If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The UK is risking losing the business generated by major US tech companies, as the row over London’s sweeping censorship law, the Online Safety Act, escalates in a number of different ways. The law’s declarative purpose is to, above all, provide a safer online environment for minors – but critics from civil society, privacy campaigners, and, the industry, have consistently pointed out that it in fact ushers in more censorship, including through age verification. Not only are the tech companies, under the new law, expected to curtail their users’ speech, and if they are found to be in breach of these rules, pay exorbitant fines – they are also expected to effectively fund the highly controversial legislative push, to the tune of about 0.02 percent of their global revenue. That would amount to X, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, TikTok, and a number of others, paying the equivalent of about $88.2 million per year – in order to fund the law’s enforcer, Ofcom. One of the many problems with the Online Safety Act is the idea to “tax” foreign companies in this way, considering the legal jurisdiction – in other words, why would companies from abroad be expected to have to fund any country’s legislative effort, let alone one as contentious as this. Another facet is that while the percentage would mean a lot of money to the richest of the Big Tech class – some of the less profitable ones would be proportionally hit more heavily. According to The Telegraph, Uber was among those signaling that, basically – its business in the UK may not be worth the bother. The UK press is citing Uber representatives as saying the effect of the Online Safety Act’s levies may have the effect of driving tech companies out of the country – but more than that, affecting large global businesses to also possibly “be dissuaded from launching their products in the UK – or growing their business there – given that this regime would capture their worldwide revenue.” A spokesperson for Ofcom said that the regulator thinks the fee proposal is “fair and proportionate” – and one that is in place in order to “deter” companies from failing to comply. So we have a hint – or a whiff – of some “pre-crime” language in there. Nevertheless, the UK government doesn’t seem to stand very firm on this controversial policy. Added the spokesperson: “We are reviewing responses to our consultation before finalizing our proposals and advising the Secretary of State, who will ultimately decide on the fees threshold.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK Risks Losing Tech Companies Over Online Censorship Laws appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

USAID in a Nutshell

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Finding links to the Soros family in the Joe Biden White House should come as no surprise. In addition to George’s decades-long meddling in our politics, he spent tens of millions backing Biden and other Democrats in 2020, and Alex got in on the action too, throwing $700,000 at the would-be worst president of the 21st century. As documented in the book The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network for George Soros (2022), George planted his seeds of influence in the Biden White House even before Biden took office.  During the transition, the incoming Biden administration assembled “Transition Review Teams” that included people tasked with understanding the operations of specific government agencies to help the administration “hit the ground running on day one.” Seventeen picks for those teams either worked directly for his Open Society Foundations (OSF) or other Soros-funded organizations.  Through that, Soros was able to exert influence on the transition teams ranging from the State Department to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, United States Mission to the United Nations, Department of Defense, Department of Labor, Department of the Interior, Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, Banking and Securities Regulators, National Security Council, Office of the US Trade Representative and Department of Veterans Affairs. Clearly, he was well diversified.  Naturally, a handful of Soros’s lackeys made their way into the Biden White House. A month after Biden’s victory, OSF President Patrick Gaspard (more on him later) stepped down from his role and began lobbying labor leaders to support him becoming Biden’s labor secretary. Interestingly, Gaspard was still being quoted in internal docs days after stepping down. Perhaps due to the optics of picking someone so directly linked to the Man Behind the Curtain, Biden ended up nominating Boston Mayor Marty Walsh.  Neera Tanden was president of the Soros-backed Center for American Progress before becoming senior adviser to the President in May 2021 — and was previously nominated to head the Office of Budget and Management but had to withdraw as her past tweets came back to haunt her.  Ron Klain, who served on the board of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, was Biden’s first White House Chief of Staff.  One less recognizable name was Sam Berger, who was a former “VP for Democracy and Government Reform” at the Center for American Progress, and became Biden’s Director of Strategic Operations and Policy for his COVID-19 response team.  Within the Biden White House, the Soros flag was planted. Both for George and for Alex, who clearly was exerting massive influence before the empire was officially handed off to him in 2023.  