Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Modernity.news,

Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini has spoken out on the dire state of free speech in the UK, asking how long it is before opposing illegal immigration becomes a thought crime too.

In the aftermath of the UK riots, dozens if not hundreds of people have now been arrested over social media posts commenting on the unrest.

In some cases, these have included violent threats or incited violence against others.

However, other examples have been patently ludicrous, including the case of a man who received two months in prison for a Facebook post stating, “Coming to a town near you,” alongside an image of Muslim men.

BREAKING: 🇮🇹🇬🇧

Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister @MatteoSalviniMI has accused Keir Starmer of “persecuting citizens” who oppose illegal immigration and defend family values.

“Will blocking illegal immigration, defending the family, and fighting Islamic fanaticism be considered… pic.twitter.com/oDAOGWHLKE

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) August 13, 2024

Salvini slammed Prime Minister Keir Starmer for exploiting the riots to launch a draconian crackdown on free speech.

“The fact that the new left-wing British government is persecuting citizens for a post or like seems genuinely worrying to me,” said the Italian politician.

“Will blocking illegal immigration, defending the family, and fighting Islamic fanaticism be considered illegal thoughts to be punished?” he asked.

As we previously highlighted, Brits are being threatened with home police visits and arrest merely for retweeting posts about the riots.

And in a new escalation of naked authoritarianism, people who merely ‘observe’ a riot and take no part in it have also been warned they will be arrested and charged.

The UK has entered a new dark age which could conceivably result in opposition to Islamism and mass migration being effectively outlawed.

*  *  *

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Days ago we featured a report detailing how the US is ready to get back to ‘business as usual’ regarding Saudi Arabia, as the Biden administration is set to lift its three-year ban on sales of offensive weaponry to the Gulf kingdom.

Biden has been hoping to broker a Saudi-Israel normalization deal during this closing phase of his administration, and he’s trying to woo Riyadh connected with efforts toward a Gaza ceasefire to end the war there.

On Tuesday The Wall Street Journal has confirmed that the offensive weapons pipeline to Saudi Arabia is back on, reporting that the US is sending shipments of bombs worth more than $750 million. This is expected to be complete in the coming months, before Biden exits the White House. 

These bomb shipments have been on pause in the wake of the half-decade long Saudi/UAE/US coalition operation in Yemen, which resulted in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis at that time. 

Worsened relations between Washington and Riyadh also were on display in the years after the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi intelligence in Istanbul, likely on orders from crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS).

But despite Biden previously calling MbS a “pariah”, a new quid pro quo arrangement is back on, per the WSJ:

The deliveries will include 3,000 Small Diameter Bombs and 7,500 Paveway IV bombs, which have been on hold since President Biden halted the shipments in 2021 over Saudi Arabia’s punishing war in Yemen.   

The shipments underscore White House attempts to woo Riyadh, hoping closer ties with the oil-rich kingdom will pay dividends in the administration’s final months. The Biden administration has been drafting a defense treaty with Saudi Arabia, as well discussing plans to provide assistance so the kingdom can acquire civil nuclear power. 

The initial pause in offensive weapons was ostensibly to prepare each side to agree to a 2022 ceasefire deal to end the Yemen war.

But now with the Yemeni Houthis’ onslaught of attacks on Red Sea shipping in order to punish Israel as well as Western powers for their support of the IDF military campaign in Gaza, the US is ready to arm the Saudis again.

“We are regularly conducting airstrikes to degrade Houthi capabilities, an effort that is ongoing and will continue together with a coalition of partners,” a senior Biden official recently told Reuters.

A deep dive on the inner workings of failed enforcement of weapons controls in the Biden admin by @dawnmenorg’s Josh Paul: “the End of a Pause, as the U.S. Lifts Ban on Air-to-Ground Munitions to Saudi Arabia” https://t.co/if1pBGSAno

— Sarah Leah Whitson (@sarahleah1) August 13, 2024

“We have designated the Houthis as Specially Designated Global Terrorists, and we will have imposed sanctions and additional costs on the Houthi smuggling networks and military apparatus,” the official continued. “This pressure will continue to build over the coming weeks.” But in reality Biden’s Middle East policy has gone nowhere, and seems to have only escalated tensions across the region.

Authored by Andrew Korybko via substack,

Belarus announced late last week that it shot down several Ukrainian drones over its airspace, which it later discovered were full of NATO electronics, and subsequently decided to strengthen defenses along its southern border.

