'Bring the rifles'

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Hundreds of companies use the software company Benevity to connect with nonprofits, allowing employees to donate their time and money, but Benevity systematically blacklists conservative nonprofits, and those nonprofits are now speaking out. “We, the undersigned organizations, urge Benevity to immediately end the use of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s ‘Hate Map’ and ‘Hate List’ in determining which nonprofits are eligible for corporate charitable giving and employee matching programs,” reads the letter, signed by 12 conservative groups and exclusively provided first to The Daily Signal. “By relying on these partisan designations, Benevity legitimizes a severely biased blacklist that inspires violence, urges discrimination against mainstream organizations, and undermines the spirit of charitable giving,” the letter adds. Benevity Benevity provides a platform for corporations to manage philanthropic efforts, such as providing a way for employees to donate to nonprofits before taxes, matching employee contributions, facilitating employee volunteering, and making corporate grants to nonprofits. According to its website, Benevity connects “nearly 1,000 enterprise companies” to a network of 513,000 nonprofits after vetting 2.2 million of them. It says it has managed $16 billion in grants and 99 million employee volunteer hours. In 2023, more than 2.3 million people donated through the Benevity platform, representing $3.2 billion. 1792 Exchange, a nonprofit that exposes bias in corporate businesses, has counted 224 of the Fortune 1,000 companies that use Benevity. The list includes Accenture, Adobe, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, American Express, Apple, AT&T, Best Buy, Cigna, Coca Cola, Costco, John Deere, Lowe’s, Macy’s, McDonalds, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Paramount, Salesforce, Spotify, UPS, and many more. In 2021, then-Benevity CEO Kelly Schmitt delivered a PowerPoint presentation explicitly stating that the company had “vetted” almost “2 million nonprofits,” adding that it used the “Southern Poverty Law Center Hate List.” The conservative nonprofits’ letter notes that “there are also recent reports of employees from major corporations that Benevity’s system blocked them from donating to Turning Point USA because of the SPLC’s designation. At the same time, left-leaning political groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and Planned Parenthood remain fully eligible for Benevity’s platform.” The SPLC The SPLC gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy, but it now puts mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” with Klan groups, suggesting they represent a similar threat to Americans. The SPLC “hate map” includes Alliance Defending Freedom, a premier conservative Christian law firm that has won multiple cases at the U.S. Supreme Court; Do No Harm, a group of doctors committed to ridding medicine of divisive racial ideologies and opposed to “gender-affirming care;” the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which monitors the threat of radical Islamist extremism; and Moms for Liberty, a group of parents demanding a say in their kids’ education. These and other groups signed the letter to Benevity. “The SPLC’s claim to be a civil rights organization cannot be taken seriously,” the signatories wrote. “Instead, it is a political weapon that targets mainstream libertarian, conservative, religious, and family advocacy organizations for ideological reasons.” The signatories claim the SPLC attacks organizations “not because of violence or extremism, but because they dissent from the SPLC’s preferred progressive orthodoxy.” Inspiring Violence The letter notes that the “hate list” Benevity uses to screen nonprofits has inspired violence. “In 2012, a gunman entered the Family Research Council’s Washington, D.C., headquarters intending to commit mass murder,” the letter states. “He later admitted that he chose his target after seeing it labeled on the SPLC’s website. By using the SPLC’s lists to vet charities, Benevity reinforces and perpetuates a dangerous mechanism that has already been used to justify violence against peaceful Americans.” The Family Research Council also signed the letter. The letter also notes that the SPLC added Turning Point USA to its “hate map” earlier this year, shortly before the assassination of Turning Point USA’s founder, Charlie Kirk. “While federal authorities have not yet confirmed whether the assassin accessed the SPLC’s website, the timing and context raise deeply troubling questions.” “SPLC leadership itself