'They will regret playing ball with the losing side'

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The Washington Post’s web traffic has taken a nosedive since 2021, with its digital readership declining by nearly 90%. The outlet, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, had around 22.5 million daily active users in January 2021, according to Semafor. As of the middle of 2024, however, that number had fallen to just 2.5 million-to-3 million. The corporate media outlet has also seen an immense drop off in revenue, which decreased from $190 million in 2023 to $174 million in 2024. On Tuesday, the Post began laying off approximately 4% of its workforce in a bid to improve its financial health, with the outlet’s publisher revealing in May that it had lost $77 million in the last year. The newspaper lost over 200,000 subscribers in October alone, after deciding not to endorse a presidential candidate. Bezos reportedly quashed the Kamala Harris endorsement. A slew of Post staffers who supported Vice President Kamala Harris resigned following the decision, including Editor-at-Large Robert Kagan and journalists David E. Hoffman and Molly Roberts. Sally Buzbee, the Post’s top editor, stepped down in June after three years in the role. The Post did not provide a reason for Buzbee’s departure or include a statement from her, but her exit reportedly followed her objecting to Lewis’ plans for a reorganization. A wave of high-profile reporters also left the Post following the November presidential election, including Josh Dawsey and Tyler Pager. Veteran opinion columnist Jen Rubin also reportedly left the outlet to start a new media publication with President Joe Biden’s ethics czar Norm Eisen, CNN reported Monday. Jeff Bezos has a net worth of over $230 billion, according to Forbes, and purchased the Post from the Graham family for $250 million in 2013. The Amazon founder was one of a slew of tech moguls to congratulate President-elect Donald Trump following his November victory, joining Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Bezos also reportedly donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund in December. The Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Originally published by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The post Corporate Media Outlet Has Reportedly Shed Nearly 90% of Digital Readership in Only 4 Years appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Ben Shapiro on Andrew Tate: 'He Made His Money Grooming Women'

The CEO of disgruntled leftist fact-checker Snopes — yeah, the same website that got raked over the coals for "fact-checking" the satire site The Babylon Bee — had the chutzpah to excuse away the truth-gatekeeping industry’s notorious, censorial treatment of the Hunter Biden laptop story. “Let's look at the most famous example of Facebook censoring content, and that was the Hunter Biden laptop story,” said Snopes CEO Chris Richmond during the Jan. 11 segment of MSNBC’s two-hour, weekend lefty spitballing puppet show Velshi. After host Ali Velshi bemoaned the media being the “scapegoats for a lot of things,” Richmond was teed up to deflect blame away from the fact-checkers for how Big Tech suppressed the New York Post bombshell on Hunter Biden. “And we say, well, it was fact-checkers, right, who told Zuckerberg to limit the reach of that? No, it was the government. So, Facebook complied with the government, and then the fact-checkers get the blame.” It’s too bad the MRC has receipts that completely upend Richmond’s gaslighting. MRC Free Speech America conducted a 2022 study of the numerous instances between 2020 and 2020 of how Meta’s fact-checkers did their utmost to bury the Hunter Biden story. Although Facebook undoubtedly broke its own policy by preempting the fact-checkers in reducing distribution of the story as prima facie misinformation under pressure from government entities, its circle of Ministry of Truth operatives had no issues walking in lockstep, including Snopes. Here are some examples. Oct. 28, 2020: A Snopes fact-check repeated the notorious 51 intelligence officials' false claims that the Hunter Biden laptop story was “Russian disinformation.” “This story raised some immediate red flags, which included the fact that more than 50 former intelligence officials suspected the story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign,” Snopes misled. April 6, 2021: A Snopes fact-check wrongly tags a social media post quoting Hunter Biden saying the laptop mentioned by the New York Post “could be” his as “misleading.” March 17, 2022: Snopes was forced — over a year after the fact — to update an Oct. 15, 2020, fact-check that tried to dismantle the authenticity of the New York Post story by noting that The New York Times had authenticated the emails housed on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Of course, the 2020 election had long since passed and the damage was already done. Oops! The irony of it all is that Facebook’s previous third-party fact-checker policy permitted the fact-checkers to decide what content gets restricted. Facebook’s fact-checking partners, which are certified by the George Soros-funded Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), are supposed to flag Facebook posts found to be  “False,” “Altered,” “Missing Context,” or “Partly False.” Facebook may have been impulsive in jumping ahead of its own system on the Hunter Biden story, but the fact-checkers had no problem cooperating with its antics and burying it further. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced he was ditching his company’s fact-checking program for Facebook and Instagram to reorient the platforms to allow for more free speech.  But what Meta, Snopes and their Orwellian counterparts did in 2020 must never be forgotten. Research conducted by The Polling Company for the Media Research Center after the 2020 election found that the media, Big Tech and the fact-checkers’s censorship (not just government) of the Hunter Biden story helped throw the election to his dad. The survey found that 45.1% of Biden voters in seven key swing states said they were unaware of the financial scandal enveloping Biden and his son, Hunter. According to the survey, full awareness of the Hunter Biden scandal would have led 9.4% of Biden voters to abandon the Democratic candidate, flipping all six of the swing states he won to Trump, which would have given the former president 311 electoral votes. In short, Richmond — and Velshi for that matter — can go pound sand. Former MRC Free Speech America Associate Editor Brian Bradley contributed to this report. 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.  

Two-time Hack Madness champion, walking cartoon, fake conservative, and Washington Post columnist Jen Rubin quit the paper on Monday to launch an absurdly named site called The Contrarian with former Obama official Norm Eisen, which CNN’s Brian Stelter gushed wouldn’t simply be “anti-Trump” but “pro-democracy.” Rubin, a rich, Northern Virginia-based white woman, left The Post on a bitter note as the new catchphrase for The Contrarian will be “not owned by anybody,” which Stelter said “is a pointed reference to billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and other moguls who, in Rubin’s view, have ‘bent the knee’ to President-elect Donald Trump.” The logo is even sillier with a blue statue of liberty holding a pencil instead of a torch. Despite their insistence of ideological diversity being “fact-based” and “independent”, a press release painted the far-left-dominated Blue Sky as its main social media platform and, in a thumb of its nose at Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, declared it would “not be on X or Threads.” How they offer anything that’s not already offered in The Bulwark or Daily Beast in terms of a blog, The New Yorker or even The Nation in print, or CNN, MSNBC, or even PBS on the TV side is beyond us. “[Eisen and Rubin] said they have already enlisted about two dozen contributors, including people who played prominent roles in debunking 2020 election denialism and investigating the January 6, 2021, attack at the US Capitol,” Stelter added. He said Eisen told him these contributors “are diverse across parties and generations,” but “connected by the shared belief that we need an unshackled media in order to meet this moment, as we face an existential threat to American democracy.” However, the most cringe part of the launch was this short video, in which they promised articles, columns, and podcast, but also posts about pets, “a humor column.” and “even a cooking column, but we’re going to sprinkle in a little bit of democracy flavor”: Jennifer Rubin has resigned from the Washington Post and she’s launching a publication with Norm Eisen. pic.twitter.com/8P1rSXUIhl — Yashar Ali ? (@yashar) January 13, 2025 The Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles posted on X a screenshot of their initial contributors. Spoiler alert, it read like a who’s who of beloved far-left CNN and MSNBC contributors, anti-free speech authoritarians, and a former CNN legal analyst-turned-famous defense lawyer: Jennifer Rubin's new website lists Luigi Mangione's defense attorney as a contributor pic.twitter.com/Oa3jdVpej5 — Andrew Stiles (@AndrewStilesUSA) January 13, 2025 Rubin’s first post read like it was penned by The Babylon Bee as a cri de cour from an aggrieved, wealthy white woman. Here’s some excerpts, including her reasoning for quitting The Post as the latest in a growing line of intolerant, petulant children who want to be out and out partisan journalists instead of simply honest reporters (click “expand”): Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission — defending, protecting and advancing democracy. The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and enlisted management are among the offenders. They have undercut the values central to The Post’s mission and that of all journalism: integrity, courage, and independence. I cannot justify remaining at The Post. Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy—Donald Trump—at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to our democracy’s survival and capacity to thrive. I therefore have resigned from The Post, effective today. In doing so, I join a throng of veteran journalists so distressed over The Post’s management they felt compelled to resign. The decay and compromised principles of corporate and billionaire-owned media underscore the urgent need for alternatives. Americans are eager for innovative and independent journalism that offers lively, unflinching coverage free from cant, conflicts of interest and moral equivocation. (....) The need for upstart outlets has never been more acute. The contradiction between, on the one hand, the journalistic obligation to hold the powerful accountable and, on the other, the financial interests of billionaire moguls and corporate conglomerates could not be starker. The Post’s own headline last month warned: “Trump signals plans to use all levers of power against the media; Press freedom advocates say they fear that the second Trump administration will ramp up pressure on journalists, in keeping with the president-elect’s combative rhetoric.” And yet The Post’s owner quashed a presidential endorsement for Trump’s opponent, forked over $1M for Trump’s inauguration through Amazon, and publicly lauded Trump’s agenda. None of us could imagine Katharine Graham sending LBJ or Nixon a $1M check. It would have been, as it is now, a fundamental betrayal of a great American newspaper. Defense of the First Amendment is incompatible with funding or cheerleading for the very person who seeks to “drastically undermine the institutions tasked with reporting on his coming administration.”

President Joe Biden announced Monday that he has decided to once again engage in charity with other people's money, putting American taxpayers on the hook for over 150,000 debtors' federal student loans, thereby "bringing the total number of Americans who have had their student debt canceled by my Administration to over 5 million." Biden bragged that his administration has "forgiven more student loan debt than any other administration in history." According to the Department of Education, the Biden administration has blown $183.6 billion across 28 debt relief actions since January 2021. These actions have largely been executed by decree, not through Congress. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona suggested in a statement Monday that this wealth redistribution scheme is part of a broader effort to establish "a system that is affordable and accountable to both students and taxpayers." The latest debt cancellation, which Investopedia indicated has a price tag of nearly $4.23 billion, consists of four types of discharges. First, the Education Department approved 6,100 debtors for $465 million in relief through Public Service Loan Forgiveness; second, the department approved around 85,000 debtors for $1.26 billion in the event they were found to have attended schools that cheated or defrauded their students; third, the department approved 61,000 debtors suffering total and permanent disabilities; and fourth, the department had other Americans shoulder the debt of 6,100 public service workers. "People who cannot afford their student loans because they are in public service, have disabilities, were cheated by their college, or who have completed decades of payments are now getting the relief they were promised," said Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal. "These permanent reforms will continue to more and more borrowers every year." Biden's promise may end up being more empty symbolism, especially if this latest handout is met by the kinds of legal challenges that past debt-cancellation initiatives have faced. In June 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court torpedoed Biden's effort to cancel more than $400 billion in loans. Chief Justice John Roberts noted in the opinion for the court's 6-3 majority that the Biden administration "lacked the authority under the [Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2023] to unilaterally cancel debt and that such sweeping policy changes needed explicit Congressional approval." A month after the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked more of Biden's student debt-cancellation plan, the Supreme Court denied the Biden administration's emergency request to lift the appeals court's nationwide injunction on the Saving on a Valuable Education Plan. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

President-elect Donald Trump's incoming border czar, Tom Homan, stated that the administration is considering establishing a citizen hotline for reporting illegal aliens suspected of committing additional crimes within the United States.Homan told NBC News on Thursday that he wants to empower the American public to assist in Trump's mass deportation plan.'I don't put a price on our national security.'He called implementing a public reporting hotline a "fresh idea.""I want a place where American citizens can call and report," Homan said. "We need to take care of the American people. We need to make sure they have an outlet to help report child traffickers, forced labor traffickers. We want to give them an opportunity to be a part of the fix." Last week, Homan stated that he wants the administration to hold weekly press briefings to update the American public about its deportation progress. "There needs to be a weekly White House press briefing on exactly who we're arresting and who we're saving, who we are putting in jail, who we are deporting, so the American people know we're true to our word," he said.During his interview with NBC News, Homan again stressed the need for transparency."I think we need to be transparent for the American people, and we need to show people exactly what we're doing," he stated.Homan also called for the elimination of the Biden administration's CBP One, a mobile application that allows 1,450 foreign nationals per day to schedule an appointment at a port of entry to make an asylum claim and enter the U.S."Creating programs to allow thousands of people in this country a week that we don't properly vet and that we know don't qualify is not the answer," he told the news outlet.Homan reaffirmed that the Trump administration plans to implement worksite raids as part of its deportation plan."We're going to do it in a smart way," he explained. "We're still working on how exactly we want to roll this out, but [work site] operations have to come back again because it's the No. 1 place we find victims of forced labor being run by many cartels."Homan has stated that the administration's plan would require at least $86 billion to start."I don't put a price on all these young women who've been raped and murdered. I don't put a price on our national security," he told NBC News.Currently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has 34,000 detention beds. Homan has stated that the administration must increase the number of beds to at least 100,000.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Thanks to a tip from California firefighters, police arrested a man suspected of committing arson near a deadly Los Angeles-area blaze. Meanwhile, comedian David Spade is offering a $5,000 reward to anyone who catches an arsonist. Around 12:30 p.m. Sunday, members of the Los Angeles County Fire Department were extinguishing a small brushfire when they allegedly spotted a man actively lighting fires in Irwindale — roughly 13 miles from the Eaton fire. 