Slipknot’s “experimental” album was recorded in 2008 and still hasn’t seen the light of day

Unable to battle the stigma of following their own path, they just got on with it; and, taking influence from Danny Elfman and Pink Floyd, went even more theatrical with 2015’s Coma Ecliptic

Even if a boot is put on their neck…taken to the train station, only then will they get it. ~ Yuri Bezmenov Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s eldest daughter, Violet, 18, spoke at a public comment section during a recent hearing before the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which governs Los Angeles. She had […] The post Affleck-Garner Daughter Demands Masks for All appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

A congressional investigation has uncovered overt political bias in the leadership of an advertising coalition that’s being used to control online speech, according to a House Judiciary Committee report released on Wednesday ahead of a hearing on whether advertisers are violating federal competition laws. The report on the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM, accuses the group of attempting to influence what content appears online by starving disfavored content, or even entire platforms, of advertising dollars needed to survive. Internal emails obtained by the committee found that GARM’s leadership strategized how to use the coalition against news outlets, including The Daily Wire, with opposing views from its leadership. “GARM and its members discussed a strategy of blocking certain news outlets like Fox News, The Daily Wire, and Breitbart News,” the report states, pointing to an email from a top executive associated with the coalition stating that he “hated their ideology and bulls**t.” One of the lead organizations in the coalition, GroupM, the world’s largest media buying agency, admits in emails that The Daily Wire is “on our Global High Risk exclusion list, categorized as Conspiracy Theories.” Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro will testify in the committee’s hearing on GARM, which will take place later on Wednesday. Last year, Shapiro described GARM as part of “a network of global elites who have created a universal framework full of guidelines and ratings designed to enforce ‘approved’ narratives and punish disapproved ones.” READ THE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE’S FULL REPORT: HOW THE WORLD’S BIGGEST BRANDS SEEK TO CONTROL ONLINE SPEECH GARM was formed by the World Federation of Advertisers in 2019, and was embraced as a “flagship project” of the World Economic Forum. Its stated goal is to create a “common understanding” in the advertising industry of “what harmful and sensitive content is” as well as “where ads should not appear,” basing it all on the importance of “brand safety” for its members. The report exposes the political bias of Rob Rakowitz, GARM’s leader and co-founder, who in one email complains about people “advocating for freedom of speech online,” and about “extreme global interpretation of the US Constitution.” Rakowitz also criticizes the fact that the Constitution was written “by white men exclusively.” “For an organization reliant on speech and persuasion in advertising, GARM appears to have anti-democratic views of fundamental American freedoms,” the report states, citing Rakowtiz’s emails. Other entities targeted by GARM include Elon Musk’s Twitter, now X, after it was initially purchased by the tech billionaire. The report states that GARM tried to direct all of its members — corporate giants like Coca-Cola and Unilever who together account for 90% of global advertising dollars — to “stop all paid advertisement” on the platform after Musk purchased it. The report states that GARM “bragged about” the fact that Twitter was “80% below revenue forecasts” after its effort. READ MORE: BEN SHAPIRO SET TO TESTIFY TO CONGRESS ON ALLEGED COLLUSION AGAINST CONSERVATIVE IN AD INDUSTRY GARM also worked to pressure Spotify over Joe Rogan’s podcast, the report shows, specifically over the host’s claims that young, healthy people didn’t need a COVID vaccine. Rakowitz, GARM’s leader, admits in private emails that threats like the one it made to Spotify “gets us into hot water by way of anticompetitive and collusive behaviors.” The committee report concludes that “GARM likely violated federal antitrust laws,” claiming that it found “direct evidence” that it was “demonetizing certain viewpoints to limit consumer choice” and therefore harmed consumers. “Colluding to suppress voices and views disfavored by the leading marketers at the world’s largest companies and advertising agencies is core to GARM’s founding principles,” the report states. In the emails between Rakowitz and the GroupM executives, Joe Barone and John Montgomery, a plan appears to be hatched to closely monitor The Daily Wire in hopes that they find a reason to censor the outlet — it’s a strategy that was used to censor Breitbart, the GroupM executive explains. “There is an interesting parallel here with Breitbart,” Montgomery wrote in an October 2021 email after he was asked about The Daily Wire. “Before Breitbart crossed the line and started spouting blatant misinformation, we had long discussions about whether we should include them on our exclusion lists. As much as we hated their ideology and bulls**t, we couldn’t really justify blocking them for misguided opinion. We watched them very carefully and it didn’t take long for them to cross the line.” He then recommends taking the same approach to The Daily Wire. “We should watch them carefully to make sure they don’t stoop below the GARM floor,” Montgomery writes, before being told by his colleague Barone that The Daily Wire was already on GroupM’s “Global High Risk exclusion list.” Though the emails show Rakowitz discussing plans to censor specific outlets with GroupM, the committee report says he denied doing so in a transcribed interview with congressional investigators. “When Mr. Rakowitz was asked by the Committee during his transcribed interview whether he discusses with GroupM its list of news outlets that are worthy of monetization, he denied doing so,” the report states. Rakowitz told the committee that he “won’t get into those conversations to keep myself compliant with our competition law policy.” In addition to Shapiro, the CEO of GroupM, Christian Juhl, will also be a witness, Breitbart reported on Monday. The report outlines specific instances where GARM members used the coalition to get involved in U.S. elections — in one series of emails in October 2020, an executive for Unilever, which is based in the United Kingdom, tries to convince Facebook to take down a Donald Trump ad it viewed as misinformation. When Facebook explained that it has different standards for political speech, GARM leadership privately seethed. “Honestly reprehensible,” Rakowitz wrote in an email to the Unilever executive, in reference to Facebook’s decision not to censor Trump. The president of Unilever, a consumer goods giant that sits on GARM’s steering committee, will also testify at the hearing. The message to Facebook, the emails obtained by the committee show, was that GARM wanted it to do more censorship — Rakowitz specifically wrote that the censorship efforts exhibited during COVID “should be the North Star” and urged it to do the same level of content moderation for elections. “In other words, GARM pushed Facebook for coordinated action around the upcoming elections similar to the actions the platform took during the COVID-19 pandemic to censor speech,” the report states. The committee report concludes that while any of these companies is free to advertise wherever they please, the collusion facilitated through GARM put it in violation of the law. “Twenty years ago, the Supreme Court described collusion as “the supreme evil of antitrust.’ Today, this description remains true,” it states. “If collusion among powerful corporations capable of collectively demonetizing, and in effect eliminating, certain views and voices is allowed to continue, the ability of countless American consumers to choose what to read and listen to, or even have their speech or writing reach other Americans, will be destroyed.”

