Quick Hits

Graham Linehan: I was arrested for speaking my mind, in another country.

When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. I couldn't help myself. "Don't tell me! You've been sent by trans activists," I said. The officers didn't react.

This was the theme throughout most of the day. Among the rank and file of the police, there was a sort of polite bafflement. They were entirely professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about.

Once the officers began reading me my rights, and I realized what was happening, the red mist descended. The officers saw how upset I was and treated me gently after that. They even arranged for a van to meet me on the tarmac so I didn't have to be perp-walked through the airport like a terrorist. Small mercies.

At Heathrow police station, my belt, bag, and devices were confiscated. Then I was shown into a small, green-tiled cell with a bunk and a silver toilet in the corner.
Later, during my interview with an officer, the tone shifted. He asked about each of the posts in turn, with the sort of earnest intensity usually reserved for discussing something serious like. . . oh, I don't know--crime?

I explained that the post about punching a trans-identified man in a female-only space was a serious point made with a joke. Men who enter women's spaces are abusers, and they need to be challenged every time.

The officer mentioned the term trans people. I asked him what he meant by the phrase. "People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth," he said.

"Assigned at birth?" I responded. "Our sex isn't assigned." He called it semantics. I told him he was using activist language.

Eventually, a nurse came to check on me and found my blood pressure was over 200 mm Hg--stroke territory. So, I was escorted to the emergency room, where I wrote this piece after spending about eight hours under observation.

The doctors suggested the high blood pressure was stress-related, combined with long-haul travel and lack of movement. I feel a contributing factor might have been that I've now spent eight years being targeted by trans activists working in tandem with police in a dedicated, persistent harassment campaign, all because I refuse to believe that men can become women.

I was offered bail, on one condition: I am not to go on X. That's it. No threats, no speeches about the seriousness of my crimes--just a legal gag order designed to shut me up while I'm in the UK, and a demand I face another police interview in October.

Linehan was right -- he was reported by a disgraced ex-cop tranny activist.

A disgraced transgender police officer is believed to have reported Graham Linehan, the gender-critic Father Ted creator, to the police over his social media posts.

Former Pc Lynsay Watson, who was born Alex Horwood--

Spoiler: He still is Alex Horwood and always will be.

-- was sacked by Leicestershire Police for gross misconduct in 2023 after allegedly harassing a free speech campaigner and critic of gender ideology.

An anonymous social media account, believed to be linked to Watson, boasted in April this year of reporting Linehan to the police over several social media posts he made about transgender issues. The account encouraged other transgender activists to do the same.

Watson has a well-documented history of calling on police forces to pursue criminal investigations of campaigners who are sceptical of the belief that self-identification, and not biological sex, determines what a man or woman is.

What a shock -- an Arab propagandist is branding a Jewish woman "the real Nazi here."

Jenin Younes @JeninYounesEsq

I am being attacked for a tweet I wrote this morning comparing Bari Weiss to Goebbels. I made this comparison for a reason. Bari Weiss intentionally put a target on journalist Refaat Al-Areer, resulting in the IDF killing him and his family, knowing that when she says "jump," the IDF asks "how high?"

Wait, so the IDF controls America, but the IDF is controlled by Bari Weiss?

Oh, I give up, who can fathom these Jewish plots.

She has published countless articles denying and/or justifying Israel's genocide in Gaza.

A council of rarefied experts declared it so!

Recently, she touted a piece by fellow propagandist Olivia Reingold, claiming that there's no real starvation in Gaza because many of the children who are dying have shrapnel in their skulls from Israeli bombs and conditions like Rickets.

And also, because Hamas propagandists fake the starvation pictures by claiming that children with muscular dystrophy are only skinny because of Jews.

And also -- who cares? You people will not stop making war on other people despite being shit at making war. That's why your "wars" are simply terrorist murder sprees.

If you want an end to war and all of its miseries, then stop making perpetual war on all non-Muslims!

Now there's an idea, huh?

And also: The Palestinians are settlers, and attacking settlers is justified.

And yes, there are Baby Palestinian Settlers. No seriously, the Palestinians run Sesame-Street-like propaganda featuring toddlers carrying AK-47s and threatening to blow themselves up in martyrdom-granting Jew bombings. So they're valid targets.

That's how this works, right, Hasan "Baby Settlers" Piker?

In what she undoubtedly considers a huge accomplishment, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is responsible for the deaths of at least 100,000 Palestinians including at least 20,000 children, promoted this piece.

