whit for the eight Americans, let alone the 240 other innocents dragged into Hell—would Hersh and these others have survived? Imagine an Israel that had not found itself restrained and under assault, not told to pause, not scolded in pissy little phone calls with petulant American establishmentarians, without arms and aid held up, without being lectured about the geostrategic value of going slow or not going at all.
Imagine an Israel that was not told by its best friend in the world that offensive action in Gaza had become self-defeating, was not told that Israel should care more about feeding people in Gaza than about eliminating the threat to its 9 million citizens and pummelling Hamas until that evil group of thugs cried uncle and begged for way to negotiate to return the hostages.
Imagine an America that did not lose its nerve under a president whose team knew perfectly well he was infirm and was working desperately to stave off his eventual collapse and departure from the race to save their own rotten and misbegotten jobs.
Have you forgotten? In case you don’t remember how traumatized liberals were by Donald Trump winning the 2016 election, you can click here for an ABC News video of Hillary Clinton’s supporters, gathered for a planned victory celebration at the Javits Center in New York, crying on the evening of November 8, 2016. It was a beautiful sight.
Insofar as Democrats were not already crazy — because anyone who votes Democrat cannot be entirely sane — the trauma of the 2016 election drove them completely bonkers and they’ve never recovered. It was on the night of November 8, 2016, apparently, that Team Hillary settled on their excuse for defeat: “RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA!”
Hillary Clinton herself accused Russia of “interfering” in the election: “This is not just an attack on me and my campaign, although that may have added fuel to it. This is an attack against our country. We are well beyond normal political concerns here. This is about the integrity of our democracy and the security of our nation.” But who was actually threatening “the integrity of our democracy”? In July 2016, while the campaign was still going, the FBI began spying on the Trump campaign in “Operation Crossfire Hurricane.” The origin, justification and legality of this project, led by the notorious Peter Strzok, have all been extensively scrutinized. The investigation began after (but was not necessarily caused by) the alleged hacking of Democratic National Committee emails. The official justification for the investigation had to do with conversations between Trump policy adviser George Papadopoulos and an obscure academic named Joseph Mifsud, which Mifsud subsequently relayed to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer. This gossip then got mixed in with spurious allegations from the infamous “Steele dossier” to create the myth of “collusion” between Russia and the Trump campaign which, after Trump’s 2016 victory, became the basis of phantasmagoric delusions on the part of Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself).
All the insanity since November 2016, you must understand, can be traced to two simple facts: Trump won and Hillary lost, and these facts were never accepted by Democrats, least of all Hillary herself. To this day, we’re still dealing with the consequences of the resulting delusion — Trump Derangment Syndrome — and one symptomatic manifestation is the media’s obsession with “misinformation.”
During a White House press briefing [Monday], the Washington Post’s Cleve Wootson asked if the government has a “role” in tackling “misinformation” and if President Joe Biden planned to “intervene” in Trump’s X Space.
An alleged journalist demanding that the federal government “intervene” to prevent the Republican candidate from speaking publicly? You see how this connects back to the 2016 campaign, because Russian “interference” in the election was alleged to include “misinformation” spread by social media — how else to explain why Hillary Clinton lost? Democrats believed Trump could not have won the election legitimately, and from this certainty arose their vigilance against “misinformation.”
The text message came from a friend: “Vaccine induced turbo cancer?” It included a link to the notice that former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was dead.
What did this message mean? Quick research determined that the cause of Wojcicki’s death at age 56 was lung cancer, which her husband said was first diagnosed in 2022:
Wojcicki – who was one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley – had been involved with YouTube’s parent company Google from its earliest days, when its two founders worked out of her garage in California to build a search engine. …
Wojcicki had served as YouTube’s CEO for nine years before announcing last year in a blog post that she would be “stepping back” from her leadership role to focus on her family, health and personal projects that she was passionate about, CNN previously reported.
She oversaw YouTube during the web’s pivotal transition toward social media, but also as online platforms came under increasing scrutiny for spreading misinformation, hate speech and other harmful content.
“I’m so proud of everything we’ve achieved,” Wojcicki wrote when announcing she was stepping down in 2023. “It’s been exhilarating, meaningful, and all-consuming.”
The ancient Latin adage, De mortuis nil nisi bonum (“Speak no ill of the dead”) is wise advice, but anyone who searched social media for Susan Wojcicki’s name on Saturday morning could discover how widely disregarded this advice was in her case. Many thousands of people were expressing their happiness that Wojcicki was dead, as she had been identified as “Censorship Voldermort” for her suppression of dissenting viewpoints on YouTube, especially in regard to the COVID-19 pandemic. . . .
