'A significant threat'

News Badlands Badlands: Elle Fanning to Star in Predator Spinoff The actor is said to be a big fan of the sereis By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on June 3, 2024 Screenshot: Hulu Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Hulu Prey director Dan Trachtenberg’s next installment in the Predator universe is circling around its lead. Today, Deadline broke the news that Elle Fanning is in talks to star in Badlands, which Trachtenberg is on board to direct. Fanning is apparently a big fan of the franchise and had a meeting with Trachtenberg about the project. The actor, according to Deadline, is on board to star and the contract details are being finalized. Fanning comes to the Predator franchise after playing Aurora in the Maleficent films and Catherine the Great in The Great (pictured above). She also was in 2011’s Super 8 and played Mary Shelley in the eponymous biopic. Badlands was written by Trachtenberg and Patrick Aison. We don’t know much about the plot other than, presumably, everyone’s favorite space hunter will make an appearance, and that it’s set to take place in the future rather than in the past. The movie is likely to be only one of many additional installments in the franchise, given 20th Century Studios has anointed Trachtenberg the ringleader over a slew of Predator projects. One of those projects is expected to be a sequel to Prey that potentially sees the return of that movie’s star, Amber Midthunder. As for Badlands, the movie is set to begin production later this year. No news yet, however, on whether it will go directly to streaming or have a theatrical release once it’s ready for our eyeballs. [end-mark] The post <i>Badlands</i>: Elle Fanning to Star in Predator Spinoff appeared first on Reactor.

Offer a random person anywhere in the world a thousand dollars, a ticket to America, and a green card, but with the catch that the offer is only good for 24 hours. How many takers would there be? Now, rerun the experiment for every other country. Does any country get more takers than America? Doubtful. The fact that it’s only a question worth asking with respect to other free-market democracies in the West is revealing. China, Russia, India, Brazil, etc., are places people leave, not where they go. When it comes to civilizational flourishing, it truly is, as renowned historian Niall Ferguson has argued, a matter of the West and the Rest. Identity politics makes for strange political bedfellows, but one thing on which virtually everyone on the left agrees is that the rise of the West and America is largely the story of the ever more effective oppression of the weak by the strong. This “oppression thesis” is powerful because it is simple. And it threads together all of the anti-American leftist ideological movements: identity politics; woke; 1619; diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI; and critical race theory, or CRT. In American classrooms, it stitches together a “warts only” retelling of American history that hardly stokes pride and gratitude in being American.  Americans should take pride in the system of liberty our ancestors established that now delivers historically unprecedented levels of peace and prosperity. But the oppression thesis asserts that past and continuing systemic oppression makes America deserving of moral condemnation and unworthy of patriotic attachment. Given the increasing dominance of the oppression thesis in American K-12 and college education, we should not be surprised that Gallup found large generational disparities in civic pride. Americans 55 and older are more than two and a half times more likely than those between the ages of 18 and 34 to express that they are extremely proud of being American.  Although there is certainly oppression in America’s story, too often children and college students are not told of how Americans, not the American government, put an end to a variety of oppressive practices that were often protected by the power of government (e.g., Jim Crow laws, government-sanctioned school segregation). Such laws and policies were often put in place by elite political power brokers, not ordinary Americans.  But America’s story is not one driven solely or even mostly by oppression, because a society cannot raise the level of general prosperity by means of piracy and plunder. Theft builds nothing; it merely rearranges what is already there. It is parasitic, not productive. Only the gains that arise from cooperation—working together to produce a whole greater than the sum of its parts—can result in more goods and services for the same number of people in society. This is what produced the unprecedented levels of general prosperity into which we were blessed to be born. A system rigged to allow only the fulfillment of ambition through cooperative gains is the real story of America.  This truth is best expressed by what we call “the cooperation thesis,” which is the idea that the rise of the West and America is largely the story of the rise of ever more effective cooperation made possible by an ever more efficient market system fueled by ever freer people. The culture and institutions that made up our civil society evolved over time in a way that led to better cooperation in every way. America is so extraordinary for the simple reason that we—as individuals and as a society—are the world’s best cooperators and have been so for a long time.  This is what makes America exceptional. This is why it continues to be seen by the rest of the world as the land of greatest opportunity, the one place where anyone can build a good and honorable life if they work hard enough. It is well past time for American civic education to embrace the cooperation thesis so that we can finally begin to cultivate the informed patriotism we so desperately need. This article, originally published by RealClearPoitics, is made available by RealClearWire The post America Was Built on Cooperation, Not Oppression appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The United States of America, a few years short of its 250th birthday, is at war. This is not a war with Russia or China. It is not an amorphous war on terror or a war on drugs. This is a war from within. It is an unconventional war. It is a systems-level attack on the foundations of this nation. It is an insidious, sophisticated attack built on decades of a sustained, strategic decay of our nation’s infrastructure: our legal system, our election system, our culture, our commonality, our civic intelligence, and our institutions. This is not an insurrection, a series of race riots, or even a police riot at a protest over a stolen election. It will be the last war in which the United States participates if it’s not won by Americans. You are not living in the same country you were born in. Right now, a president, who record numbers of Americans don’t think even won the last election—and for good reason—has ordered the legal, intelligence, and law enforcement services of this country to arrest and detain his chief political rival. It is the product of a sustained, nearly decade-long covert and overt operation using every tool at the government’s disposal and their command of the propaganda machine of the legacy media to destroy Donald J. Trump. Joe Biden is not the head of this lynching, however. He is a senile patsy serving as a prop figurehead. Even on his best day, he could not have orchestrated and overseen this project. His very presence as the source of authority from which the domestic terrorists draw their appeal to legitimacy is proof positive of the enemy’s success in overtaking the apparatuses of governmental power. Joe Biden is merely the tragic comedy illustration of how much real power the enemy has taken. That he can be the puppet shows how little effort needs to be expended to fake legitimacy for this takedown operation. As the enemy actually utilizes the power of the systems that it has corrupted, the professional organizational apparatus of the opposition party meekly and pathetically appeals to those same structures for its salvation. Such weak acts are playacting. The con is based on a fundamental miscalculation that the American people believe such acts constitute a legitimate effort to protect and save this country. In no place is this more clear that in the halls of the United States Congress. Take, for example, the one institution in which the American people are alleged to have access to actual power right now: the House of Representatives. The 2022 midterm elections, once billed as an incoming “Red Wave,” were supposedly an opportunity for Americans to provide a check on the lawless occupation of the U.S. government. Instead, the enemy was unfazed. They had fundamentally changed the structure of the U.S. government two short years before, in 2020, in a way that protected their power. The election system itself had been conquered with illegitimate changes to the very way in which people are meant to realize the promises of a constitutional republic. The election system, much like the legal system, is no longer a neutral instrument. In 2020, there was a dramatic and hostile transformation of the election system from a voting system into a contest of one party’s political machinery and its ability to distribute and collect unaccountable mail-in ballots. Only one side has a machine. The professional Right—the politicians and their consultants—fails to understand that the rules changes themselves were designed to ensure a permanent advantage to the Left. The best knockoff imitation of the Left’s illegal voting operation on the Right only gives legitimacy to this new government structure where ballots are collected instead of votes to select our leaders. The professional Right was willfully clueless about this point on the night of the midterm elections. In fact, the vipers instead used it to support the Left and its attack on Trump. I sat in my living room watching Fox News on the evening of the midterms and watched talking head after talking head attempt to spin the results as a referendum on the man who wasn’t even on the ballot. And just like that, the 2024 Republican Primary was off in full swing. The result was Trump-hating Republicans paying parasitic consultants and pollsters hundreds of millions of dollars to distract and detract resources and protection away from Trump. The professional Right on Capitol Hill has been spectacularly useless in its ability to protect America from the damage being wrought by the Left. It has settled into a pretzeled rhetorical defense of Trump while leaving every resource on the table that could be used to protect this country, like withholding funding and releasing an avalanche of actually enforced subpoenas. While the Jan. 6 Committee proved the damage that such committees could cause, this recent Congress also has proved their uselessness. Take, for example, the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government and its chairman, Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. That subcommittee was the pound of flesh extracted for Kevin McCarthy to become speaker of the House and was supposed to be a supercharged committee aimed at de-weaponizing the attacks on Trump and all Americans. It has been none of that. As I write this, the subcommittee is on pace at the end of this Congress to return nearly two-thirds of the $15 million supplemental budget it was given. Members are literally “tipping” the Biden administration for election interference while pretending to be fighting it in their cable news appearances and their fundraising letters. Part of the problem is that the elected Right is too busy fighting itself to fight the Left. The biggest fight comes from a class of elected politicians trying to resist the fundamental transformation of the conservative movement that Trump created. They are content to give lip service to “America First” appeals if it means that they can get back to the business of funding foreign wars and serving as lobbyists for special interests. And House members are still fighting over who gets to be in charge of this mess. Any limitation that Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has politically imposed on himself to gain the support of the furthest Left elements of the Republican caucus has also been accepted by Jordan, who is desirous of Johnsons’ job. That kind of capitulation does not create the type of environment in which a hard-charging legal process and investigations can be conducted—elements that are critical to see any positive results out of the Weaponization Subcommittee. Perhaps the only bright spot is the work of House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., and his staff. Unlike his counterparts, Comer’s team has meticulously proved the corruption of the Biden family with ample evidence, to include the literal receipts. Legacy media and establishment politicians will never give him the credit he deserves. But the