Since we're just making numbers up, I have consulted my fellow Experts in the comments and we are now declaring that Netanyahu has killed tennity-billion Palestinians.

Weiss has made it her life's work to defend Israel's actions at all costs--including the killing of children; indeed, she has said as much. I judge people by their actions and their words, not by their identity. That Weiss happens to also be a Jewish lesbian plays no role in my assessment of her morality (or lack thereof). I do not apologize.

Stephen L. Miller @redsteeze

One of the final obstacles to dehumanizing Jews for these people is to remove the holocaust completely from their history, for Hamas sympathizers to say, "Actually, Jews are Nazis and WE are the ones in concentration camps and gas chambers and genocided."

It's very purposeful. It's part of the playbook.

Will we ever be free of unending Palestinian propaganda justifying their unending murders?

On Aug. 27, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform launched a probe into the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, to determine the role and the methods of foreign individuals in manipulating articles on the platform to influence U.S. public opinion. In the committee's letter to the foundation's CEO, committee Chair James Comer and Subcommittee on Cybersecurity Chair Nancy Mace requested "documents and information related to actions by Wikipedia volunteer editors" to uncover "potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles."

I shed light on these organized efforts in an October 2024 investigative report. Specifically, I identified a network of more than three dozen editors--whom I dubbed the "Gang of 40"--who systematically pushed the most extreme anti-Zionist narratives on Wikipedia. These editors have made 850,000 combined edits across 10,000 articles related to Israel, effectively reshaping the entire topic area. Last month, the group scored its latest and perhaps most brazen victory when a Wikipedia administrator issued a final rejection to an appeal on an extraordinary 12-month freeze these editors had pushed to place on the lead section of the "Zionism" article, thus prohibiting any changes to their edits during that period.

The episode began in January 2024, when Gang of 40 editors implemented what they called a moratorium on a hotly debated sentence inserted by one of the group's leading members in the article's opening paragraph: "Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible."

That claim--which represents the Gang of 40's underlying strategy of equating Zionism with ethnic cleansing or genocide--now caps the second sentence of the most important resource defining Zionism online, and Wikipedia has ruled that it cannot be challenged or corrected for a year.

Several leading Gang of 40 members appear to be foreign citizens, and at least one seems to be aligned with the interests of Iran.

Wikipedia made this exceptional ruling even though the sentence in question was written by Levivich, a veteran editor who was banned along with six other Gang of 40 editors in a sweeping arbitration proceeding (officially called Palestine-Israel articles 5, or PIA5) that followed my initial investigation. In that report, I found that top members of the group--including Nishidani, Selfstudier, Nableezy, Iskander323, Makeandtoss, and Levivich (all of whom would be topic-banned in PIA5)--coordinated over the course of years to systematically recast Zionism through the lenses of colonialism and racial supremacy.

Oh great, another group of "experts" is making an "authoritative declaration."

A group of hundreds of former U.S. intelligence officials -- including some who signed the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter -- has reemerged on the scene to attack FBI Director Kash Patel and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard while handing out endorsements to leftwing Trump foes such as Abigail Spanberger and Eugene Vindman.

The Steady State, a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt "social welfare organization," claims that it has "300+ members" who are former national security officials who "continue to promote democracy, rule of law, and national security based on the values shared by most Americans." The group says it was first formed in 2016 in opposition to President Donald Trump. The group endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, and now has reemerged more prominently in the second Trump term.

Unlike 501(c)(3) public charities, under the tax laws, donations made to a 501(c)(4) are generally not tax-deductible for the donor. At the same time, a 501(c)(4) is allowed to endorse candidates, engage with campaigns even on a paid level, and engage in other political activities.

The first rule of Steady State is don't talk about Steady State

The group says it has been operating since 2016, but its website only appears to have launched in March 2020 -- premiering with an endorsement of then-candidate Biden for president.

Rick Wilson, a leader of the Lincoln Project (a leftist group now promoted by the Steady State), tweeted in November 2019 that "the idea that *anyone* inside the Trump Admin is 'the Resistance' or 'the Steady State' or ANYTHING other than complicit in his corruption, illegality, and overall fuckery is a risible lie."

And it turns out short fat angry low-T "man" Rick Wilson was lying. Now there's a plot twist worthy of its own Scooby-Doo mystery.