has admitted that its ultimate goal is not to educate the public but to ‘destroy’ its ideological opponents,” the letter adds. After the Kirk assassination, FBI Director Kash Patel told The Daily Signal that all of the bureau’s “ties with the SPLC have been officially terminated.” He called the group a “partisan smear machine” and said its “disgraceful record” makes the group “unfit for any FBI partnership.” The conservative groups ask Benevity to “publicly end its use of the SPLC’s hate list and hate map, adopt a viewpoint-neutral process for nonprofit eligibility, and restore access to organizations unfairly excluded.” They note that Benevity’s new CEO, Soraya Alexander, will start on Nov. 1, and add that this transition “presents a valuable opportunity” for the new CEO to champion fairness and objectivity. The conservative groups also urge corporations using Benevity’s platform to join them in asking the platform to disavow the SPLC, and to “discontinue their partnership with Benevity until these changes are made.” “Charitable giving should empower generosity, not enforce ideology,” the letter concludes. The list of signatories includes Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Family Association, the Center for Christian Virtue, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Do No Harm, the Family Policy Alliance, the Family Research Council, GenSpect, Moms for Liberty, Partners for Ethical Care, 1792 Exchange, and Them Before Us. Benevity Open LetterDownload The post The Sneaky Way Corporate America Blacklists Conservatives, and How Some Are Fighting Back appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Governments around the world have a long history of introducing laws that restrict speech while insisting they are not acts of censorship. Each new proposal is framed as a measure to promote safety, combat misinformation, or protect vulnerable communities, yet the result is often the same: expanded state authority over what citizens can say or share. Now Canada’s Attorney General Sean Fraser is attempting to reassure Canadians that the federal government’s new hate speech legislation, Bill C-9, is not a disguised attempt to police online expression. The proposal, already facing strong opposition from free expression advocates, introduces new “hate-related” offenses and expands police powers over what is labeled “hatred” in the Criminal Code. Fraser told MPs that the government is not seeking to criminalize internet activity that is currently legal. “We should recognize there are many acts we may find offensive that do not constitute hate for the purpose of the Criminal Code,” he said during his appearance before the Commons justice committee. He insisted the bill’s purpose is not censorship, even as he confirmed that its provisions would apply equally to speech on the internet and in public spaces. The legislation, officially titled An Act To Amend The Criminal Code (Combatting Hate Act), also bans the display of Nazi and Hamas symbols that are deemed to promote hatred, makes it an offense to obstruct religious or cultural ceremonies, and rewrites how “hatred” is defined. The bill frames it as “the emotion that involves detestation or vilification and that is stronger than disdain or dislike.” Free speech advocates have warned that this rewording lowers the legal bar by abandoning the Supreme Court’s requirement that hatred must be “an emotion of an intense and extreme nature.” Fraser responded that any online statement would only be subject to prosecution if it already met the threshold for hate propaganda under existing law. “The only circumstance where you could imagine some online comment attracting scrutiny under this law would attach to behavior that is criminal today but is punished less severely,” he told the committee. The federal government has repeatedly tried to expand hate speech laws in recent years. Two previous efforts, Bills C-36 and C-63, collapsed under public pressure and procedural failure. Bill C-36 would have allowed fines of up to $70,000 or house arrest for “legal content deemed to incite hatred,” while the Online Harms Act (Bill C-63) proposed life sentences for repeat offenders and monetary rewards for complainants. Both were shelved before becoming law. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Canada’s AG Claims Anti-“Hate” Law Isn’t About Censorship appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Don Lemon: Get a Gun and Prepare to Fight ICE

Dem Strategist: Of Course Bragg, James Used Lawfare to Bury Trump

An industrial pollutant may have been driving human evolution for millions of years.

The hairs are found on the juvenile and young adult snails.