'So keep your eyes peeled. Do what you can out there.'The Irwindale Police Department said in a statement, "While on scene, LACOFD personnel observed a suspect actively lighting fires in the area."Officers responded to the incident and arrested 29-year-old Ruben Montes — a resident of Baldwin Park, which is about a half-hour east of Los Angeles. Montes was charged with arson.The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection reported that the Eaton fire had burned 14,117 acres, destroyed or damaged over 7,000 structures, and was 33% contained. To combat the Eaton fire, 3,408 personnel, 16 helicopters, 375 engines, 29 dozers, and 90 water tenders were deployed.The Eaton fire has taken the lives of 16 people, according to the Los Angeles County medical examiner. Another eight people died from the Pacific Palisades fire, which has scorched 23,713 acres and damaged or destroyed an estimated 5,000 structures, according to Cal Fire. The Palisades fire has been only 14% contained.Officials are still investigating what caused the Eaton and Pacific Palisades fires. Comedian David Spade is offering a reward to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest of arsonists in California. The “Saturday Night Live” alum stated in an Instagram video, “I’m out in California and people are saying guys are lighting fires out there to make this s**t worse."The comedic actor continued, "They just caught somebody we’re pretty sure was lighting fires walking along with a blowtorch. They let him go."Local residents apprehended the suspect with a blowtorch in the area of the Kenneth fire less than an hour after the blaze startedPolice arrived and detained the man on suspicion of arson, but the charge was dismissed because officials said they lacked probable cause to arrest him on arson charges. The suspect — Juan Manuel Sierra-Leyva — was being detained on a felony probation violation, the Los Angeles Police Department stated.The Daily Mail and the New York Post reported that the man is an illegal immigrant from Mexico. Spade told his 3.2 million followers on Instagram, "So if you can find somebody lighting a fire and you catch somebody, and you get the cops to bust them and throw them in jail, I’ll give you 5,000 bucks. So keep your eyes peeled. Do what you can out there.”Spade stressed, "Don’t fake it, though. No staging. Let me know."Spade isn't the only celebrity to suspect that arsonists are involved in the devastating California fires. "THERE IS an ARSONIST here in LA,” actor Henry Winkler wrote on the X social media platform. Conditions for wildfires are expected to continue to be extremely dangerous. The National Weather Service on Monday said, "Dangerous situation expected as Critical to Extreme fire-weather conditions develop across parts of southern California today into Tuesday."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ripped the H-1B program for its abuse of while at the same defending the use of immigrant workers in his state.The Republican gave a press conference predominantly focused on adjustments he will make in the state to facilitate President-elect Donald Trump's deportation process of illegal immigrants."We will allocate resources and ensure state and local officials in Florida are supporting these efforts. We have no time to waste. Florida must lead," DeSantis said, per First Coast News.'We've got some big problems with some of the legal immigration programs.'However, when it comes to the ever-growing issue of foreign workers under the H-1B program, DeSantis said it was important not to mix the two issues."We have legal immigrants in Florida. So you can't conflate illegal immigrants with people who are here legally," he began."I've also said we've got some big problems with some of the legal immigration programs that we have," the governor continued before providing an example."We've seen this H-1B program, how companies will bring in H-1B [workers], the Americans train the H-1B [workers], and then they fire the Americans and hire the H-1B. How would that even remotely be acceptable?"DeSantis continued his press conference by criticizing chain migration:"You have chain migration, which is not merit-based and is bringing in this more distant relatives, not what you want. So there's a whole host of issues there that that need major reform."At the same time, the governor said he had heard criticisms of immigrant farm laborers and defended them on the grounds of being legal."From an immigration enforcement perspective, I mean, if somebody is here on, like, an H-2A visa, they are working in the state of Florida legally. And when we did E-Verify, people would say, ... 'Hey. There's a a busload of farm workers. I saw them on I-4.' And people assume they're illegal."DeSantis' comments largely defended the work of the Trump administration on illegal immigration and Trump's upcoming deportation plan. The governor even threatened to suspend elected officials from office in Florida if they are found to be "neglecting their duties" and causing roadblocks for the new immigration mandates."It will require new legislation in Florida to ensure that the duties of both state and local officials are very clear and that those duties require them to be assisting the federal government in this regard," he said.DeSantis added, per the Post Millennial, "I have the authority, with respect to certain officials, to suspend them from office if they are neglecting their duties."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

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