While this didn’t start making headlines until the final year of the Biden presidency, Alex racked up thirty visits to the White House, making visits every single year. There were few visits in 2021, but they ramped up in 2022, signaling a potential true “start date” for when Alex began directing things off camera.  The meetings came under scrutiny as Fox News and the New York Post exposed them, leaving millions wondering, “What exactly was Alex there to discuss?’ That’s what we decided to find out – and there was no shortage of material to speculate on. While it’s impossible to prove causality, there sure were a lot of coincidences. Indeed, if there was no correlation between Alex’s visits and political events, it would beg the obvious question of what exactly the purpose of the meetings was. Are we to believe they were just making small talk? That’s certainly what Alex would prefer. Kenyan “Corruption” and a Meeting With the Big Guy  Alex Soros weaved his way into serious influence at the center of power in American politics: the White House. The most notable Alex Soros meetings we uncovered in our research were with none other than President Joe Biden himself (of which there were two), and one happened to be around the time that major foreign policy events were unfolding. At 10:22 am EDT on May 23, 2024, Biden gave remarks alongside Kenyan President William Ruto on the South Lawn, where one of the main subjects was the two presidents’ mutual fixation on fighting so-called climate change, one of Alex Soros’s key political obsessions. Just after Biden’s remarks with Ruto on May 24, 2024, White House visitor logs have Soros personally visiting with Biden at 6:15 pm the same day. Soros would also post Instagram photos documenting his attendance at the state dinner that day at the White House in honor of Ruto with Open Society Foundations President Binaifer Nowrojee.           View this post on Instagram                       A post shared by Alexander Soros, PhD (@alexsoros) Alex Soros once iterated that one of his goals was to make climate change radicalism the 21st century’s civil rights movement. “I also think that if environmental defenders become the Rosa Parks’ and the Caesar Chavezes [sic] of the environmental movement, the movement will gain unprecedented traction,” Soros told Mongabay magazine on October. 27, 2016. We see this script play out in the Biden-Ruto meeting. One of the big highlights of the Biden-Ruto meeting, as was praised by the Soros-funded organization E3G, was the “two released a fact sheet with initiatives across a range of topics from democracy to trade, including an array of projects under ‘Shared Climate Solutions.’” If that wasn’t telling enough, E3G noted how Biden was prepared to use the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which has recently become a subject of major scandal due to massive levels of improper payments of taxpayer dollars doled out to a number of leftist pet projects, to accomplish his climate vision for Kenya: The White House also named specific climate projects in Kenya, including investments in hydropower and EV startups, promoting private and public clean energy adoption and increasing conservation. Utilizing USAID, the Development Finance Corporation, and a $60 million grant from the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Biden Administration has put real weight behind the partnership with Kenya. According to the American Presidency Project, on the same day of Ruto’s state visit, “The U.S. Department of Energy and Kenyan Ministry of Energy announced their intent to sign a [Memorandum of Understanding] in June in Nairobi intended to enhance bilateral collaboration and partnership in the development of clean energy, carbon management technologies, and decarbonization strategies.”  What made Soros’s visit with Biden on the same day more than just a coincidental stroke of serendipity was the fact that the Soros empire has been heavily invested in Kenyan politics for decades. The Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa (OSIEA) opened its doors in Nairobi in 2005, where it’s headquartered, and where Biden’s DOE and the Kenyan Ministry of Energy would conveniently also sign their mutual MOU. From 2022-2024, Open Society Foundations noted that OSIEA and its affiliate regional organizations “merged into the global structure of Open Society Foundations.” The significance of Ruto’s state visit was underscored by the fact that it was the first visit to the U.S. by an African leader in over 15 years. Subsequently, Biden would also designate Kenya a non-NATO ally. Ruto fawned over Biden about the supposed importance of building global partnerships to fight climate change, which is a euphemism for imposing heavy regulations on fossil fuels. “[W]e will have the opportunity to discuss and to have a conversation about building global partnership and leadership around the issues that pose challenges regionally, globally, and in countries like Kenya and many others: challenges of climate change, challenges of insecurity, challenges around debt distress,” Kuto told Biden.  