Nikki Haley is campaigning to the wrong crowd.  Her campaign would probably say that’s part of her strategy. To conservative voters, that’s exactly the problem with Nikki Haley: Republican primary voters aren’t Haley’s real constituency.

The individuals Haley is truly trying to appeal to, the people whose opinions she cares about the most, are the neoliberal elites who run establishment institutions like the media and Wall Street banks.

Tucker Carlson, my former boss, made this point over a year ago. I was with him in Iowa when he gave a speech explaining why Haley is unfit to lead the Republican Party.

In the speech, Carlson recalled Haley’s response to George Floyd’s death in 2020. Just days after the incident (and notably, before any facts had emerged), Haley tweeted that “in order to heal,” Floyd’s death “needs to be personal and painful for everyone.”

“I thought, why should what happened between a cop and George Floyd outside a convenience store in Minneapolis be personal and painful to anybody,” Carlson wondered. “What are you even talking about? Oh, you have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re trying to please the people whose opinions you actually care about at The New York Times.”

Carlson was and is, of course, right. He added that Haley’s tweet was a perfect example of why she’s unfit to lead the country.

“The second things get intense and the second the other side really unleashes and starts yelling so loudly that you can’t think clearly — I want a leader who can still think clearly,” he said.

Nikki Haley may be a nice person and a good politician, but she’s not that type of leader. More often than not, she’s been the type of Republican who behaves exactly like the institutional left believes Republicans should. She is the media’s favorite Republican running this cycle, and it’s not hard to see why.

For one, Haley believes in identity politics. She’s made her gender a central part of her pitch, from her bizarre comment about the “ammunition” in her heels at a primary debate to the campaign gear on her website. Haley sells bumper stickers and t-shirts that say “Sometimes It Takes A Woman,” which sounds more like Hillary Clinton than your average female GOP voter.

When asked recently why minorities should vote for her, Haley didn’t cite any policy proposals. Instead, she answered, “I am a minority first, so I think I’m as diverse as it gets.”

In other words, Haley wants people to vote for her because she’s an Indian woman. That message has earned Haley praise from the media.

On Wednesday, NPR ran a piece titled “Strong but ‘feminine’: how Nikki Haley navigates gender as the only woman in the GOP race.” The author wrote that Haley has been “highlighting the traits that make her unique … including her gender and her family’s immigration story.” As if those things weren’t obvious to voters.

It’s clear the media is attempting to rehabilitate Haley’s image on the left to make her more palatable to their audiences.

After the first Republican debate, MSNBC host Joy Reid said Haley “seemed like a reasonable Republican politician who kind of made sense.” Comedian Bill Maher recently called Haley an “as-good-as-it-gets Republican.” A November piece in Politico said Haley was “consolidating the NeverTrump vote” among donors and organizers.

Then there’s the support for Haley from the corporate establishment on Wall Street. Last month, fresh off declaring she would end limits on legal immigration and instead reform the system based on what corporations “need,” Haley met with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and other business executives to court their support. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is arguably the most significant proponent of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing in the United States.

When asked after the meeting if she was concerned about those ESG policies, Haley ignored the question. Instead, she pointed to her record as governor and said, “I partnered with my businesses. I use them as a resource. One, they hire people that we need to hire. They help us with our economy.”

Around the same time as Haley’s meeting with Fink, Axios reported that she had been having private conversations with J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon. Days later, he publicly called on business leaders, even liberal Democrats, to support her.

Perhaps even more important, her ties to the neoliberal establishment are that Haley is a staunch proponent of involving the United States in foreign military conflicts like the war in Ukraine. By extension, Haley also supports enriching the defense contractors that benefit from those conflicts. In fact, no other Republican currently running can be counted on to protect that system — the military-industrial complex — the way Haley would.

That’s because Haley herself was part of it. She also directly benefited from it.

As South Carolina governor, Haley signed over a billion dollars worth of economic development legislation for Boeing. The company rewarded Haley with a seat on its board just months after she left the Trump administration in 2018. That relationship, along with Haley’s work with several other companies with ties to the defense industry, gave a huge boost to her personal finances. As journalist Lee Fang reported earlier this year, Haley went from being over a million dollars in debt and having just $15,000 in a bank account to amassing a fortune worth over $12 million.

Amassing personal wealth is not in itself disqualifying. But Haley ingratiating herself with the defense industry is part of a pattern. At a time when conservatives increasingly want leaders to buck the establishment, Haley has been too willing to go along with it.

Whether because of her own personal conflicts of interest, her general desire to be embraced in the mainstream and by donors, or simply her lack of courage, Nikki Haley has repeatedly shown conservatives that she can’t be trusted to take principled stances on controversial issues.

