DOJ Opens Sweeping Anti-Trust Probe Into Big Tech Firms
This could be the start of something big. We have witnessed a lot of abuse at the hands of Big Tech, specifically Google, Facebook, and Twitter. These three companies have engaged in an all-out assault on free speech in America for the last three years. Moreover, companies like Google and Facebook have become notorious for their over-the-top violations of individual privacy rights. There is a simple rule to remember when you use one of these apps: "if they are not selling a product, YOU are the product!" Google, Facebook, and Twitter make a lot of money (a. lot. of. money) by harvesting the information and data of their users and selling it. Big Tech makes money through Big Data. This will be a case to follow with interest.
The Department of Justice is opening a sweeping anti-trust review to determine whether the country’s leading technology firms are stifling competition in violation of federal law, it announced Tuesday.“Without the discipline of meaningful market-based competition, digital platforms may act in ways that are not responsive to consumer demands,” Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim of the Antitrust Division said in a statement announcing the remarkably broad probe. “The Department’s antitrust review will explore these important issues.”The Antitrust Division will work to determine whether companies such as Facebook, Google, and Apple have “reduced competition, stifled innovation, or otherwise harmed consumers” as they’ve grown dramatically in recent years and begun expanding into various industries by acquiring smaller potential competitors. The Federal Trade Commission is conducting a separate, more limited investigation into potential monopolistic abuses by Facebook and Amazon.
Is 'The Lion King' based on fascism? Russell Moore responds
Everyday Americans need to start pushing back (hard) against the crazy opinions and absurd views of leftist activist. This includes leftists crazies in academia, media, entertainment, and government. Good for Russell Moore to take a stand against leftist craziness.
Evangelical leader Russell Moore rejected a highly publicized claim that the Disney movie “The Lion King” promotes fascism.“I don’t think ‘The Lion King’ is fascistic at all,” said Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. “My own denomination boycotted Disney a generation ago. And some of the things you hear from the left sometimes sound like a leftish version of what I used to hear from the right.”Moore was responding to a recent opinion column published by The Washington Post claiming that the movie “The Lion King” had fascist themes.He labeled the allegation a “pseudo-controversy,” declaring that “nobody really believes that ‘The Lion King’ is fascist propaganda.”Moore explained that this specifically is “a second-guessing of all art. That all art really has to be propaganda, which is really a Stalinist way of seeing things.”“The problem is whenever we think nature by itself is an indicator of how we ought to live,” continued Moore. “I’ve heard arguments for transgenderism on the basis of pregnant male seahorses. And I’ve heard arguments against helping the poor because in nature that doesn’t happen.”“Those arguments don’t work because the Scripture gives us a fundamental distinction between humanity and the rest of the animal world. Humanity is to image God, with reason, with morality, with stewardship.”Earlier this month, The Washington Post published an opinion column by Dan Hassler-Forest, assistant professor of media and cultural studies at Utrecht University.Hassler-Forest argued that “The Lion King” promoted an “ideological agenda” that promotes “a seductive worldview in which absolute power goes unquestioned and the weak and the vulnerable are fundamentally inferior.”“In other words: ‘The Lion King’ offers us fascist ideology writ large, and there is no obvious way out for the remake,” he wrote.“The Lion King,” which was released last week as a live-action remake and broke box office records, is not the only children’s entertainment to be labeled fascist. The popular television series “Paw Patrol” and “Thomas the Tank Engine” have weathered similar allegations in the past.“’Thomas,’ the long-running television franchise about a group of working trains chugging away on the Island of Sodor, has been called a "premodern corporate-totalitarian dystopia" in The New Yorker, imperialist and sinister in Slate, and classist, sexist and anti-environmentalist in the Guardian,” wrote Elissa Strauss in a column for CNN in 2017.“'Paw Patrol’ is equally polarizing … Buzzfeed called the show ‘terrible’ and pointed to instances of gender and social inequality that go unchecked on the show. In the Guardian, Ryder is described as a megalomaniac with an implied ‘unstoppable God complex.’”Tom Knighton of PJ Media took issue with the labeling of the two TV shows, writing in 2017 that the complaints over the shows were “another example of the left trying to destroy things people enjoy in an effort to sound intelligent and ‘woke.’”“None of these programs are harmful or do anything except make children sit down and be quiet for a few minutes, something any parent can tell you is a blessing that shouldn't be overlooked,” wrote Knighton.“They overanalyze every aspect of the show until they find something to lash out at. Ironically, they target television folks who, by and large, tend to be liberals with a strong disdain for the modern right. In other words, they're accusing their own side of shilling for the enemy.”
David Jeremiah warns modern church is entertainment-driven social organization afraid of controversy
Pastor David Jeremiah, the senior pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church in El Cajon, CA, recently urged the Church in America to stay true to its biblical calling and warned of the trap of trying to be relevant at the cost of it biblical teaching.
