YouTube strips rising media company Epoch Times of ability to monetize video content

"This is the latest example of big tech suppression of free speech, a step on the road to communist-style censorship' - publisher Stephen Gregory.

YouTube, the video platform service that is a Google subsidiary, has banned The Epoch Times, a rising, conservative-leaning media outlet, from earning money off its videos.

"YouTube demonetized the Epoch Times and related accounts last week," Stephen Gregory, publisher of The Epoch Times confirmed to Just the News on Tuesday in an email. "This is the latest example of big tech suppression of free speech, a step on the road to communist-style censorship."

A YouTube spokesperson acknowledged Tuesday in an email to Just the News that the company had demonetized the publication's channel and affiliated channels and had suspended them from the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) – over issues related to harmful or sensitive content.

"All channels on YouTube need to comply with our Community Guidelines, and in order to monetize, channels must comply with the YouTube Partner Program policies, which include our Advertiser-Friendly Guidelines," the spokesperson also said. "Channels that repeatedly violate these policies are suspended from our partner program."

The spokesperson noted that channels removed from its partner program are able to appeal the decision or reapply to YPP in 30 days, provided the underlying issues that led to suspension have been addressed to YouTube's liking.

The move by YouTube follows Twitter earlier this month de-platforming former President Trump and some conservative users, and the app Parler being denied web hosting services by Amazon.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Jan. 13 issued civil investigative demands to Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon Web Services, and Apple, asking the companies for their policies and practices regarding content moderation and, more specifically, for information related to Parler, a social media application popular among conservatives that was recently terminated or blocked by Google, Amazon, and Apple.

On Thursday, a federal judge denied Parler's request to have Amazon immediately restore its web service, saying she rejects "any suggestion that the public interest favors requiring AWS to host the incendiary speech."

Larry Elder, a prominent, African-American conservative filmmaker who hosts a video series for The Epoch Times, confirmed during an interview with the "Just the News AM" television program that the de-monetization hit him personally, reducing his income.

"We have to build our own infrastructure, our own social media platforms," Elder said, pointing to alternative social platforms like Gab.com and video service Rumble.com. "The only answer is not to bitch, moan and whine about how how unfairly we're being treated, not to run to the government to pass more regulations. The answer is to build our own platforms. And we have been asleep at the switch."

https://justthenews.com/nation/technology/youtube-strips-rising-media-company-epoch-times-ability-monetize-video-content

How To Lead The United States Into An American Spring

To those asking where we go from here, there must be one conclusion from the right: The counter assault must be sustained. There is no going back.

Many men and women of the right are asking themselves in the days following President Trump’s departure from office: “Where do we go from here?”

The answer is easy for some. The establishment desires to move beyond Trump and return to business as usual: where powerful interests have an outsized voice in setting the agenda, where policy objectives are routinely sterilized of all perceived political risk, and where elites keep their base of voters in the dark.

But the establishment is not the only constituency breathing a sigh of relief that Trump is no longer in the White House. Much of what can be termed the “center-right” movement in the Beltway and commentariat is ready to revert to their pre-Trump agenda: robotically extending America’s interests to the outskirts of the globe, tinkering at the margins of an ever-expanding welfare state, and prioritizing a sort-of market absolutism. The cultural issues—the ones that trigger name-calling by the left—get pats on the head, but no real action, priority, or passion.

As a result, this movement has failed to change America’s trajectory. Notwithstanding policy victories on taxes, welfare, and the right to life in the last several decades, the tide of progressive liberalism has not been turned. The commanding heights of culture—the academy, the media, the entertainment industry, elite opinion, etc.—have only gotten stronger and bolder.

Trump’s election was glaring evidence of a deep dissatisfaction with both conventional politicians and the establishment—for their lack of mettle against the left and their refusal to address the many cultural issues that fell outside of their conventional views of conservatism. In addition, President Trump’s dogged commitment to keeping his promises led to adoration within his conservative base of supporters.

But his presidency was about far more. It was the first real counter assault to the left in decades, by a champion who had the stomach and the strength to sustain the withering fire of his adversaries. This explains the lengths to which the left went to destroy his presidency and his movement.

To those asking where we go from here, there must be one conclusion from the right: The counter assault must be sustained. There is no going back. The call for unity must not become an excuse for surrender.