Republicans deserve a nominee who represents them first, before the interests of Wall Street and permanent Washington. They want a nominee who will not cower when faced with criticism from the media establishment.

Not only does Nikki Haley fail to fit that bill, but she’s the exact opposite. There’s a reason why establishment forces are coalescing to prop up her campaign. Voters: beware of the moderate dressed in conservative clothing.

Eduardo Neret is a conservative writer and political commentator, and a former producer for Tucker Carlson.

Eduardo Neret | Daily Caller

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.

The post Night Cap: Why Nikki Haley Is The Neoliberals’ Favorite Republican appeared first on Granite Grok.

In the new black century, the race-baiters have been working overtime to undermine one of their own. MLK, once an icon of the civil rights movement, can no longer be honored as he once was. The color of your skin is the only thing that matters, and it must be black.

From Barry Obama, the “black” president who destroyed decades of progress on race relations, to Ibram Kendi, CRT, and the 1619 Project, content and character only matter if you are repeating their divisive rhetoric. Whites are born racist. There is no such thing as reverse racism. And we must now ask this question.  Did the black 26-year-old female suspect who was pouring gasoline on the home where MLK was born prevented from perpetrating a Hate Hoax or from exacting New Age Civil Rights Revenge on an old age icon? (Related: If MLK Were Alive Today, White CRT Advocates Would Shout Him Down.)

This dumb bish AKA Laneisha Shantrice Henderson was just arrested after she tried to burn down MLK Jrs. birth home.
She was dousing the outside with gasoline when two tourists stopped her.
Do you think she is mentally ill or pulling a Jesse Smollett? pic.twitter.com/25lOgip7MF

— Chris Randolph (@TrumpAF2024) December 8, 2023

No one seems to know (as of this writing) what her motivation was, but she appears to be a former Navy Vet, and it is impossible to dispute that she was dousing the home in gasoline. FOX Atlanta 5 says the judge has denied her bail as a flight risk, but the motive remains unclear. No one is reporting why she traveled to Atlanta (she gave an out-of-state address to police) to buy a gas can gasoline and then dose the home with it. (Related: Did the Slaves or MLK Know Freedom Was Actually a Dog Whistle for White Supremacy?)

It seems like a lot of effort to perpetrate a Smollett, but in contrast, not nearly as consulted, planned, and perpetrated as Jussie’s not-so-excellent adventure. I’ve also yet to find significant commentary from the new generation of race baiters who consider quitting King’s content of their character quite as racist.

We’ll try to update the story as it develops.

The post Was This a Hate Hoax or was This Black Woman Part of the Hate MLK Crowd? appeared first on Granite Grok.

During the 2020 election, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) partnered with the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a consortium of groups led by the Stanford Internet Observatory, to track and counter what they considered mis- and disinformation.

EIP surveilled hundreds of millions of social media posts and collected from the cooperating government and non-governmental entities that it calls its “stakeholders” potential violations of social media platforms’ policies concerning election speech.

It coordinated its efforts primarily through a digital “ticketing” system. There, one of its as many as 120 analysts or an external partner could highlight a piece of offending social media content or narrative consisting of many offending posts by creating a “ticket” and share it with other relevant participants by “tagging” them. Tagged participants could then communicate with each other, in something of a group chat, about the veracity of the flagged content, concerns about its spread, and what actions they might take to combat it.

For social media companies, this meant removing the content outright, reducing its spread, or “informing” users about dubious posts by slapping corrective or contextualizing labels on them.

During the 2020 election cycle, EIP generated a total of 639 tickets, covering some 4,784 unique URLs – representing content shared millions of times – disproportionately related to the “delegitimization” of election results. Major platforms, including Twitter, Google, and Facebook, responded to tickets in which they were tagged at rates of 75% or higher. The platforms “labeled, removed, or soft blocked” 35% of the URLs shared via EIP.

RealClearInvestigations has obtained data associated with nearly 400 EIP tickets, data produced for the House Homeland Security Committee in connection with its oversight efforts. The tickets come in the form of a series of spreadsheets. Each row represents one ticket. The Stanford group provided no key for the spreadsheets. Much of the information is redacted.

Here are just a few examples of the tickets EIP produced:

Ticket EIP-482 (created October 27, 2020) was originated by the CISA’s Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center (EI-ISAC). It concerns a tweet from then-President Trump indicating “most” states permit one to change one’s original vote after engaging in early voting, which EIP categorized as potential “Procedural Interference.”

The analysts point to fact-checks from, among other sources, Buzzfeed and ABC News challenging the president’s claim. Following two redacted comments on the ticket, an unnamed commenter writes, “Twitter received and is reviewing.” A subsequent comment reads: “We heard back from Twitter through CISA with this response: Our team concluded that the Tweet was not in violation of our Civic Integrity Policy.”