In November 2023, TIME magazine named Ruto as one of four Africans on its “climate leaders” list. In September, according to the BBC, Ruto “hosted the first ever Africa Climate Summit in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, which ended in a joint declaration demanding that major polluters commit more resources to help poorer nations.” Alex himself shares this Marxist view. On November 18, 2021, Soros linked to a Project Syndicate article by Soros ally Jeffrey Sachs that called for taxing “high-income” countries at $5 per ton of CO2 and directing the funds to ‘low-income’ and ‘lower-middle-income’ countries. “#COP26 dropped the ball on climate financing to stem loss and damage from the climate emergency. @jeffdsachs offers a compelling solution,” Soros captioned his tweet on the article.  Ruto isn’t shy about showcasing his extremism on the eco-activist front either. “In October 2023, he called for the eviction of people living in the 380,000-hectare Mau Forest,” BBC reported.  “While some environmentalists hailed the move as critical to safeguarding the forest, some human rights lawyers said the government illegally evicted the Ogiek indigenous community which has inhabited the land for generations to profit from carbon offsetting schemes.”  This kind of activism runs parallel with Alex’s brand, given the Soros empire’s dedication to bullying businesses away from fossil fuels through radical environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategies. In addition, just six days after Soros met with Biden during Ruto’s state visit, Open Society Foundations released a report on how one of its grantee’s initiatives — Global Media Index for Africa — sought to shed “light on the global news media reporting on Africa,” indicating “a need to significantly improve coverage on Africa in terms of more progressive narratives.”  “Kenya” was used as one of the case studies in the index used to analyze how positively news stories were covering political “transition” in the country, with the overall goal to supposedly nuke the otherwise accurate perception that Africa overall is a continent in perpetual crisis “characterized by wars, famine, poverty, disease, and corruption.” The implication, in effect, was that Biden and Soros both shared a mutual interest in actively promoting their mutual ally Ruto’s image as some kind of saintly hero of leftist utopianism on climate change and other things.  How can we infer this? Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) wrote in an October 1, 2024, item for Foreign Policy magazine that declared Ruto returned home from his state visit with Biden “facing nationwide protests over a proposed bill to raise taxes” to pay down debt his government “accumulated mostly through deals with China that were riddled with dubious terms and kickback arrangements.” “The protests were largely led by Kenya’s youth, who recognized that there’s one thing preventing their country from reaching its full potential: corruption,” as Murphy noted. “Kenya’s former auditor general estimated that around half of the country’s debt can likely be attributed to corruption. It’s no wonder that Kenyans are angry.” Go figure.  Did Alex Soros discuss his foundation's interest in the Kenya question during his visit with Biden the same day as his meeting with Ruto, who was on the verge of a political crisis caused by his government’s reported corruption? Coincidence? Maybe, or maybe not.  Climate Coincidences As we documented, climate change has been *the* issue for Alex Soros, once a member of the advisory board of Soros-backed eco-extremist group Global Witness. Global Witness, in their words, focuses on “[n]atural resource-related conflict and corruption and associated environmental and human rights abuses.” Global Witness boasts that it works to “hold companies and governments to account for their destruction of the environment, their disregard for the planet and their failure to protect” human rights. Part of its anti-fossil fuel vendetta includes campaigns to “tackle the spread of division, hate and disinformation on digital platforms.” This is another way of admitting that it fights to get Big Tech platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube to censor speech according to what Global Witness determines should and should not be allowed.  After founding his Alexander Soros Foundation in 2012 while in college, Global Witness’s inaugural award was the ASF Award for Environmental and Human Rights Activism. In 2017, environmentalist groups were the biggest beneficiaries of funds from his groups.  On his personal website, AlexSoros.com (which now redirects to the OSF), the first article he lists as having ever published (back in 2014) was on environmental activists in Peru protecting the Amazon rainforest, which Alex himself has visited.  So then it should come to no surprise that climate-related policy announcements correlated with more of Alex’s White House visits than any other. In fact, nearly two-thirds of all Alex’s meetings surrounded an environmental-related announcement or policy change from the Biden administration. Just take a look for yourself below: It wasn’t just Alex, either. While the Soros empire maintained its most direct influence through him, his pawns were also out there. In 2023, the New York Post highlighted how past or present leaders at the OSF had racked up 33 private meetings in under two years. Tom Perriello, the executive director of the OSF-U.S., accounted for the majority (17) of the meetings, having met with the chief of staff for the White House’s Office of Political Strategy and Outreach, Associate Director of Strategic Outreach — and even had a sitdown with John Podesta. He met most with Kimberly Lang when she was a National Security Advisor executive assistant.  