Yet even if conservatives recommit to the fight President Trump began, there is much work to be done to broaden and anchor the movement in truth and resolution. There has been too little effort to formulate an enduring America First agenda befitting an America First politics. The conservative movement needs an organization focused exclusively on framing policy battles on those specific issues.

That is why I am founding the Center for American Restoration, and a corresponding activist organization named American Restoration Action. It will help restore an old consensus in America that has been forgotten, that we are a people For God, For Country, and For Community.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/26/how-to-lead-the-united-states-into-an-american-spring/

Joe Biden: America Is a “Nation of Morally Deprived” People Who Are “Less Prosperous” Due to Systemic Racism

Don’t you just love Democrats? With all of their self-hatred and rage packaged up to smear and berate the people they claim to represent.

Joe Biden delivered remarks on racial equality on Tuesday.

Only 2,200 tuned in to watch this painful speech on the YouTube White House Channel.

That was probably best.

It was painful to watch Joe Biden slur his words as he mumbled through his remarks.

It was also painful to hear Joe Biden and the anti-American left accuse all Americans of being a “nation of morally deprived” people.

Joe Biden: I believe we are in a battle for the soul of this nation. And the simple truth is our soul be troubled as long as systemic racism is allowed to persist. We can’t eliminate ‘zimply’ overnight. We can’t ‘eliminateverthing.’ But it’s corrosive, it’s destructive and it’s costly. It costs every American. Not just who felt the sting of racial injustice. We’re not just less of a – We’re not just a nation of morally deprived because of systemic racism. We’re also less prosperous. We’re less successful. We’re less secure.

What a disgusting speech.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/joe-biden-america-nation-morally-deprived-people-less-prosperous-due-systemic-racism/

FULL RETARD ACHIEVED

Household pets may need a COVID-19 vaccine

Household pets may need to be vaccinated against COVID-19 to curb the spread of coronavirus and reduce the risk of transmission.

The concern comes after 17 million mink were culled in Denmark after hundreds of local cases emerged from a strain found in the animals.

While dogs and cats can contract coronavirus, there are no known cases of them passing it on to humans and some scientists suggest it's not necessary until there is evidence of transmission from animals to humans.

https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6226361719001

Acting Capitol Police Chief Apologizes, Says Force ‘Should Have Been More Prepared’ for Deadly Riot

On January 6, Trump loyalists gathered in Washington DC, as congress confirmed the winner of the US election; however, bolstered by calls made at the outgoing president's 'Stop the Steal' rally minutes earlier, hundreds of individuals, in a riot that saw five people killed, stormed the Capitol and temporarily halted proceedings, shocking the world.

Acknowledging setbacks that law enforcement officials endured as many hundreds of Trump supporters forced their way through security barriers, acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman issued a statement to congressional officials on Tuesday, formally apologizing for security failures.

At the time of the deadly riot, Steven Sund was the Capitol Police chief. Sund was quickly replaced by Pittman after the former resigned in the fallout over the violent insurrection. Prior to the new appointment, Pittman had served as the assistant chief for Protective and Intelligence Operations.

During a closed-door briefing with members of the House Appropriations Committee, Pittman stated Capitol Police had “failed to meet its own high standards as well as yours,” before noting that she was present to “offer my sincerest apologies on behalf of the department.”

“Let me be clear: the department should have been more prepared for this attack,” Pittman told officials. “By January 4th, the department knew that the January 6th event would not be like any of the previous protests held in 2020. We knew that militia groups and white supremacist organizations would be attending. We also knew that some of these participants were intending to bring firearms and other weapons to the event. We knew that there was a strong potential for violence and that Congress was the target.”

“The department prepared in order to meet these challenges, but we did not do enough,” the official said, before explaining that added measures included requiring all available officers to be on shift, activating SWAT units and upping the number of civil disturbance units, as well as reshaping security perimeters based on instructions received from both the House and Senate sergeant-at-arms, both of whom resigned from their posts in the wake of the deadly riot.

https://sputniknews.com/us/202101261081888287-acting-capitol-police-chief-apologizes-says-force-should-have-been-more-prepared-for-deadly-riot/

REPORT: CDC Apparently Changed COVID Criteria That Inflated Fatalities 10-Fold (2/2)

Imagine if President Trump had managed to squeeze out $38 billion to fund a border wall by scaring the bejesus out of Congress with some incredibly alarming stats about illegal alien crime.