The unhinged antics of academia have long baffled ordinary Americans. Institutions once prized for their services to knowledge are now staffed by people who routinely deny that such a thing objectively exists, and who focus more on their partisan priorities. Despite its reputation, Columbia University is no exception. Before recently being evicted after clashes with police, students at the school’s fractious anti-Israel encampment proudly proclaimed their support for terrorism while calling on the college to sever ties to Israel and Israelis. Now, we have more evidence that some of the college’s top administrators are not merely willing to indulge such radicalism but hold their own egregious views. Last week the Washington Free Beacon exposed how deans at the Ivy League school mocked Jewish students in private texts, referring to them as “privileged” despite their concerns over growing anti-Semitism. Perhaps the most surprising part of this scandal is that the offensive remarks were made in private, given how normalized such sentiment has become in academic circles. The Jewish students denigrated by their deans are the same ones who recently had to pass protestors, mobilized by groups that openly celebrated the slaughter of civilians by Hamas, screeching at them to “go back to Poland.” Even prior to macabre celebrations of the October 7th attacks, anti-Jewish incidents were soaring in the U.S., with assaults on Jews rising by over 25% in 2022. Columbia University deans mocking Jewish students’ legitimate concerns about anti-Semitism as “privilege” — not to mention the vomit emojis they directed at those who express those concerns, proves that despite promoting progressive values, Columbia’s rampant critical race theory has apparently done nothing to alleviate a toxic atmosphere for Jewish students, and arguably exacerbated it. In the corridors of academia, “progressive” staff are only too happy to trivialize the genuine fears and experiences of Jewish students in a way they would not be if students of any other minority group expressed similar fears. How can students feel safe on campus in these circumstances — or trust administrators to be honest referees for their concerns after these private texts? Incredibly, despite a slew of headlines claiming that the Columbia staff in question have been “removed,” the college will simply shuffle three of them into new roles. The most senior among them, Dean Josef Sorett, is walking scot-free having released a mealy-mouthed statement in which he vows to “rebuild trust.”  But how can trust be rebuilt when, to echo the words of the Free Beacon, Columbia’s response is akin to “Moving the Priests Around” a rightly decried practice of shuffling abusive priests from parish to parish instead of forcing them to face justice for horrendous crimes? While many Catholic authorities have reckoned with previous abuse scandals and improved safeguarding practices, most colleges are incapable of even admitting a scandal is unfolding.  The question now is whether ambitious American students, Jewish or otherwise, decide to give up on the colleges of yesteryear and gravitate towards less “prestigious” schools that remain dedicated to learning rather than appeasing extremists. While comprehensive measures such as training on anti-Semitism could be helpful in theory, it is difficult to believe that, in practice, administrators like those at Columbia will change for the better from such training. Their mocking text messages, after all, occurred during a discussion of anti-Semitism. After this text message scandal, can we really trust colleges to execute these training programs? Will students, already raised to hate, be open to changing their minds? Are current teachers actually qualified or willing to explain the complex history of anti-Jewish hatred, rather than reduce it to yet another function of the irredeemable white supremacist evils of Western civilization? The reality suggested by this affair is that entire college departments and administrations are rotten to the core. Root and branch reform is needed, in Columbia and beyond. Universities must crack down on anti-Semitism, not just from the Right but also from the Left — and from their own students — before they can hope to root out anti-Semitism. From Nazi Germany to the USSR to post-Islamic Revolution Iran, societies that encourage or turn a blind eye to Jew-hatred have been doomed to achieve neither longevity nor learning. In order to train the next generation of people in elite professions who have America’s best interest at heart, Columbia and other colleges must extinguish the anti-Semitism festering in their ranks. The US will not maintain its global strength if its educated elite continues its descent into a toxic combination of hatred and ignorance. * * * Georgia L. Gilholy is a journalist and writer in the U.K. Her work has appeared in The Spectator, The Times of Israel, Hong Kong Free Press, First Things, Newsweek, Jewish Chronicle, CityAM, UnHerd, The Jerusalem Post, and The Washington Times. She is also a media consultant for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting & Analysis (CAMERA). Follow her on X/Twitter: @llggeorgia. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire