'I'm a wartime speaker, in a real sense'

It’s not just members of Congress and other politicians or TV personalities speaking at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. So-called everyday Americans are taking the big stage in the speaker lineup too. Peruvian immigrant Vanessa Fuara told former President Donald Trump and delegates gathered in the convention hall Monday night about her experience as a legal immigrant and inflation’s impact on America’s mothers. Born in Peru, Fuara said she moved to the U.S. with her family when she was 9 years old.  “Like millions of legal immigrants, my family didn’t begin our pursuit of the American dream by breaking the law: We respected America, and we wanted to earn our citizenship,” Fuara said.  At 18, Fuara said, she achieved one of her greatest aspirations when she became a U.S. citizen. When she asked her father what political party she should join, Fuara said he replied, “We’re Hispanics. We vote Democrat.”  But the more she learned, Fuara recalled, she noticed that her values didn’t align with the Democratic Party.  She said she believes that the family is “the most important institution,” the U.S. Constitution “is the greatest document in history,” and every human “born and unborn is made in the image of God.”  As manager of partnerships and coalitions at the organization Restoration of America, a group dedicated to teaching Americans about issues such as abortion and the sanctity of life, Fuara said, she has “had the honor of meeting thousands of moms since Biden took office.”  She said she hears one dominant message from mothers of various backgrounds: “The cost of living is making it harder to meet basic needs.”  Mothers are “reaching down to the bottom shelf just to save 25 cents,” she said, and “grandmothers who should be enjoying their golden years are working again to barely make ends meet.” These days America feels more like she is back in Latin America, Fuara said.  “Under the Biden-Harris agenda, we’re no longer living, we’re surviving,” she said.  But under Trump, Hispanic unemployment hit record lows and income reached a record high, she said.  Fuara ended her speech by addressing “fellow Hispanic Americans” as well as “all Americans,” saying that “if you believe in faith, family, freedom, [and] financial stability,” they should join her in voting for Trump. The post ‘Feels Like I’m Back in Latin America,’ Peruvian Immigrant Tells GOP Convention Delegates appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Yet more “innovative” – and comprehensive – ways in which US taxpayer-funded groups “communicated” with Big Tech behind major social media are coming to light. This one concerns the Clemson University Media Forensics Hub. Twitter Files’ Matt Taibbi’s Substack project Racket News reports that the response to their FOIA requests unveiled what is referred to as “a tight-knit relationship between university professors, federal law enforcement, and the news media.” The emails that went back and forth between the founders of the Clemson Hub and Twitter and Facebook (between July 2019 and September 2022) show that the focus was not only on removing content and accounts but also on making sure there was cooperation with politically aligned media like CNN (one of Twitter’s emails said this was already happening in the form of “data sharing”). And while these social and legacy media are private, “disinformation research” done at Clemson was sponsored by South Carolina Research Authority – which is funded by taxpayer money. In October 2022, the National Science Foundation awarded (or rewarded?) Clemson’s Hub with a $5 million grant. But the roundabout ties with the government don’t stop there: The documents also reveal that the professors behind the Clemson Hub were “coordinating” not only with CNN, but also federal law enforcement, and, with Graphika. Racket News writes that the emails they got via FOIA show Clemson was receiving “help with resources” from law enforcement. As for Graphika – this social media analytics firm says it is “the most trusted provider of intelligence” meant to protect the integrity of global elections, counter foreign malign influence, detect coordinated harassment and incitement to violence, and so on. One entity that certainly trusted Graphika – to flag online speech for censorship, that is – is the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), among others of similar provenance. The House Judiciary Committee looking into online media space manipulations ahead of the 2020 presidential ballot established that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had its hand in the setting up of Stanford and Washington universities’ scheme EIP – which then allegedly went on to collude with DHS’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Newly Released Emails Reveal Coordination Between Clemson University Media Forensics Hub and Social Media Giants appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Earlier in the year, Google filed an application to patent new methods, systems, and media for what the giant calls “identifying videos containing objectionable content” that are uploaded to a social site or video service. For example, YouTube – though the filing doesn’t explicitly name this platform. The patent application, which has just been published this month, is somewhat different from other automated “methods and systems” Google and other giants, notably Microsoft, already have to power their censorship apparatus; with this one, the focus is more on how AI can be added to the mix. More and more often, various