Now try to imagine that the mainstream press completely ignored the question of whether those stats might have been ginned up out of thin air precisely to get Congress to turn over all that dough.

Unless you’re on some pretty crazy hallucinogens, you can’t.

Heck, even if every single word of Trump’s story were true, not a week would pass before we’d some New York Times reporter would be all over the news quoting her mentally defective brother-in-law as a “source familiar with the matter” who claims that Trump had not only lied about the criminal propensities of illegal aliens—whom everyone knows are better Americans than you or I and especially Donald Trump could ever hope to be—but that the dreaded Orange Man had also viciously mocked our founding fathers, flag, and Jesus Christ himself along the way.

Yet, somehow, hardly anyone in America is even aware that the CDC managed to get their initial $8 billion budget for 2020 increased by a factor of six to a whopping $46 billion by relentlessly honking the COVID-19 panic-horn. (H/t, RedState reader, Kurt Schulzke.)

Moreover, the flagrant accounting shenanigans the CDC used to generate their generous windfall are sitting there hiding in plain sight on their website so that—not just that New York Times reporter’s mentally defective brother-in-law—but even the reporter himself wouldn’t have had much trouble finding them had either bothered looking.

You see, in March of 2020, the CDC announced some changes to the way they wanted doctors to start filling out death certificates. And a few weeks later, the CDC issued some new diagnostic guidelines.

But these changes turned out to be very narrowly focused, indeed.

The didn’t affect how heart disease or cancer deaths were diagnosed or reported.

https://redstate.com/michael_thau/2021/01/25/report-cdc-change-in-covid-criteria-that-inflated-fatalities-10-fold-also-broke-federal-law-conclusion-n316252

>>12722704

https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2020-12/CarterPageFISA.pdf

412 pages redacted heavily

Judge rules Virginia elections board violated law with late absentee mail-in ballot rule

The decision will affect future elections in Virginia going forward

Last August, the Virginia Board of Elections issued a rule that would've allowed elections officials to count late mail-in ballots that arrived without a postmark up to three days after the November election. On Monday, a state judge ruled that the board's decision was illegal.

Virginia Circuit Court Judge William Eldridge said that Virginia's mail-in ballot rule violated state elections law and issued an injunction preventing the state from adopting the rule for future elections, the Daily Caller reported. The judge's decision was announced by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a legal group representing Frederick County electoral board member Thomas Reed in his case against the state mail-in ballot law.

"This is a big win for the Rule of Law," PILF President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams said. "This consent decree gives Mr. Reed everything he requested – a permanent ban on accepting ballots without postmarks after Election Day and is a loss for the Virginia bureaucrats who said ballots could come in without these protections."

The Virginia Board of Elections issued its election guidance to county boards on Aug. 4, 2020, notifying them that any ballots "received by the general registrar's office by noon on the third day after the election … but does not have a postmark, or the postmark is missing or illegible" were not to be rendered invalid. But a week later, the elections board decided that such ballots should be counted.

On Oct. 13, PILF filed a lawsuit against the state elections board on behalf of Reed, who argued that he would not enforce the directive because it violated state law.

The relevant Virginia statute states: "Any absentee ballot returned to the general registrar after the closing of the polls on election day but before noon on the third day after the election and postmarked on or before the date of the election shall be counted." Reed's lawyers argued that a plain reading of state law prevents ballots that lack a postmark from being counted.

Two weeks later on Oct. 28, 2020, the court sided with Reed in a preliminary injunction hearing, issuing an order that prevented the state of Virginia from accepting and counting late absentee ballots that were missing postmarks.

The result is that none of the contested ballots were counted in the November election and Judge Eldridge's final ruling siding with Reed over the Virginia elections board will not change the outcome.