It’s also considering shutting down the Ukrainian Embassy in Minsk too. This follows their border crisis from a little more than a month ago after Ukraine’s military buildup back then and comes amidst Ukraine’s sneak attack against Russia’s Kursk Region, both of which were analyzed below:

* 30 June: “Keep An Eye On Ukraine’s Military Buildup Along The Belarusian Border”

* 8 August: “Five Lessons For Russia To Learn From Ukraine’s Sneak Attack Against Kursk Region”

* 10 August: “Last Year’s Pentagon Leaks Proved That Zelensky Was Plotting To Invade Russia Since January 2023”

In brief, the first crisis de-escalated after Kiev reportedly removed its troops first and then Minsk naively assumed that its neighbor thus had no aggressive intentions so it followed suit, while the second is the natural culmination of those aforesaid attacks. It should also be said that Belarus’ decision to de-escalate border tensions with Ukraine inadvertently freed up more of the latter’s forces for invading Russia even though that’s of course not what Lukashenko intended to have happen.

The fog of war makes it difficult to accurately assess the situation in Kursk Region, but most reports indicate that Ukraine’s offensive has halted and that it might be digging in for the long run. This adds context to its drone incursions over Belarus by suggesting that its General Staff could be probing for weaknesses all along the Union State’s border. The swiftness with which Ukraine broke through the Russian border might embolden it to try replicating this against Belarus as a diversionary tactic.

It’s premature to jump to conclusions, but that could further stretch Russia’s forces and help advance Ukraine’s goal of coercing its foe to transfer some of them from the Donbass front if it happens, which is widely thought to be the primary objective behind its sneak attack against Kursk Region. Likewise, Ukraine’s reported probing into Belgorod Region and its latest attack against the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) complement these efforts, all of which aim to keep Russian on edge and guessing.

The military-strategic situation is curiously similar to the days before Ukraine’s ultimately failed counteroffensive last summer when “The Union State Expected That The NATO-Russian Proxy War Will Expand” to possibility include Belarus, Moldova, and/or Russia’s pre-2014 territory. That didn’t happen as is now known, perhaps due to urgently improved border defenses at the time that might have since been scaled back due to complacency, but Ukraine certainly seems to be seriously considering it now.

As for the Moldovan option, it’s always been a wildcard that Kiev has thus far held off on playing despite prior Russian concerns, though that doesn’t mean that it should be forgotten about. One argument against expanding the conflict to that front is that it could inadvertently stretch Ukraine’s own forces even further and thus facilitate a possible Russian breakthrough in Donbass, which is precisely what Ukraine is trying to prevent or delay as long as possible through various means.

The same goes for attacking Belarus or launching another sneak attack against a different region within Russia’s pre-2014 territory, let alone all at the same time, whereas more attacks against the ZNPP wouldn’t entail the same military risks even though the environmental ones are much greater. At the same time, however, the Belarusian option might be more enticing for Ukraine to contemplate than any other when recalling what Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper reported earlier in the spring.

They claimed that Belarus’ direct involvement in the conflict would trigger the tripwire for a conventional NATO intervention, which could relieve pressure on Kiev while provoking a Cuban-like brinksmanship crisis that might see Russia freeze its advance in Donbass. Of course, neither can be taken for granted: NATO might decline to conventionally intervene if Ukraine provokes Belarus to respond, and Russia might not freeze its offensive in Donbass as part of some mutual de-escalation deal with NATO.

Nevertheless, Kiev might still gamble that it can get NATO to directly intervene on its side by provoking Belarus to respond, including through a potentially forthcoming conventional attack. The conflict’s military-strategic dynamics continue to favor Russia even in spite of what’s happening in Kursk Region so Ukraine might soon become desperate enough to implement its own “Samson Option” of trying to expand the conflict in every direction possible if its leadership comes to believe that defeat is inevitable.

In that scenario, it might also finally play the Moldovan wildcard and attempt Kursk-like sneak attacks against other Russian border regions, though even then it couldn’t be taken for granted that NATO would conventionally intervene or that their intervention would result in preventing Ukraine’s defeat. Moreover, the US might calculate that frantically trying to expand the conflict in every direction possible isn’t in its interests, in which case it could try to dissuade Ukraine of this or covertly stop it if it still does.

In connection with that, it’s relevant to reference Bloomberg’s hit piece from earlier this month against Zelensky’s hawkish chief of staff Andrey Yermak, which this analysis here argues could be the beginning of an American campaign for weakening that grey cardinal’s influence. This radical ideologue is a major obstacle to the resumption of peace talks and he might even be the one who put Zelensky up to invading Russia. So long as he retains the president’s ear, then Ukraine’s “Samson Option” can’t ever be ruled out.

It therefore follows that the US might want to drive a wedge between them in order to reduce the chances that Yermak convinces Zelensky to go all out if he believes that defeat is inevitable, and thus risk provoking a NATO-Russian hot war, instead of resuming peace talks in that event. After all, Ukraine might have wanted to expand the conflict into Belarus, Moldova, and/or Russia’s pre-2014 territory as part of its counteroffensive, but the US could have advised against it out of an abundance of caution.