The aforementioned non-Labor Secretary Patrick Gaspard made ten visits, one of which was with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jen O’Malley Dillon. He ended up at the Center for American Progress, a favorite of the Sorosistas in the White House.    Fast forward to 2024, Soros-backed digital strategist Tara McGowan racked up nearly 20 White House visits just by April. In the 2024 election cycle, the Alex-led Open Society Foundation donated $15 million to Courier Newsroom, which she founded. Courier, which operates 11 “local news” outlets primarily in swing states, does not disclose its political alignment directly in its political stories and coverage. McGowan, in a 2019 internal memo, explicitly outlined how Courier’s role was to help Democrats get elected. After Joe Biden's apparent senility became impossible for even the media to ignore following his first and only debate with President Donald Trump, we were all left to wonder who really was in charge all those years. It certainly wasn’t Joe. Matt Palumbo is the content manager at Bongino Report. In addition, he is the author of The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros (2022), Dumb and Dumber: How Cuomo and de Blasio Ruined New York (2021), Debunk This!: Shattering Liberal Lies (2019), and Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump (2018).  Joseph Vazquez is the MRC Business Associate Editor for the News Analysis Division.  https://www.instagram.com/alexsoros/p/C9gVyhWRuED/?img_index=1 https://gov.alaska.gov/biden-administration-disregards-congress-attempts-to-cancel-anwr-leases/ https://wildlife.org/biden-cancels-controversial-oil-and-gas-leases-in-the-arctic/ https://x.com/AlexanderSoros/status/1639075393285263360?mx=2 https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/02/10/remarks-by-president-biden-and-president-lula-da-silva-of-brazil-before-bilateral-meeting/ https://www.riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/brazil/after-acts-in-brasilia-soros-ngo-wants-lula-da-silva-to-lead-global-alliance/ https://tinyurl.com/4wf8f65x https://twitter.com/AlexanderSoros/status/1579864794907414528 https://twitter.com/AlexanderSoros/status/1453740489069395975  

A rivalry between Canada and the United States has been revitalized after Canadian fans booed the U.S. national anthem, with one American player finally revealing that the team does not like it.Columbus Blue Jackets defenseman Zach Werenski had one assist in nearly 14 minutes on the ice in the epic 3-1 win over Canada on Saturday, and the tension between the two nations has only escalated as players have reacted to the chorus of boos from Canadian fans at the Bell Centre in Montreal.Canadians have been unhappy with the tariff battle between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Donald Trump and have taken out their frustration on their hockey rivals."We knew it was going to happen," Werenski said. "It happened the last game, it's been happening in the NHL before this, and we knew tonight was going to be the same way," he added, according to Fox News.Werenski was referring to similar instances in Vancouver and Ottawa. Vancouver Canucks fans booed "The Star-Spangled Banner" before a game with the Detroit Red Wings in early February, as did Ottawa Senators fans before a game with the Minnesota Wild the next day. Werenski continued, "We obviously don't like it.""It is what it is," he went on. "We kind of had an idea. We used it as motivation the best we could and found a way to get a win. But we had an idea going into it, so it wasn't a surprise. Definitely don't like it, though."'I don't think it's right.'Even Canadian forward Brad Marchand commented on the boos, saying the players have "nothing to do with the political things that are going on."Although Marchand was born in Nova Scotia, Canada, he has played his entire career with the Boston Bruins. He then added, "I do feel bad for those guys in that moment. I don't think it's right." Matthew Tkachuk of Team USA fights Brandon Hagel of Team Canada at the Bell Centre on February 15, 2025, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Photo by Minas Panagiotakis/Getty ImagesSaturday's battle took North America by storm when it started off with three fights in just the first nine seconds. Canada quickly went up 1-0, but Team USA stormed back for a 3-1 victory, which forced Canada into a must-win situation.The broadcast averaged 4.4 million viewers according to the New York Times, with a peak of 5.2 million viewers. That was a bigger audience than any non-Stanley Cup game in the NHL since 2019 and far more than the 766,000 viewers who watched the two countries battle at the World Cup of Hockey in 2016.The U.S. clinched its spot in the final with Saturday's win, but Canada managed to knock off Finland on Monday afternoon to set the stage for a tense rematch this Thursday night in the 4 Nations Face-Off final.The international tournament has replaced this year's NHL All-Star Game and featured just four teams, which also included Sweden.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