Make no bones about it.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, a growing network of nongovernmental organizations, politicians, and corporations have pushed for sweeping global health initiatives. They lobby for massive funding, insisting it will prevent the next international health crisis.Groups such as the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation, and the U.S. government have saturated the media with calls for “equity” and “preparedness.” Together, they established the Pandemic Fund — a financial pool designed to channel money into their shared vision of global health management.It takes little imagination to see how a fund directed by Gates-linked institutions could steer money — intentionally or not — toward companies in which he holds a stake.According to its website, the Pandemic Fund “finances critical investments to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response capacities at national, regional, and global levels, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries.” In practice, it serves as a central clearinghouse for governments, NGOs, and business coalitions to move money under the banner of “health security.”The funds flow to “implementing entities” such as the World Bank; the WHO; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and UNICEF. These organizations, in turn, decide how the investments are distributed — and to whom. Each claims to act on behalf of public health, but their reach and influence often extend far beyond medicine into politics, surveillance, and control.Convenient ambiguityWho actually gets paid to implement these objectives? What do “surveillance” and “prevention” mean in practice? How is “preparedness” measured? Which corporations manage the process, and whose services are contracted for the lab upgrades? None of these questions has a straight answer. The fund’s language reads like a bureaucratic fog — dense, opaque, and unaccountable.What the Pandemic Fund does provide is a clear list of donors: the United States, the Gates Foundation, and several European governments. It also highlights 47 active projects spanning 75 countries.What it doesn’t provide is equally telling. The site omits the names of officials who manage the money in each country, the ownership of the laboratories, and the companies installing the surveillance systems. Even the identities of those delivering “medical support” remain concealed behind the veil of “global cooperation.”Conflicts of interestBeyond its opacity, the Pandemic Fund is riddled with conflicts of interest. The Gates Foundation ranks among its largest institutional donors, while Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, acts as an “implementing entity” responsible for distributing those same funds.Gavi’s own website acknowledges that the Gates Foundation was both a founding partner and a seed donor, contributing $750 million at its launch in 2000. That relationship alone should raise questions. Gavi now helps allocate the Pandemic Fund’s grants, meaning one of its original funders plays a direct role in deciding where new money goes.The potential conflicts run deeper. Bill Gates has invested heavily in Moderna and BioNTech, two of the world’s leading mRNA vaccine manufacturers. The Gates Foundation funded Moderna’s early mRNA work, and public records show that Gates himself owns more than 1 million shares of BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer to produce the COVID-19 vaccine.It takes little imagination to see how a fund directed by Gates-linked institutions could steer money — intentionally or not — toward companies in which he holds a stake.The web of influence extends into policy enforcement. The World Health Organization’s director-general oversees the International Health Regulations, a global framework that allows governments to impose quarantine, testing, or vaccination requirements during declared health emergencies. The United States accepted the IHR in 2005 but rejected the most recent amendments adopted in 2024, formally withdrawing from those obligations in July of this year.Even so, the structure remains in place. If Washington — or any other government — adopted tighter compliance measures, it could channel money from the Pandemic Fund to purchase vaccines and “countermeasures.” Pharmaceutical companies would profit handsomely from policies that treat mass vaccination as the first and only line of defense. The more the world relies on vaccines as a universal solution, the more secure the profits for investors like Gates.The Gates Foundation’s influence doesn’t stop at funding or investment. It appears on the WHO’s list of official “non-state actors,” a category that allows direct collaboration on projects and participation in committee meetings. In other words, the foundation helps set global health standards and then funds the programs that enforce them.RELATED: Researchers tied to Fauci’s COVID cover-up still scoring big NIH grants Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty ImagesAmerican taxpayers foot the billAt the end of the chain, American taxpayers pay for it all. Washington’s seemingly benevolent $700 million “donation” to the Pandemic Fund comes straight from the U.S. Treasury. Every dollar funneled into this global health consortium began as someone’s paycheck.In practice, the fund operates less like a charity and more like a taxpayer-financed slush fund for international health bureaucrats and private interests. The U.S. government collects money from citizens, passes it through the fund, and watches as the Gates Foundation, the WHO, and their network of NGOs redirect it to vaccine manufacturers, foreign governments, and organizations with which they maintain deep financial and institutional ties.This system of influence moves wealth in one direction — up and out. Money leaves the hands of American workers and flows to a global health elite that hides behind the language of “pandemic prevention.” The slogans of safety and preparedness disguise a network that rewards insiders and deepens the dependence it claims to end.Congress and federal auditors need to dig into where this money actually goes and who profits from it. Americans deserve to know whether their taxes support genuine public health or line the pockets of the same institutions that cashed in during the last pandemic.