CISA-produced documentation shows the sub-agency’s chief counter-MDM (mis-, dis-, and malinformation) officer, Brian Scully, had also reported the tweet to Twitter, which responded to him directly about it. Therefore, EIP and its stakeholder, an executive agency, both forwarded the chief executive’s speech to a social media platform for potential censorship.

Ticket EIP-257 (Sept. 29), originated by the EI-ISAC, concerns a social media post from an unnamed user, alleging an absentee ballot had been delivered by mail to his dead father. An EIP stakeholder “flagged the post to Facebook for removal and the link is no longer active which means it has either been taken down or made private to the individual’s Facebook.” A subsequent comment notes that “We also received confirmation from Facebook (by way of CISA) that Facebook took action on this case,” again showing EIP and CISA seemingly working as force multipliers in content moderation.

Ticket EIP-301 (Oct. 2), originated by the EI-ISAC, concerns a “tweet regarding voting machines.” An elected official reported that the since-deleted and unavailable tweet “is false. Voting machines work the vast majority of the time. Old machines do have issues, but to phrase it like [this] vastly overstates the scope of the problem.” CISA inquired as to whether Twitter took the tweet down. It did.

Ticket EIP-954 (Nov. 8), the origins of which are not discernible, concerns social media posts sharing an article from The Federalist, where I am a senior contributor, titled “America Won’t Trust Elections Until The Voter Fraud Is Investigated.” According to the ticket, the article “Misconstrues Disinformation as Evidence.” One tagged post comes from Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway. A stakeholder writes to Facebook and Twitter in connection with the ticket that “this seems to be the greatest hits from the past 3 days wrapped up in one article. The article links to several of the gateway pundit links which have received action since Tuesday.” Twitter indicates it was reviewing the tweet, though it appears not to have taken action on it. RCI asked Hemingway for comment on the flagging of her tweet and publication’s work. She replied:

This unconscionable censorship of The Federalist and its reporters is sadly unsurprising. The censorship-industrial complex in this country clearly views free speech as its enemy and will do anything to shut it down, including spreading lies and using intimidation to coerce private companies to censor factual, legal speech on behalf of the regime.

Hemingway concluded with a warning: “The censorship-industrial complex better buckle up because the days of conservatives taking this lying down are over.”

Ben Weingarten | RealClear Wire

The post How the Federal-Private Speech Police Operated in Election 2020 appeared first on Granite Grok.

Artificial Intelligence apps have begun to proliferate across the internet that allow you to take pictures of clothed girls and women with a smartphone and make them nude. Victims feel humiliated, and the potential for abuse is enormous, but I’m sensing a disturbance in the transgender force.

While the rare and few who actually suffer from gender dysphoria deserve appropriate medical and mental health, there is also a known faction of male abusers who use the culturally accepted feelings of femininity to gain access to vulnerable women in once-private spaces.

When I read about young men using some new idea or bit of technology to creep on girls and women, even when the naked parts don’t truly belong to the person to which they are attached, I am offended but, at the same time, reminded. A boy can let his junk hang out while ogling girls in a locker room if he claims to be one, but no one has a right to feel humiliated by that.

To borrow from one of the victims of the AI App incident at Westfield High School in New Jersey.

‘We’re aware that there are creepy guys out there but you’d never think one of your classmates would violate you like this.’

What if these creepy boys announced that they were girls so they could watch you change in front of them or step in and out of a shower in the girl’s locker room? You have zero consent with an understanding that if you complain about the locker room, you are an intolerant bigot.

To be clear, neither of these things is acceptable, but when you invest that much time and energy sexualizing the culture and dehumanizing the meaning or product of intercourse, then build onramps to voyeurism and sexual assault, you’re going to have a hard time justifying any outrage over things we used to just accept as inappropriate or offensive.

Before you get offended, ask yourself: did you enable it, were you forced to enable it, and are you prepared to do whatever is necessary to reel that back in, if that is even possible? And if not, how do you expect to move forward in that world if this isn’t going away?

So many questions.

The post Smartphone Apps that Make Pictures of Clothed Girls Naked vs. Boys in Girls Locker Rooms … appeared first on Granite Grok.

Thousands of busybodies have descended on Abu Dhabi to forestall what they see as an imminent apocalypse. The twenty-eighth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP28) being held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), is presided over by its president, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and UAE Special Envoy for Climate Change. Al Jaber is also the chief executive officer of Adnoc, the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, as well as the chairman of Masdar, otherwise known as the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, a state-owned renewable energy firm. The irony of an oil executive leading a meeting intended to eliminate fossil fuels from the world economy was not lost on participants.