The Cathedral of Hope, a Dallas-based leftist organization that identifies as a United church, has made no secret of its LGBT activism and ideological capture. After all, among the non-straight resources linked on its site is a document claiming that identification as a homosexual is a sacrament and another document providing homosexual men with dating tips. It appears, however, that behind closed doors, things at the COH are far more "unhinged" than critics might have suspected. The host of BlazeTV's "Sara Gonzales Unfiltered" and others at the Texas Family Project similarly committed to protecting children attended an event at the COH over the weekend titled "Celebrating the Art of Drag Sunday." They were greatly disturbed by what they found at the service and at the subsequent drag brunch. Sara Gonzales, who serves as vice president of the Texas Family Project, told Blaze News, "Nothing about this 'church' service was godly or Christian. What's worse: The drag brunch fundraiser afterward was full of raunchy acts, sexual references, glorification of drug use, and scantily clad men dressed as women." "What church do you know that embraces such degeneracy and sin? Only one comes to mind: the church of Satan," added Gonzales. The event was advertised as a "fabulous and spirit-filled Drag Sunday," where the COH would "celebrate the artistry, resilience, and joy of drag, affirming the beauty of self-expression and the sacredness of every person." Families were invited afterward to attend a drag brunch fundraiser, which the ticket site indicated was an event for ages 18 and up. 'Go forth and sin some more!' During the service, which had children in attendance, the COH's senior pastor Neil Thomas tried using the words of Jesus Christ to justify having a cross-dressing activist as a preacher. Thomas asserted that Christ's statement recorded in Mark 10:27 that "with God all things are possible" means "that a preacher can be a drag king. It's not every day that you are part of a denomination who would ordain not only a woman to ministry but who'll allow that woman to be a drag king." The senior pastor was referring to Brooke Dooley, an LGBT activist who decided to don a fake beard and masquerade as a man named "Rev. Brock Bottom" for the occasion and who was also afforded an opportunity to give a sermon. Dooley suggested "the drag show begins" just after a child's birth, criticized "evangelical purity culture," and asserted that gender is an "arbitrarily constructed" social invention used to "maintain power dynamics." At one point in the service, Dooley joined Thomas on the altar to heap praise both on members of the United Court of the Lone Star Empire, an LGBT outfit populated by apparent autogynephiles, and on members of the Dallas Fort Worth Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group that has long derided Christian beliefs. Since its inception on Easter Sunday 1979, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence has, for instance, mocked Catholic teaching and doctrine, ridiculing the church's orthodox views on marriage, sexuality, homosexuality, transgenderism, and abortion. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights noted that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is "known for simulating sodomy while dressed as nuns" and "like to feature a 'Condom Savior Mass,' one that describes how the 'Latex Host is the flesh for the life of the world.'" The motto of the group is, "Go forth and sin some more!" In footage captured by the Texas Family Project, Thomas and Dooley invite members of both groups to the altar. Several heavyset men dressed in drag oblige the pastor, as does a man dressed in a fetish suit with a dog mask who crawls about on his hands and knees. 'OK, 'cause I will kill him.' After the transvestites and the man in the dog costume take their place in front of the altar, Thomas states, "I don't know about you, but somethings [at] this Cathedral of Hope I think we forget just how queer we are." — (@) One transvestite afforded an opportunity to speak at the drag after-party — attended by Thomas, other activists from the COH, and members of the radical groups honored earlier at the altar — instructed potential supporters of President Donald Trump to refrain from outing themselves. After raising the prospect that some people in the crowd might not have voted for his preferred candidate, the transvestite speaker's mind evidently turned to violence. He asked whether the COH members in attendance engaged in human sacrifice, then asked whether they should "start" with sacrificing Trump supporters. The transvestite speaker then misunderstood a murmur from the crowd as an audience member's admission of having voted for Trump and said, "He voted for Trump?" When told that was not the case, the transvestite replied, "OK, 'cause I will kill him." 'These people are seriously unhinged.' The same speaker at the nominally Christian church's fundraiser proceeded to mock Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's disability, noting that he traveled down to Austin with other transvestites "to, you know, fist fight Greg Abbott. But he just — he just wouldn't stand up and fight me." "I think that the easiest thing we can do with the money that we raise is just take away those wheelchair ramps," added the transvestite. — (@) The Texas Family Project noted that "'churches' that allow drag queens to be preachers are satanic." Kaden Lopez, the executive director of the Texas Family Project, stated, "We don't go film these events because we want to, it's because we have to. The absolute insanity that some 'churches' are promoting is mind boggling." Libs of TikTok said in response to the videos of the event, "These people are seriously unhinged and insane. They need to start being investigated." Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!