Is there anything more off-putting than a tech founder who concern-trolls himself — warning with deep seriousness that the things he's doing are actually quite troubling and we all need to get serious about passing laws that will mitigate their consequences before disaster strikes?I don't know — I don't want to know! — but one related instance currently going viral highlights why it's worse than a mere turnoff. In a heartfelt cry for help, Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, one of the leading AI companies, posted a long warning about how dangerous his frontier technology really is and how it's our responsibility to take action to remedy that.“Make no mistake: what we are dealing with is a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine," he writes. "In fact, some people are even spending tremendous amounts of money to convince you of this — that’s not an artificial intelligence about to go into a hard takeoff, it’s just a tool. ... It’s just a machine, and machines are things we master." To the contrary, he insists that "what we are dealing with is a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine," one that, despite his optimism about AI's benefits, leaves him "deeply afraid."There's only one thing that can justify human existence over and above that of the most powerful tools we can build.Now, it is notable that Anthropic has a certain reputation. David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto chief, posted in response that the company "is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering. It is principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem."In fact, as the New York Post recently reported, Anthropic is on a "collision" course with the Trump administration due to its deep, elite connections with the left-wing political machine, ranging from previous administrations to the Ford Foundation, one of the so-called "nongovernmental organizations" the White House has blamed in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination for fomenting and funding political violence.But worse, in a sense, are Anthropic's links to effective altruism, a cultlike Silicon Valley movement whose brushes with large-scale fraud (in the FTX scandal starring Sam Bankman-Fried) and polyamory have led even eccentric and controversial figures like Sam Altman to raise red flags. As former FTC chief technologist and Abundance Institute AI policy head Neil Chilson has explained, today EA figures are best known for pushing extraordinary crackdowns on AI development, ranging from "authoritarian" policy responses to literally calling in the airstrikes on AI data centers, an approach driven by their insistence that runaway AI is an apocalyptic development sure to wipe out humanity unless we collectively act first.To be clear, Anthropic's founders have distanced themselves from EA in public remarks, and Clark's recommendations do not include anything like nuking AI from orbit just to be sure. In fact, he should be commended for his call to listen more to "labor groups, social groups, and religious leaders" on the subject of our future relationship with our most powerful technologies.But there is no escaping the fact that the ultimate goal behind the alarm raised by Anthropic's leadership and the EA network sharing its orbit is to take coordinated global legal action to pervasively restrict and dictate the course of technological development from the very highest level on down. This is something many Americans instinctively reject, whatever their fears or concerns about AI might be. It is easy to see how such an approach would disregard the Constitution right out of the box. But the appeal being made is to higher-scale principles and powers than the Constitution's or the American people's. And ultimately, in this context, weaving in the "voices" of "stakeholders" across various "communities" is merely a means to that end, a diversitarian stamp of moral legitimacy that, as a core part of DEI's use as an algorithm to create a new global governance regime, has already worn out its welcome.So what do we do?I would hardly characterize myself as a "religious leader," but the fact is that very few Christians have spent recent years working seriously across the interrelated fields of tech theory and practice, and in that capacity I do want to offer a perspective that can prove useful to cutting through the increasingly intractable and fruitless debates between "nones" who love (or even worship) AI and "nones" who hate (or even want to destroy) it.The overarching problem posed by the Anthropic controversy is that people who do not believe that our given human being is sacred really can't be trusted with legal control over the technology they think is going to obliterate our humanity — because they fail to understand that no law can ever save us from destroying ourselves regardless