In fact, the climate conference was rife with controversy and intrigue even before it began. Immediately after Al Jaber’s appointment as president, climate activists decried his presidency as a conflict of interests and an outrage, with one activist complaining, “This appointment goes beyond putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.” COP28 is the first conference to have an industry CEO, let alone an oil industry CEO, placed at the helm of the climate change mitigation agenda. Calls for Al Jaber to step down from his CEO position at Adnoc soon followed his appointment and were promptly ignored.

The controversy only increased as the summit approached. A mere month before the conference began, in an online meeting of a She Changes Climate event, Al Jaber responded angrily to Mary Robinson—an Irish politician, the chair of the Elders group, and a former UN special envoy for climate change—after Robinson challenged Al Jaber to commit to phasing out fossil fuels entirely. Robinson claimed, “We’re in an absolute crisis that is hurting women and children more than anyone.” Making such absurd connections is typical of climate activists, who often roll identity politics into their climate activism, which apparently gives them the sense that they are tackling all the world’s supposed problems in a single effort.

Al Jaber responded by countering:

I accepted to come to this meeting to have a sober and mature conversation. I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C [the temperature increase cap decreed in the Paris Climate Accord]. . . .

. . . Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves. (emphasis mine)

Al Jaber’s remarks have been regarded as verging on, if not explicitly representative of, climate change science “denial,” and he has been savaged for them. Yet, they represent the only rational, evidence-based statements made during this embattled conversation.

Further charges that Al Jaber aims to undermine the climate change agenda came from leaked communications between COP28 and Adnoc staff members, some of whom have been working in both capacities. The leaked documents strongly suggest that Al Jaber planned to use his position as the COP28 president to make oil deals on the side with government officials of participating nations. These revelations caused a frenzy among climate activist groups. One can only hope that these plans are true and that Al Jaber will have succeeded in making some oil deals for Adnoc and its potential customers. Such economic activity is not so much a sign of hypocrisy as it is evidence that economic actors will pursue rational exchanges, despite the obstacles posed by the market interference of interventionists like the United Nations and its political accomplices, including obstacles that are self-imposed by the economic actors themselves.

Other accusations leveled at Al Jaber’s presidency of COP28 include the charge that Adnoc “has the largest net-zero-busting expansion plans of any company in the world.” Adnoc, it is claimed, has been vastly expanding its development of fossil fuels, which would betray efforts to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Given that fossil fuel exports account for approximately 70 percent of the UAE’s merchandise exports, such efforts at expansion only make economic sense.

Al Jaber may be the only sane person in attendance at COP28, but he will likely be pressured into acceding to the demands of climate catastrophists. The rest of the participants appear to be in hysterics while under the sway of a mass delusion. Against the facts of science and the benefits of fossil-fuel-enabled technology, they believe that CO2 is “pollution,” that “sustainability” requires imposing an enormous tax on humanity for the respiration and growth of plant life, and that the farming methods of the original Green Revolution—which have increased yields by many factors—must be eliminated and replaced with a new environmentalist Green Revolution. They believe that industrial production must be undertaken using non-fossil-fuel inputs and that myriad industrial products must exclude fossil-fuel-based materials. These demands are as delusional as anything enacted by Chairman Mao Zedong during the Great Leap Forward.

Carbon neutrality by 2050 is an insanely impossible demand. Our industrial civilization and the population it supports depends on the advances made in fossil fuel extraction and use. Even Canadian scientist and polymath Vaclav Smil—a believer in climate change who is an otherwise credible source—agrees. In his book, How the World Really Works, Smil writes:

For those who ignore the energetic and material imperatives of our world, those who prefer mantras of green solutions to understanding how we have come to this point, the prescription is easy: just decarbonize—switch from burning fossil carbon to converting inexhaustible flows of renewable energies. The real wrench in the works: we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.

Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances.

As Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber seemed to suggest, the climate change catastrophists of COP28 would consign humanity to preindustrial conditions—relegating those in poorer regions to misery and hunger—all while tackling a phantom whose existence is dubious at best.

The economics of climate change catastrophism involve global centralized planning and interventionism on a scale hitherto unexampled. It is irrational to the extent that it purposefully forgoes known economic advantages, jettisons tried-and-true methods, and rejects the market-based approach that has proven to maximize inputs for efficient wealth production. It artificially imposes technological change rather than allowing it to develop of its own accord. Furthermore, it aims to curtail economic freedom by supplanting the choices of producers and consumers and overwriting them with the plans of a climate change dictatorship.

The full results of COP28 will become known by December 14. One can only hope that it ends in abject failure. Climate activists have suggested that it already has.

Michael Rectenwald is the author of twelve books, including The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda, Thought Criminal, Beyond Woke, Google Archipelago, and Springtime for Snowflakes. He is a distinguished fellow at Hillsdale College.

Michael Rectenwald | Mises Wire

The post COP28: Scandal on Top of Fabrication appeared first on Granite Grok.