"The domestic and international threats that led us to action in 2020 have not disappeared. The gains we have made remain fragile," the group's website now says. "The threats to our democracy and international stability and security have evolved, and in some ways become more acute. The need to promote the values that brought us together three years ago remains as strong as, if not stronger than, ever."

Steven A. Cash, the executive director of the group, told a podcast in June that "I think the Steady State wouldn't exist, probably, if it wasn't for Donald Trump. So we have to be honest about that." Cash told another podcast in May that one-third of the group's members are from the intelligence community, one third from the State Department, and one third from elsewhere. Many of the group's members are not public.

Cash did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to him by Just the News through his LinkedIn, and the Steady State did not immediately respond to a request for comment either.

The October 2020 laptop letter, written to give Biden a "talking point" in his debate against Trump, contributed to the baseless narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop stories were nothing but a product of Russian disinformation -- a narrative happily seized upon by Biden's 2020 campaign and spread by some of the laptop letter signers.

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Just the News also recently reported that yet another Steady State group member who signed the letter, Larry Pfeiffer, the former chief of staff to then-CIA director Michael Hayden (who also signed the laptop letter), has continued to suggest, without any credible evidence, that "the Russians played some role" in the incriminating laptop. Pfeiffer promoted the Steady State in August, tweeting, "Follow us please."

In attempting to justify his baseless claim about the laptop, Pfeiffer had told the SpyTalk podcast audience to read an article written by and podcasts done by retired CIA officer John Sipher -- who is also a member of the Steady State group. Sipher, a co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, previously said he was proud to have played his part in influencing the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden -- before backtracking and claiming he was being sarcastic.

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The group has also harshly criticized the declassification efforts by Gabbard related to Russiagate.

"Tulsi Gabbard's role in disclosing classified intelligence in an attempt to validate the coup narrative exemplifies the dangers of politicizing intelligence. Her actions not only contravene the warnings of intelligence professionals but also endanger sensitive national security information," the Steady State wrote in August.

Cash went on PBS's Newshour in August to attack Attorney General Pam Bondi over the Trump DOJ allegedly investigating whether any of those officials involved in the Russiagate hoax may have committed crimes. Cash claimed that "we had a tremendous amount of accountability" already and that Bondi's efforts were "bizarre."

Media Research Center: You're not going to believe this, but CNN "anchorwoman" Abby Philip interrupts conservatives 42 times more (not 42% more, 42 times more) than leftists.

Now Scott, don't you think your rhetoric is too strong in pointing that out?

Since last summer, when CNN NewsNight shifted to an panel discussion-only format, host Abby Phillip has been praised for consistently inviting prominent conservatives onto the otherwise lopsidedly left-wing network. But with how rarely Phillip actually permits said conservative guests to finish a point without interrupting them, NewsNight is more akin to a televised struggle session than the beacon of ideological diversity as which it's sometimes portrayed.

Summary of Findings:

* During a random sample of ten episodes of CNN NewsNight, Phillip interrupted a guest explicitly to contradict him or her ("adversarial interruption") 130 times. Of those, 127 (~98%) were conservatives, while just three (~2%) were liberals. Thus, conservatives were interrupted adversarially 42 times more often than liberals.

* Conservatives were interrupted 60% of the time and were interrupted adversarially 58% of the time. Liberals were interrupted only 8% of the time and were interrupted adversarially just 1% of the time.

* Of the 30 guests (~96%) who were never interrupted adversarially, 29 were liberals. The sole conservative to avoid being cut off by Phillip spoke only twice, for a total of 68 seconds.

MRC analysts examined a randomly-selected sample of ten different episodes of CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip from the second Trump presidency. Each time Phillip interrupted a guest, analysts took note of the timecode, the guest's political affiliation (either conservative or liberal), and the reason for the interruption (to contradict to speaker, to agree with and/or add to the speaker's point, or to direct the conversation to another topic).

Throughout the ten NewsNight editions examined, we found Phillip interrupted guests a total of 149 times. Conservatives were cut off 132 times, while liberals were cut off just 17 times -- a disparity of nearly eight-to-one . That's far from an even split, but likely significantly better than what conservative readers might have guessed.

The numbers look even worse when one factors in the purpose of the interruption: Phillip silenced a conservative guest in order to contest a point 127 times, compared to a paltry 3 times for liberal guests. That means Abby Phillip adversarially interrupted conservatives 42 times more often as she did with liberals.