of how much technology has advanced in any particular direction, and they fail to grasp that we will continuously destroy ourselves in ever more feverish ways the more we reject God's own message that He created us in an act of love so great that our relationship to Him is familial, calling us to reciprocate that love and act toward one another accordingly.RELATED: Against the Butlerian Jihad! Photo by Tobias Schwarz/Getty ImagesThere's only one thing that can justify human existence over and above that of the most powerful tools we can build. Only one thing that can justify our authority and control over those tools. Nature, reason, philosophy, myth, story, legend, ethics, ideology, rights, might ... none of these suffice any more.The only thing that will do is faithful belief in the truth of the Christian anthropology: that our given human form, including its visible and invisible parts, is sacred in the highest — for we were given that form, as the consummation and microcosm of all creation, because of how unfathomably the immeasurably supreme God loved and loves us, individually and together, even unto the degree that we can and must call Him not just Lord or Master, but Father, so that we can freely return His complete and total love with our own.Nothing else will hold the line against occultism, obscurantism, destitution, servitude, profanation, disenchantment, and despair in the realm of AI or any other technology capable, if pushed, of simulating the human person and the human soul to the point of complete deception and delusion. It just so happens that "we" have pushed technology to a degree that this uncomfortable truth about what justifies our existence (as it always has) is coming ever more starkly and inarguably out into the open.Of course, a lot of people really don't want this to be true, for all the endless reasons and rationales we are all extremely familiar with. You would think that the revelation of "this one weird trick" would cause waves of relief to spread joyously across the world, but no. The most prominent reactions are from those who would rather flee into the underground catacombs or dive into the black hole of the Borg.These foolish attempts at a hasty solution will not just fail you as a person; they will fail the many, many millions desperately thirsting to be trustably, authoritatively led into the more strenuous and tension-filled but more peaceful and beautiful middle way between the two great negational temptations.Abandoning the people and the devil take the hindmost 300 million-plus is a poor way of loving one's fellow creatures so beloved by God that in them He commands us to see His very self. Obey the commandments (Matthew 22:37-40) with discernment, patience, discipline, humility, loving-kindness, and long-suffering, and we can have "nice things" like technological advancement and flourishing communities and so forth. Seek ye first the kingdom, and the rest will follow.Seek ye other stuff — such as a simulation so powerful that there, all experience and memory of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are obliterated, and the rest will follow from that.Start in your heartThis is emphatically NOT about attacking or debunking or destroying other faiths, doctrines, ideologies, wishes, passions, agendas, or anything else. The time has come to deny pride of place to blaming the other instead of the self, to fixating on what the other says or does instead of what lurks within and issues forth from one's own heart (Matthew 15:18-20).This is about the urgency of taking up the calm and quiet invitation to pursue an active, affirmative path that unlocks the kind of future so many thirst for and even say they want. It's so simple. It doesn't require anything of us that can't be done by just about any person, regardless of place or time. I like to "joke" that "Interstellar" is a movie about how men will literally shoot themselves into a black hole instead of going to church. It's not a joke, of course. That temptation, right to the very limit of sanity and imagination, is always there somewhere, lurking in our hearts, ever since the Fall.Drawing near to your fellow man, drawing near to God, is often painful, scary, "destabilizing," unpredictable, laborious, costly, and hard to explain or even understand in hindsight. Yet it is essential — it is of the very essence of who we are.No attempt to escape or replace this experience, no matter how grandiose, all-consuming, or incomprehensible, can lead us to any solution to our deeply human problems, especially in a golden age, where some such problems not only persist but grow acute: monstrous, menacing, overwhelming, to the point where we must realize, as we must realize now, that where we are going there are no solutions, only salvation — not by any merely human creation, but by our all-good, holy, and life-giving Creator.