“The Church is coming under attack; it’s forgotten what the Church is supposed to be,” Jeremiah, founder of Turning Point Radio and Television Ministries, told The Christian Post. “We’re not an entertainment service; we’re not here to see how close we can get to what the world does. But there’s so much of the world in the Church and vice versa that we can’t tell a difference. We have to hold to the truth. We have to get nourished. If it’s not happening, you’re a social organization and not a church.”“There’s an incredible motivation on the part of everyone to be successful, and a lot of times people program their churches to see how many people will sit in the pews on Sunday,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with getting people there, as long as you share the Gospel. But there’s no glory in just a number.”“Don’t worship at the attendance altar,” Jeremiah advised. “A lot of good things happen in churches when there aren't huge numbers but the pastor has prepared a good message and there’s worship. We get off on this thing that we have to be bigger than the guy down the street and how to get more people in the building. When you’re focused on that, you’ll never preach anything that’s controversial and you’ll always be trying to figure out how to get more people to come.”“Here in California, we see interest on the part of millennials and younger for the Bible and for truth,” the pastor said. “Most of the time, we see statistics about how people are leaving the Church, but in many respects, young people are demanding more truth, more teaching, and less entertainment. They’re not interested in shallow expressions of religion.”“Christians have two major markers in their lives: When they become Christians, and when they go to Heaven. But most Christians don’t know what to do in between those two markers, and that’s because churches don’t teach them,” Jeremiah said. “The whole idea that God expects us to build character in our lives is a foreign thing to so many people because it hasn’t been taught and explained from our pulpits.”
The War over America’s Past Is Really about Its Future
In an effort to scrub American History of anything that is not considered politically correct by today's snowflake brigade, the leftists are systematically destroying our nation's foundation and collective memory. The leftist narrative states that America is a racist, no-good, misogynist, paternalistic, capitalist wasteland founded by crooks and scoundrels. Instead, the leftists offer Americans the hope of a new socialist utopia. In destroying our past, the leftists are dooming America to repeating the mistakes of previous socialist/totalitarian "utopias" that are now on the trash heap of history. It was George Santayana (1863-1952), who stated, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."Victor Davis Hanson takes aim at the atrocities being committed by leftists revisionists:
In their radical progressive view — shared by billionaires from Silicon Valley, recent immigrants, and the new Democratic party — America was flawed, perhaps fatally, at its origins. Things have not gotten much better in the country’s subsequent 243 years, nor will they get any better — at least not until America as we know it is dismantled and replaced by a new nation predicated on race, class, and gender identity-politics agendas.In this view, an “okay” America is no better than other countries. As Barack Obama once bluntly put it, America is exceptional only in relative terms, given that citizens of Greece and the United Kingdom believe that their own countries are just as exceptional. In other words, there is no absolute standard by which to judge a nation’s excellence.About half the country disagrees. It insists that America’s sins, past and present, are those of mankind. But only in America were human failings constantly critiqued and addressed.America does not have be perfect to be good. As the world’s wealthiest democracy, it certainly has given people from all over the world greater security and affluence than any other nation in history — with the largest economy, largest military, greatest energy production, and most top-ranked universities in the world.The traditionalists see American history as a unique effort to overcome human weakness, bias, and sin. That effort is unmatched by other cultures and nations, and it explains why millions of foreign nationals swarm into the United States, both legally and illegally.These arguments over our past are really over the present — and especially the future.If progressives and socialists can at last convince the American public that their country was always hopelessly flawed, they can gain power to remake it based on their own interests. These elites see Americans not as unique individuals but as race, class, and gender collectives, with shared grievances from the past that must be paid out in the present and the future.We’ve seen something like this fight before, in 1861 — and it didn’t end well.
Abortion debate: Whose rights take precedence?
The abortion debate has hinged on a crucial question: is the baby in the mother's womb a human being? The pro-life advocate says a human baby is a person and has a fundamental right to life, while the pro-abortion advocate argues that "the fetus" is not a human/person and therefore the woman's right to bodily autonomy is greater than a fetus' right to life.While the question of personhood is another false narrative created by the pro-abortion advocacy groups, I found this quote from the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights incredibly ironic given the strong pro-abortion stand of the UN during the last 45 years. I quote from an article by Katherine Ranck via The Christian Post:
The Preamble of this declaration recognizes “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” (Emphasis mine). The rights protected by this declaration, among many others, include the right to life, the right to freedom, protection against torture or cruel punishment, protection from discrimination, and the right to be recognized everywhere as a person. As members of the human race, the unborn deserve these same rights and protections. The final article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.” Abortion is an act “aimed at the destruction of . . . the rights and freedoms” of the preborn child. The right to life, the right not to be discriminated against based on their size, development, location, or dependency, the right not to be tortured, and the right to personhood.This now begs the question, which right receives precedence? Many advocates for abortion claim that because of the nature between the woman and the child (fetus), they cannot both have equal moral and legal rights. Unless one holds to a Darwinian ethic of “survival of the fittest,” where the stronger have the right and obligation to overpower the weaker, ethics and our legal system call for a higher moral obligation to protect the most vulnerable among us. The Oxford Dictionary defines a vulnerable person as “[A person] in need of special care, support, or protection because of age, disability, or risk of abuse or neglect.” The United Nations has an entire section dedicated to the rights of children and the most vulnerable, being the disabled (children, women, migrants, the poor, minorities, etc.). The Preamble to the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989 defines “child” as, “every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier” and notes that there needs to be “particular care” extended to the child “Bearing in mind that, as indicated in the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, ‘the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth’”
Abortion is not acting out of one’s own right to bodily autonomy. It is acting to take away the human rights of another person. This does not make the woman any less human. This does not take away a woman’s rights. It only forbids her from taking away the rights of another person. As members of the human family, the preborn have the right to live, to grow, to thrive. They have the right not to be poisoned or town limb from limb. The have the right to be protected. Our society and our nation have failed to ensure that ALL humans’ rights are protected. The most vulnerable of all humans have been disallowed their rights. Enough is enough. It is past time to demand that all humans, all members of the human family, are awarded the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.