The ruling, however, will apply to future elections in Virginia, including the November 2021 gubernatorial and state legislature elections.

https://www.theblaze.com/news/judge-rules-virginia-elections-board-violated-law-with-late-absentee-mail-in-ballot-rule

Now China Says Christians Are Spreading COVID-19 Near Beijing

Remember Nero, the lunatic emperor who wanted to mount a massive urban renewal project in Rome, so he lit fires that got out of control and left much of the city in charred embers?

Since responsibility for such a horrendous act would not have been good for Caesar’s image, what did Nero do? He blamed the tragedy on an obscure sect most Romans tended to view as religious fanatics, who were known as Christians.

Thanks to Nero, then, lots of Christians — men, women, and children — were crucified, their bodies set aflame to provide nighttime illumination, and the seeds of countless major persecutions that would bloody multiple centuries to follow were planted in the Roman Empire.

Now it’s in China that we see tyrannical leaders blaming somebody else for their own failures as COVID-19 spreads rapidly in a province near Beijing, according to reports published by LifeSite.

Posts on social media platforms MeWe and Weibo began spreading accusations against Catholics for causing the recent cases. The rumors also claimed that a number of European and American priests came to participate in the religious ceremonies without taking any preventative measures, bringing the virus with them.

The accusations, circulating widely since January 6-7, further mentioned that “20 days ago the village of Xiao Guozhuang organized a religious activity and there were several priests from Europe and the United States together.”

Another article pointed to the village of Xiao Guozhuang, accusing it of being a Catholic stronghold, of holding regular ‘mysterious activities,’ and thus responsible for spreading infections.

LifeSite’s Michael Haynes reports that the 22 million inhabitants of China’s Hebei Province have been placed on severe lockdown, with everybody ordered to remain in their homes, thanks to “a recent uptick in positive cases.”

Not surprisingly, there appears to be no credible evidence that any group of Christians in Hebei Province were responsible for the increase in positive COVID cases, but that didn’t stop one of the top officials in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from linking the two.

The accusations “were supported by Sun Chunlan, China’s second Vice Premier who visited Hebei on January 15-18 and blamed religious gatherings for the new infections,” Haynes reported. “Despite admitting that the source of the recent outbreak had not been identified, Chunlan stated, ‘It is necessary to learn lessons from the spread of the epidemic caused by religious activities and suspend group activities in religious places of worship and other gathering places.'”

https://pjmedia.com/culture/marktapscott/2021/01/26/now-china-says-christians-are-spreading-covid-19-near-beijing-n1411033

Senate Votes 55-45 to Set Aside Rand Paul’s Point of Order That Impeachment Unconstitutional – 5 Republicans Vote with Democrats

On Tuesday Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) raised a point of order that the impeachment of private citizen Donald Trump is unconstitutional.

Democrat Majority Leader Chuck Schumer then moved to table or kill Paul’s point of order. Schumer only needed a simple majority vote to set Paul’s point of order aside.

FIVE Republicans voted with Democrats and against Rand Paul. The list included: Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse and Pat Toomey.

The US Senate then moved the impeachment trial to February 9th at 1 PM.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/breaking-senate-votes-55-45-set-aside-rand-pauls-point-order-impeachment-unconstitutional-5-republicans-vote-democrats/

White House Cites Economists’ Claim That Fixing Racial Inequality Could Add $5 Trillion To The Economy In Next Five Years

Susan Rice, President Joe Biden’s designee to serve as director of the Domestic Policy Council, cited economic projections Tuesday that suggest that taking steps to fix racial inequality could add $5 trillion to the economy over the next five years.

Rice opened Tuesday’s White House press briefing by speaking on the executive orders Biden will sign Tuesday afternoon, claiming that Biden’s policies will make “the American dream real for families across the nation by taking ambitious steps to redress equality in our economy.”

“These aren’t feel-good policies. The evidence is clear,” she continued. “Investing in equity is good for economic growth, and it creates jobs for all Americans.”

“Economists have estimated that the U.S. economy has lost a staggering $16 trillion over the last 20 years because of discrimination against families of color,” Rice continued. “If we closed racial gaps in income and opportunity, these same economists have estimated we could add $5 trillion to the U.S. economy over the next five years and add over 6 million new jobs for all Americans.”

https://dailycaller.com/2021/01/26/white-house-cites-economists-claim-that-fixing-racial-inequality-could-add-5-trillion-to-the-economy-in-next-five-years/