countries are introducing censorship laws where the speed at which content is removed or accounts blocked is a major requirement made of social media companies. Google could have this in mind when the patent’s purpose is said to be to improve on detecting objectionable content quickly, “for potential removal.” No surprise here, but what should be the key question – namely, what is considered as “objectionable content” – is less of a definition and more a list that can be further expanded, variously interpreted, etc., and the list includes such items as violence, pornography, objectionable language, animal abuse, and then the cherry on top – “and/or any other type of objectionable content.” The filing details how Google’s new system works, and we equally unsurprisingly learn that AI here means machine learning (ML) and neural networks. This technology is supposed to mimic the human brain but comes down to a series of equations, differentiated from ordinary algorithms by “learning” about what an image (or a video in this case) is, pixel by pixel. It seems from the description of the process we are looking at a type of generative adversarial network (GAN) system – two neural networks “competing” while “learning.” Google says it creates “embeddings” from content or even metadata and compares that to other known objectionable content (both “float” in two separate “multi-dimensional spaces” that contain other “embeddings”). That’s one way of saying, “huge data sets are needed here.” Some observers see this and other similar efforts to produce “AI-based” censorship technology as logical, given the volume of content the platforms deal with. But then there are all sorts of problems, including both false positives and negatives in the never-ending hunt for “disinformation” and “harms.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Google Plans New Content-Scanning Censorship Tech appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

You Newsom Thing Was Fixin' to Blow

The Associated Press (AP) fawned over the history and new direction of leftist billionaire Alex Soros’ grant-making behemoth, Open Society Foundations (OSF).  In a July 16 article, the AP carried water for Soros’ restructuring of the OSF, highlighting a new initiative to allocate $400 million to move Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Senegal, Malaysia and Indonesia away from cheap and abundant sources of energy. The puff article, which praised the OSF as “one of the biggest funders of human rights advocates and supporters of political dissidents around the world,” had zero criticism of the potentially massive impacts of this spending on the developing nations.  “The goal of the investment was to produce sustainable jobs and a shift toward clean energy and away from carbon intensive industries in Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Senegal, Malaysia and Indonesia,” OSF President Binaifer Nowrojee told the AP.  The AP and Nowrojee both chose to ignore how important “carbon-intensive” activities are to both developing and developed nations. Oil, natural gas and coal supplied 82% of the world’s energy needs in 2022 and 84% of the world’s energy needs in 2023 according to the Energy Institute. Highly in-demand materials like plastic, cement, steel and fertilizer require fossil fuels for their production and transportation. Nevertheless, the AP had nothing to report about the OSF plan to push governments to offer tax breaks to compliant businesses, alongside substantial funding for like-minded “think tanks” and “civil society groups.” This uncritical coverage of Soros’ move is unsurprising as the AP is not neutral on the green agenda. In 2023, a Media Research Center study uncovered that the AP relentlessly pushed climate change propaganda after receiving millions from leftist donors in 2022. The AP also received $300,000 from the Danish eco-extremist group, the KR Foundation, which pushes for the complete abandonment of oil and coal.  Past attempts by environmentalists to impose their green agenda have gone poorly. For instance, in April 2021, Sri Lanka switched away from synthetic fertilizer to organic fertilizer leading to the decimation of food and tea production. Nearly a third of the country’s debt in 2022 was held by ESG-obsessed asset manager BlackRock and the United Nations supported Sri Lanka’s disastrous move by giving them a high ESG score. By July 2022, the switch to organic fertilizer led to massive protests, culminating in the collapse of the Sri Lanka government as hungry protestors stormed the presidential residence and forced the president and prime minister to resign. Not satisfied with lionizing Alex Soros’ leadership and recent OSF spending, the AP also put a positive spin on the history of the OSF. The outlet wrote that OSF founder George Soros, “survived the Nazi occupation,” entirely neglecting to mention his time spent accompanying an official charged with helping the Nazis confiscate the property of Jewish people in Hungary. Soros himself admitted to this during a 60 Minutes interview.  The AP continued to cast the OSF as a human rights defender against authoritarian regimes while discussing its history. The article complained that Soros’ OSF and his Central European University had been “effectively forced out” of Hungary. Immediately following this, the AP warned that “Authoritarianism and populism is surging in many countries, including in Europe.”  Conservatives are under attack! Contact the Associated Press at 212-621-1500 and demand it stop acting as a mouthpiece for the climate change activist lobby.

President Donald Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), is now a practicing Catholic, but that was not always so. Years before his baptism and reception into the Catholic Church, Vance told Deseret News he grew up in a "pretty chaotic and hopeless world. Faith gave me the belief that there was somebody looking out for me, that there was a hopeful future on the other side of all the things I was going through." Vance's Pentecostal father would occasionally take him to church. "Going to church showed me a lot of really positive traits that I hadn’t seen before. I saw people of different races and classes worshiping together," said Vance. "I saw that there were certain moral expectations from my peers of what I should do." The future Marine, venture capitalist, and senator indicated that unlike the other children on his block in Middletown, Ohio, the kids his age at the evangelical church he would occasionally attend expected him "not [to] do drugs or have premarital sex or drink alcohol." Although he found a supportive community through church that could serve as a check against the negative influences he encountered elsewhere, he felt that the particular kind of evangelical Christianity he practiced with his father encouraged "a cultural paranoia where you don't trust and want to withdraw from a lot of parts of the world." Years later, when he entered Yale Law School, he indicated he "would have called [himself] an atheist." He elsewhere indicated that his reading Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris corresponded with this turn away from faith. By the time of his graduation, however, he began exploring his faith again. "Back home, kids who grew up to be relatively successful tended to abandon their faith," Vance told Deseret News. "All of my close friends growing up were all really religious but, with the exception of one of us, we all considered ourselves nonreligious by age 25." At Yale, I was exposed to faith groups in which that didn't seem to be happening. Mormons and Catholics at Yale Law School, who were really smart and successful, were engaged with their faith. There was a moment when I was like, 'Maybe it is possible to have Christian faith in an upwardly mobile world.' You can be a member of your faith and still be a reasonably successful person. That's not the world I grew up in, but maybe that's true. Vance hypothesized at the time that the practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Catholicism, contra the variety of Evangelicalism he was exposed to early on, did not apply the same type of "isolating pressures." Months prior to the 2016 election, he indicated that he was "thinking very seriously about converting to Catholicism." Rod Dreher, author of "The Benedict Option" and "Live Not By Lies," attended Vance's Catholic baptism in Cincinnati in 2019 and interviewed him about his spiritual life for the American Conservative. 'The hope of the Christian faith is not rooted in any short-term conquest of the material world.' Dreher, who left Catholicism in 2006 ultimately for Eastern Orthodoxy, asked Vance, "Why Catholicism? Why now?" Vance's answer loosely resembled that provided by G.K. Chesterton in "Twelve Modern Apostles and Their Creeds": "I became persuaded over time that Catholicism was true." "I was raised Christian, but never had a super-strong attachment to any denomination, and was never baptized. When I became more interested in faith, I started out with a clean slate, and looked at the church that appealed most to me intellectually," Vance told Dreher. Dreher, who covered sexual abuse in the church for the New York Post, asked if Vance found "the Catholic Church's travails daunting." I do in the short term, but one of the things I love about Catholicism is that it's very old. I take a longer view. Are things more daunting than they were in the mid-19th century? In the Dark Ages? Is it as daunting as having a second pope at Avignon? I don’t think so. The hope of the Christian faith is not rooted in any short-term conquest of the material world, but in the fact that it is true, and over the long term, with various fits and starts, things will work out. When pressed on how his faith might affect his politics, Vance indicated his views "are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching." This appears to have helped inform his economic populism. 'Yet I couldn't shake the feeling that if I converted I would no longer be my grandmother's grandson.' Vance hit on a theme in the interview that has also been explored by other past speakers at the National Conservatism conference, including First Things editor R.R. Reno and Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen: that the Cold War fusion between libertarians and social conservatives, which long defined the Republican Party, did not particularly benefit the latter. "Part of social conservatism’s challenge for viability in the 21st century is that it can’t just be about issues like abortion, but it has to have a broader vision of political economy, and the common good," said Vance. Vance indicated in a 2020 op-ed for the Lamp that he often wonders what his grandmother "would have thought about her grandson becoming a Catholic." She was a woman of deep, but completely de-institutionalized, faith. She loved Billy Graham and Donald Ison, a preacher from her home in southeastern Kentucky. But she loathed 'organized religion.' She often wondered aloud how the simple message of sin, redemption, and grace had given way to the televangelists on our early 1990s Ohio TV screen. 'These people are all crooks and perverts,' she told me. 'All they want is money.' But she watched them anyway, and they were the closest she usually came to regular church service, at least in Ohio. Growing up with "Mamaw," Vance indicated he was left with the distinct impression that "Catholics worshipped Mary," "rejected the legitimacy of Scripture," and would have the anti-Christ amongst their ranks. Catholics didn't, it turned out, worship Mary. Their acceptance of both scriptural and traditional authority slowly appeared to me as wisdom, as I watched too many of my friends struggle with what a given passage of Scripture could possibly mean. I even began to acquire a sense that Catholicism possessed a historical continuity with the Church Fathers — indeed, with Christ Himself — that the unchurched religion of my upbringing couldn't match. Yet I couldn't shake the feeling that if I converted I would no longer be my grandmother's grandson. He later determined, however, that "Catholicism [was] the closest expression of her kind of Christianity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive. And above all: a faith centered around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He loves unconditionally and forgives easily." Sohrab Ahmari, who similarly interviewed Vance earlier this year, recently told the National Catholic Register that Vance, poised to potentially become the second-ever American Catholic vice president, is "very open and proud about his faith, but it's not that gross over-piety that's kind of fake." Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

The assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump has left Americans all over the country with more questions than answers. U.S. Army Green Beret sniper Matthew Murphy is one of them. After analyzing the available information regarding the shooting, he tells Sara Gonzales that “nothing about this makes sense.” “You have to take a few steps back to how he even got on that rooftop,” Murphy continues. “120, 150, depending on who you listen to, yards away from president Trump. I mean that is the closest possible spot you could get.” As the shooter got into position, rallygoers were yelling and pointing him out to the police. Meanwhile, there was a counter-sniper in position to protect the former president. “There is not a doubt in my mind that the sniper on the roof saw the shooter, saw him crawling across the roof. It would be impossible, even with a naked eye at that distance, on a white roof to not see the shooter. So why [didn't he] take that shot?” Murphy says, noting that he himself wouldn’t have hesitated to take the shot. Rumors began swirling after a 4chan post written by an anonymous man who claims to be the sniper explained that he was told to stand down. “I don’t know if that’s true, but that is the only reason I can think of, any of my friends can think of, that he would not have pulled that trigger and shot the shooter,” he explains. Gonzales is also fairly certain this wasn’t a mistake. “There are so many different coincidences that it rises past the level of incompetency, and in my opinion, we need to be looking at perhaps something more sinister took place,” Gonzales says.“It wouldn’t be the first time that the federal government was working to take out a president or a former president or a presidential candidate.” Murphy noticed something else strange about the shooting. “When you look at the trajectory of the bullet that flies behind Trump’s head,” he begins, “that bullet seems to be very flat.” “When it shows it's about to hit his ear, he turns his head, and as that bullet goes past, bullets flying on a very, very flat trajectory. Not a trajectory where someone had an elevated rooftop position and would take a shot at the president,” he explains. In another video of the shooting, a woman who is seated behind Trump ducks behind a sign before immediately taking out her phone — which has drawn even more questions. This woman “ducks ... behind the sign, and then that round that came in from the side comes in now.” “I have talked about this with multiple snipers, and this is not just me going down a rabbit hole,” Murphy says. “Everyone that I’ve talked about this with that I trust is seeing the same thing I’m seeing. Something else happened, and that bullet, it looks like it came from somewhere else.” “You, speaking as a level one sniper,” Gonzales says, “are you saying you believe that this was either an inside job, there was a second shooter, or a combination of both?” “It could potentially be an inside job,” Murphy answers. Want more from Sara Gonzales?To enjoy more of Sara's no-holds-barred take to news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Conservatives on social media expressed deep skepticism on Tuesday after the U.S. Secret Service agency revealed it had ramped up security for former President Donald Trump after it had learned in recent weeks that Iranians planned to assassinate him.The news comes on the heels of the attempted assassination of Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, though the timing may be coincidental. National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson insisted that authorities had "not identified ties between the shooter and any accomplice or co-conspirator, foreign or domestic."'Did the CIA just declare war on The Republic? This Iran story is too on-the-nose.'The Secret Service indicated that it had recently uncovered a possible Iranian threat against Trump and "added protective resources and capabilities to the former President’s security detail" as a precaution, said spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi. The agency has also repeatedly warned the former president about the inherent dangers of outdoor campaign rallies in general.Iran, authorities claim, is still seething from Trump's assassination of Qasem Soleimani in 2020, when Trump was still in office, but many conservatives on social media have questions about the latest reports regarding the foreign adversary. Many, for example, suggested federal agents may be using the supposed Iranian plot as a pretext for another war."The deep state wants war with Iran. What better way than for them to 'kill two birds with one stone' by removing Trump and leaving the body on Iran? That’s what they want. Beware!" said Michael Cernovich."Did the CIA just declare war on The Republic? Because this Iran story is too on-the-nose. Watch the players. That will tell you," added "Dilbert" cartoonist Scott Adams."There's no doubt Iran wants Trump dead. Did this actually happen though? That's much more up in the air," added the popular account known as Not the Bee."Ah yes, Iran waited 4.5 years to get revenge on Trump — right before he officially becomes the GOP nominee and begins receiving intelligence briefings," quipped an account known as johnny maga, which has over 100,000 followers.Still others hinted that the Secret Service may be trying to deflect blame for the security breaches at the Trump rally that allowed the assassination attempt to happen."Don’t believe your eyes, we actually DID step up Secret Service resources for Trump," joked former PJ Media NYC editor David Steinberg."Secret Service is trying to pivot to Iran so we don’t suspect them in Saturday’s attempts on Trump’s life," said Hotep Jesus, another conservative account with hundreds of thousands of followers. In the post, Hotep Jesus also included a gif of Alex Jones wearing a tinfoil hat.Trump's campaign issued its own statement about the reports: "We do not comment on President Trump’s security detail. All questions should be directed to The United States Secret Service."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Two dozen skeletons and other bones dating to between 670 and 940 C.E. were discovered on the grounds of the historic Old Bell Hotel in Malmesbury, England. The post Dozens Of Bodies Found In A Medieval Cemetery Sitting Right Under The Garden Of A Hotel In A Small English Town appeared first on All That's Interesting.