Last year would have been a much better time to do that than now when Ukraine still had tens of thousands more troops, hundreds of more Western vehicles, and much higher morale. Going this route one year later after so many losses doesn’t make military-strategic sense except if Ukraine is seriously flirting with the “Samson Option”, which the US might either begrudgingly agree to go along with or might soon intervene behind the scenes to stop in some way if it’s against that happening.

This insight enables observers to better understand Belarus’ military buildup along the border, which is a reaction to Ukraine’s latest drone incursions. Ukraine carried them out in order to prompt this response from Belarus as Yermak-advised Zelensky considers whether it’s worth expanding the conflict in the hopes that NATO would then conventionally intervene in his support should that happen. Whatever he decides to do will have an outsized influence on events as everything rapidly approaches the end game.

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

Why do western officials insist on gaslighting the public on illegal border crossings?

Why do they attempt to destroy anyone that publicly opposes mass immigration from the third world?

The laws on the books support the public’s majority position on immigration – Come here legally or don’t come here at all.

In Europe, the UK and the US polls show a majority of citizens want reductions in immigration and better border security.

Yet, government officials, who often claim to be “protecting democracy,” brazenly ignore these majority concerns. Why?

For many years now I have offered a specific theory on the true agenda behind open border policies in western countries and I believe this theory answers most of questions surrounding illegal immigration.

The common claim within the Liberty Movement is that this is all part of the “Cloward-Piven Strategy”: A social engineering method which uses large scale relocation of migrants into a society in order to destabilize that nation. The goal is to import people with a incompatible or hostile ideology and, eventually, the target culture will break down and be forced to accept a new system of governance (i.e. from free markets and liberty to communism and slavery).

If western populations are unified in opposing the globalist ideology then the task of deconstruction becomes impossible for them. So, they simply destroy the west from within by introducing millions of people that will NEVER assimilate or unify.

My theory goes beyond the Cloward-Piven explanation, though.

I think there is a deeper and even more sinister purpose to the introduction of third world migrants to the US and Europe.

I summarized my position in my article ‘Cultural Replacement: Why The Immigration Crisis Is Being Deliberately Engineered’ published in January. I noted:

“I have mentioned this in previous articles and I continue to believe that one of the main purposes for the establishment to leave borders open and entice illegals to enter is to create a migrant army; a situation in which millions of illegals will be offered easy citizenship in exchange for service. I also believe that this migrant army will be used against the American public (the real citizenry) to impose martial law measures in the wake of a national disaster…”

In other words, my argument was that migrants from the third-world are not merely being used as unwitting tools for cultural saturation of the west. They’re not being shipped in by the millions to simply live off the fruits of our labor and our ancestors’ labors. I believe they are being brought into the US, the UK and Europe as enforcers for the establishment.

Think about it – They are essentially bought and paid for. They are mercenaries recruited with offers of easy citizenship, government handouts and the opportunity to brutalize the very western (and generally white) populations they despise. And, they are allowed to do this while hiding behind government law enforcement agencies for protection.

With a two tier policing system in place, the migrants can do whatever they want without much fear of repercussions. In Europe there is the added problem of expanding Islamic immigration which is directed by religious doctrine to conquer non-believers. From the Quran:

Quran [9:29] Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture – [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.

Third world migrants are hired muscle for the political elites. They can terrorize the populace, and if the native population takes action to defend itself the government can step in, call them hateful racists and declare martial law. It’s a win-win. The migrants then help with the enforcement of that martial law as the government doubles down on two-tier policing.

There are those that insist the anti-immigration position is a “false paradigm.” The notion of “false paradigms” has become a plague among liberty movement thinkers that needs to be abandoned. The reality is that we are not just fighting the globalists, we also have to fight the people that wittingly or unwittingly aid the globalists. The elites help instigate conflicts, but many of these divisions already exist without their influence.

For example, third-world cultures are intrinsically violent and authoritarian. The top 20 most violent nations and most oppressive nations in the world are also the same nations sending caravans of migrants our way. Progressives will claim that’s a good thing and that we need to help these people. It’s not a good thing and most of them can’t be helped because they aren’t coming here to be free, they are coming here to take whatever they can take.

The majority of people from these regions will never be able to coexist peacefully within western communities. They don’t understand freedom, they don’t understand diplomacy, they don’t understand compromise. For them, tolerance is not a virtue, it’s a weakness that can be exploited to their advantage. This is a fact proven time and time again as mass migrations accelerates and I think my theory has recently been vindicated by events in the UK.