truth can be seen in the data. Since Comer got to work, poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans now accept that the Bidens engaged in corrupt activity. So, what the hell do we do about all of this? We do everything at the same time—now. Congress must immediately hire a congressional special counsel and equip that individual with all constitutional authority to do the job. In other words, the Weaponization Subcommittee should give its unused budget to someone else. This work includes a record-setting number of forced depositions and subpoenas backed by the enforcement authority of holding people in contempt of Congress. And no more requiring votes for every minor investigative change. Have one vote now and let the special counsel get to work. And nothing done by the special counsel gets referred to Biden’s Department of Justice. Instead, it is delivered to relevant state and local prosecutors for action. On the election, we must first admit that the 2024 election has already been interfered with in a substantial and incurable way. The basic demographics of this country have been altered by an illegal invasion of illegal aliens organized by Biden. Simultaneously, every reasonable preventive mechanism to keep them from voting is forcefully opposed by the Regime. The basic fundamental structure of flooding the country with unaccountable mail-in-ballots exists. The Right has made incremental and positive gains in some areas, only to be outdone by a matter of degrees because of the Left’s control of the basic election machinery. The country is flooded with propaganda from regime media, creating conspiracies to try to keep Trump off the campaign trail and out of office by subjecting him to a series of kangaroo court cases—and finally, a conviction. There is no chance of a free and fair election. That ship has sailed. The only question is if we will have a certifiable election. What can happen is that Trump can win by a margin bigger than the other side’s capacity for cheating. Every step must be taken to mitigate the ability of the Left to illegitimately alter the election. This includes mass litigation, of course, but also immediate overt action by state and local officials to protect the integrity of their elections. One area to immediately begin with is kneecapping Biden’s ongoing efforts to use the whole-of-federal-government approach he has created as his get-out-the-vote operation, where agencies that deal with members of the public who most likely lean Democratic are used to help them register to vote. States have the ability to kick this activity out of their jurisdictions. Members of the general public need to demand the change they wish to see. There is a war happening right now, and only one side is fighting it. The other side maintains its limited hold on power by providing rhetorical mentions of Americans’ concerns but in every real sense, does nothing to fix them. Politicians on both sides are able to survive in this political landscape by the entrenched power of party politics, obscene amounts of money in politics, and the support of the dying power of traditional media, who—in a search for content—is willing to provide pomp and circumstance to the doldrums of fundraising letter-sending and low-budget government hearings. We don’t have to live this way. There is still time to turn the ship around. The real damage is made permanent if the Left is able to finalize its takeover of the election and judicial systems in a way that makes elections and prosecutions pro forma. That day could come very soon, but for now, it is not today, and there is still time to fight. The post America Is Under Attack appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Has Sanity Returned to Minneapolis?

David was driving along a desolate stretch of highway when he saw what appeared to be a lifeless dog on the roadside. His heart sank at the sight, but an inexplicable urge to help overtook him. He pulled over, and upon closer inspection, he realized the dog was still clinging to life. This discovery motivated... The post Man pulls over for lifeless dog on the side of the highway then realizes he’s clinging to life appeared first on Animal Channel.

Paulette Harlow, 75, was arrested back in 2020 after praying outside of a Washington D.C. abortion clinic. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced Harlow on May 31, deciding that she deserves to sit in jail for two full years. Harlow, visited the Washington Surgi-clinic with a group of other pro-lifers on Oct 22, 2020. She sat in a seat outside of the clinic doors where she sang hymns and prayed that babies would be saved from abortion. Harlow was arrested along with eight other pro-lifers outside of the clinic and was convicted under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. The FACE Act prohibits “violent, threatening, damaging, and obstructive conduct intended to injure, intimidate, or interfere with the right to seek, obtain, or provide reproductive health services.” Apparently praying and singing hymns is “violent” and “threatening.” Reports indicate that Harlow’s husband “begged for mercy, expressing his fear that his wife would die alone in prison,” due to her health issues and her age. Judge Kollar-Kotelly couldn’t have seemed to care less when issuing a 24-month sentence. The judge actually asserted that perhaps Harlow would “make an effort to remain alive” since that’s a “tenet of [Harlow’s] religion.” Other protestors who were at the Washington-Surgi clinic that day have also been charged and sentenced. On May 15, Lauren Handy, 30, was sentenced to 57 months in prison as well as three years probation after linking herself with her fellow pro-lifers at the clinic and singing hymns and praying for the babies and moms. Other individuals sentenced include: Josh Darnel, 42, who filmed the blockade, was sentenced to 34 months in prison; Jean Marshall, 74, Harlow’s sister, was sentenced to 24 months; Heather Idoni, 59, similarly received 24 months and John Hinshaw, 69, William Goodman, 54, Joan Bell, 76, and Herb Geraghty all received 27 months. Keep in mind that all these individuals are going to jail for praying for life while people who protest by becoming human roadblocks for PETA, Palestine, BLM, climate change or trans/queer crap are often celebrated instead of incarcerated. It has become abundantly clear that the left has an agenda and now, even our justice system seems willing to assist them in reaching their goals.  

Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary, aka “Mr. Wonderful,” offered a bold alternative for the future of the Communist Chinese government-tied app TikTok.  During the May 30 edition of Fox Business’ The Big Money Show, O’Leary laid out his plans for “Americanizing TikTok” and making it “wonderful again,” offering to buy the app with the help of crowdfunding investors. O’Leary told Fox Business, “I find this an extraordinary deal. It’s a legacy deal. It’s definitely one I want to do. And I think the opportunity is huge.”  O’Leary panned alternatives to his proposed solution, such as a recently revealed 2022 proposal by TikTok to offer a measure of control to the U.S. government. O’Leary rejected this plan as a “Chinese-style solution,” strongly opposing any plan that gives the government the ability to shut down an app over unapproved content.  O’Leary also rejected the idea that TikTok could win in court against a recently passed law that would either force the sale of TikTok or ban the app from the country. O’Leary said that the lawsuit would be unsuccessful “even at the Supreme Court.” Instead, O’Leary pitched Fox Business viewers on his idea. “That's why those of us interested in buying it are starting the process now,” he said, before mentioning his website. “I've set up wondertiktok.com if you're interested in participating because I want to do crowd funding for all the millions of Americans that want to be part of this. But that won't be the majority of the money. It’s gonna come from sovereign wealth,” he said. O’Leary warned listeners that getting permission from both President Joe Biden and the Chinese Communist Party for this deal would not be easy. However, O’Leary was not deterred. “I want to support Americanizing TikTok. I want to make TikTok wonderful again. That’s exactly what is going to happen if I do this deal.” Prior to the Fox Business interview, O’Leary announced in a May 28 post on X that he has a plan to purchase the app. “The clock is ticking on TikTok. Congress has passed a law that gives it less than 270 days to sell to interests that are governed by US laws or be shut down,” O’Leary wrote. “I'd like to democratize TikTok and turn it into a platform where the user data is protected from the prying eyes of foreign adversaries. It's time to make TikTok WONDERFUL again. Want to be part of this?” Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency and an equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

A Sunday New York Times story by Berlin-based reporter Christopher Schuetze was the latest example of the paper’s repellent habit of condoning certain aspects of Communist tyrannies in Russia and Eastern Europe. for the authoritarian Communist past, “‘Not Everything Was Bad’: Saluting the Mercedes of Eastern Europe and a Communist Past.” Schuetze visited a May Day event in the former East Germany celebrating classic cars from the Communist Era, complete with a young man, Uwe Rockler, dressed as an East German traffic cop. Repression chic! The hundreds of motorcycles, buses, trucks, cars and farming vehicles on display exuded the nostalgia that many here feel for a vanished country that -- despite its oppressive dictatorship -- was home for decades. .... To Mr. Röckler, whose parents toiled under the communist regime, the era holds a fascination. “Not everything was bad, it was just everyday life,” he said. Of the East German police, which many see as one of the most obvious manifestations of a repressive state, he said: “They were actually pretty good criminalists -- in many ways equal to those in West.” The repression was represented in mild, almost joking fashion. Waiting in line to board a carefully maintained bus from 1958 that would take him on a tour of Pirna, Thomas Herzog, 62, remembers the requirements of that era well. “I’m here because no one is forcing me to be here,” he said with a laugh. Among those in Pirna celebrating this May Day, 35 years after East Germans last celebrated it in a functioning communist state, many said the era had been rife with problems, including restrictions on speech and travel, with citizens living under the yoke of one of the most restrictive state security systems behind the Iron Curtain. But as that time recedes into the past, memories of the communist country have become more attractive for many, especially as discontent with the current system grows. …. Conny Kaden, 60, the founder of the G.D.R. Museum, said that despite the benefits reunification brought, there were downsides. The socialist state, he noted, in addition to offering jobs at state-run enterprises, had fostered a sense of community through mandatory meetings in youth, worker and community clubs. “I’m not saying this is about raising the G.D.R. flag,” Mr. Kaden said. “But we lost something, we lost the cohesion.” The paper indulges this sinister nostalgia on such a regular basis that one can break the stories down by regime, from Soviet Russia to East Germany to China to Cuba: In 2017 the paper ran a “Red Century” series to mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution that offensively whitewashed the repression and hardship of daily life under Communist rule. A headline over a February 1992 story on the last Soviet political prisoners being released read: "A Gulag Breeds Rage, Yes, but Also Serenity." That was a year-end Notable Quotable for us. From a June 2019 story about East Germany by Thomas Rogers: “But it still arouses nostalgia among some former citizens who fondly remember its gender egalitarianism and social safety net or admire its utopian aspirations.” In February 2018, the Times Katrin Bennhold hailed government child care, presumably accompanied by forced female labor, as a highlight of human liberation: “Eastern women, who were part of the work force and with free child care, were more emancipated than their western sisters, and proved to be more mobile than their male counterparts.” An October 2008 book review carried the astounding headline "East Germany Had Its Charms, Crushed by Capitalism." Moving east, nice things were said about Communist China under mass-murdering dictator Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, including “greater rights” for women, while dismissing the millions who died in the Great Leap Forward in a few words. Don’t forget Communist Cuba under Fidel Castro, on the front of the Travel section in 2018, courtesy of contributor Tony Perrottet: “It’s a tribute to the resilience of the young rebels who -- whatever their later faults once they took power -- took on the brutal Batista dictatorship at great personal risk. The aura of idealism becomes particularly poignant today, as Cuba’s revolutionary dream has become as battered as the corrugated iron ceiling of the Presidio itself….” Reporter Schuetze’s bio noted he also covers “the rise of populism and the far right, which is especially concerning given Germany’s past.” Evidently he has no such concerns for the far left represented by Communist tyranny.

Nina “Marry Poppins” Jankowicz, the would-be director of the now-defunct Disinformation Governance Board, let the cat out of the bag, exposing disinformation studies as a ploy to promote Marxism. The Mary Poppins of disinformation appeared at a panel hosted by The 19th, a Marxist Critical Theory advocacy non-profit, on May 22. The subject of the panel was “Disinformation, Voter Registration, & Obstacles in Democracy.” Jankowicz’s comments during the panel were riddled with references to radical Critical Theory, a Marxist theory that sees all of society in terms of an eternal struggle between the marginalized and a group of entrenched privileged oppressors. She also revealed that her approach to “disinformation studies” is colored by these ideas. “[I]n addition to studying kind of the political side of disinformation, I also study gendered and sexualized disinformation,” said Jankowicz. Jankowicz claimed that people with protected intersectional identities were more likely to be targeted by disinformation campaigns. “We also found that if you were a person of intersectional identity–so if you happen to be a woman and gay or a woman who was black, et cetera–you were subjected to more compounded and vitriolic abuse,” said Jankowicz. “There are plenty of studies that also point to the fact that women who are running for office receive more vitriolic abuse and frankly, gender disinformation narratives, than the men they’re running against.” As an example of what constitutes a “gender disinformation narrative,” Jankowicz referred to common criticisms of Vice President Kamala Harris and her documented relationships with influential political characters like former California Speaker of the State Assembly Willie Brown. Jankowicz also claimed that negative criticism of female politicians was somehow part of a sinister plot to bar females from public life. “And the idea of gendered misinformation is to raise the cost of participation for women and marginalized communities,” Jankowicz said. “It is to keep us out of public life. Often it frequently targets our families.” Jankowicz also touted the claim that men are somehow insulated from scurrilous gossip in a way that women are not. “And frankly, you know, if you start a sexual rumor about a man, that tends to be kind of, oh, a chip off the old block, you know, a nice compliment for him,” Jankowicz said. “If you do the same thing about a woman, it can destroy her career. And we’ve seen that time and time again. These things haven’t gone away.” Jankowicz has been a major driver of censorship and conversations justifying censorship in the United States. For instance, last week Jancowicz was named in journalist Michael Shellenberger’s latest Twitter Files. Shellenberger revealed that Jankowicz was working with an anti-disinformation consulting firm, Alethea, that was advising Twitter on how to more effectively censor dissident voices. In addition, Jankowicz runs the American Sunlight Project, another pro-censorship advocacy organization.  Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.