Don't worry, they'll be bankrupt in two years.

Les Files Twitter, maitenent en Francais.

At this moment, the Trump administration is negotiating with the EU over final obstacles to a trade deal, one of which is European censorship of US social media platforms.

Many analysts believe the massive size of the EU will lead US social media firms to impose European censorship, including on Americans. Last year, the EU's then-top digital censor, Thierry Breton, threatened action against Elon Musk after he announced a conversation on X with Donald Trump.

Now, new TWITTER FILES show a coordinated effort by France's President Emmanuel Macron, legislators, and state-affiliated NGOs working together to force the world's most influential social media platform to censor users for legal speech and influence Twitter's worldwide "content moderation" for narrative control.

What's more, TWITTER FILES - FRANCE reveals the birth of the censorship-by-NGO proxy strategy at the heart of the Censorship Industrial Complex:

-- President Macron personally reached out to then-CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey;

-- The timing of Macron's action strongly suggests coordination with NGOs on a pressure campaign to win more censorship and demand sensitive user data from Twitter;

-- The pattern of events indicates potentially illegal activity by various actors.

The TWITTER FILES FRANCE investigation was led by @McmahonPascal and @battleforeurope, and edited by @galexybrane and @shellenberger. We are releasing the Files here on X and simultaneously publishing a comprehensive report by Clerótte and Fazi on France's invention of the Censorship Industrial Complex.

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4. "This case is largely about painting Twitter as a dangerous actor in the press."

Macron's request for Dorsey's number appears to be linked with the simultaneous launch of a lawsuit by four French government-linked NGOs against Twitter.

"We were sued back in the spring by four NGOs claiming that we are not doing enough to address hate speech in France (and comparing us unfavorably with Facebook and others)," wrote Karen Colangelo, Associate Director of Litigation, Regulatory, and Competition at Twitter, in an October 19, 2020, email to colleagues. "They seek to have an expert appointed to examine our reporting and enforcement systems."

Colangelo didn't think the goal of the NGOs was to win the lawsuit, which was without merit. Rather, she said, "This case is largely about painting Twitter as a dangerous actor in the press."

I really want to make them rue the day they declared war on dissident speech by outlawing their fucking speech -- and backing that ban up with arrests and jail time. Let them enjoy being silenced.

A couple of years ago we saw that low-cost drones were now capable of taking out $30 million tanks. And killing soldiers with grenades dropped from cheap drones with perfect precision.

I wondered how the US would respond to this threat, because we depend on the asymmetrical advantage of having the most expensive firepower money can buy.

Ukrainians are demonstrating that maybe it's not so hard or expensive to defend against drones.

Ukrainians are hunting down Russian drones armed with nothing more than shotguns and rifles while dangling out of prop lanes as part of a low-tech solution to Moscow's high-tech aerial assassins.

Although Kyiv has some of the West's most advanced air-defense systems, including US-made Patriot missiles and F-16 jets, the nation has been forced to deploy such unconventional tactics to counter Russia's ever-escalating drone bombardments because of the sheer number of devices being deployed.

Pilots and gunners in Ukraine's 11th Army Aviation Brigade have been tapped to take the Soviet-era Yak-52 prop planes to the skies, with the two-person aircraft shooting down 120 drones this past year with only shotguns and rifles, the Wall Street Journal reported.

"There is such great new technology now, yet I am still hanging out of the cockpit shooting at drones with a shotgun," said an auto mechanic-turned gunner who has shot down more than 60 Russian UAVs.

The tactics of the 11th bring back aerial warfare to its World War I days, where marksmen had to lean out of their cockpits with a gun to take out the enemy fighters.

The Yak-52 is so basic that it has no radar, with the pilots only guided by radio before having to rely on their own eyes to spot the Russian drones soaring over the border.

The prop planes fly within 200 to 300 feet of the drone before the gunner opens his plane's canopy to fire.

One of the gunners of the 11th likened the experience to an extreme version of a soldier having to fire his gun while riding on a horse.

The cockpit gets so cold that the pilots and gunners need thick jackets and fur-lined helmets to stay warm, yet another detail that harkens back to the beginnings of aerial combat.

Despite the seemingly low-tech solution, these tactics account for about 10% to 12% of all drones intercepted by Ukraine on a typical day, according to the 11th's deputy commander, Col. Mykola Lykhatskiy.

posted by Ace at 06:45 PM

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