British citizens have been victimized for over a decade by migrant attacks and organized crime. The two-tier policing system in the UK continues to protect these migrants from retribution while the government hides statistics that show how much violence is being committed by non-citizens.

The British riots last week were a rare moment when patriots finally spoke out on open borders and took to the streets, only to be declared “Nazis” and “racists”. The use of riot police to quell property damage and fighting would be understandable to a point, except that aggressive migrant protests had been ongoing for months with very little police interference. Again, the two-tier policing is obvious.

Then, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer made a statement admonishing patriot protests and defending migrants. No referendum on immigration has been offered. He has not once acknowledged the problem of rising migrant crime and has essentially declared war on patriots.

In July the Labour Party was reportedly in the process of creating of a new “Muslim leadership group” intended to become the primary point of engagement between Keir Starmer’s government and Muslim communities in the UK. A draft document setting out plans for the network describes its core objectives, including “to influence public policy in a way that safeguards and promotes the rights of British Muslims”, and “to influence the media debate around Muslims in Britain”. In other words, propaganda to silence native dissent.

Muslim migrant gangs, calling themselves the “Muslim Defense League” (MDL) saw Starmer’s speech as an invitation to stalk the streets of British towns armed with knives and machetes; moving from street to street attacking white Brits at random.

The migrants made it clear that their purpose was to “assert dominance” over Brits and frighten them into submission. So far UK officials deny that the Muslim gangs exist. The media has refused to cover most of the activities of migrant gangs and has placed all blame on native patriots. One of the only places you can see any video evidence exposing migrant gangs is on Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter). Musk as also been attacked by UK officials for “fomenting unrest”, simply because he doesn’t censor the footage.

Meanwhile, Keir Starmer and other government officials have been meeting with Muslim groups to reassure them that the government is on their side. The migrants are now emboldened to do as they please while the Brits face the reality that if they fight back, the government will put them in prison. The migrants are now, in the most basic sense, a mercenary wing of the UK government.

This dynamic is even more undeniable when we look at the move by the UK government to remove Christian-related events from the British military while encouraging Muslim recruiting. Keep in mind, last week the UK government threatened the possibility of the military being used on the British people.  Corrupt empires throughout history have preferred using foreign mercenaries to suppress their own citizens.  It’s no coincidence that such a large percentage of the people coming from the third-world (around 80%) are military age men.

The post-war British populace has long lived without a relationship to true violence. Sure, they have football riots and brawls, but I’m talking about cold, calculated ethnic warfare designed to subjugate. Alien migrants coming from Africa and the Middle East are intimately familiar with such violence. They know it well and have embraced it totally as a part of their culture.

Not very many Brits are capable of comprehending a knife attack on a children’s dance recital, or the mass stabbing of toddlers playing in a park, or the operation of organized rape gangs that kidnap teens. When you first experience this kind of demonic will, it can be petrifying. I fear the British people are facing something so far outside of their wheelhouse that they may not know how to deal with it. The combination of organized migrant crime and government oppression might browbeat Brits into devastating apathy.

I suspect that the situation in the UK is just a precursor to what we will soon see in the US. Starmer is a die-hard advocate of the World Economic Forum and he is following their program to the letter.  The conditions in the UK are what the Davos crowd wants everywhere. 

Regardless of the outcome of the US elections in November the illegal immigration crisis will be central to everything we do in the next couple years. If leftists remain in political power then it is likely that we will see a similar attempt at a crackdown on patriots from an arrogant Harris Administration.

I believe Harris will most definitely offer citizenship to every illegal already in the country (many of them in exchange for military service), buying a mercenary force and a progressive voting block at the same time, ending any chance of conservatives ever participating in government again.

In the case of a second Trump Administration the situation changes. The removal of illegal migrants will be the top issue and leftists in the US will try to prevent it. They view the migrants as the key to their kingdom; the way to “destroy capitalism” and bring in woke socialism. Removal of illegals would set them back decades. Leftists will riot rather than lose. It’s a certainty.

The difference is, US patriots are armed (50 million strong with over 400 million guns and hundreds of billions of rounds of ammunition). I’m now receiving a lot of emails these days from UK and European readers who say they are desperate for the same firearms rights we have in the US. They all tell me, “never give up your guns.” Don’t worry, we won’t. We know what’s coming thanks to the events in the UK.

*  *  *

If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

With Boeing’s Starliner stuck at the International Space Station, SpaceX is forging ahead, announcing that the “first human spaceflight mission to explore Earth from a polar orbit” will launch later this year. 

“As early as this year, Falcon 9 will launch Dragon’s sixth commercial astronaut mission, Fram2, which will be the first human spaceflight mission to explore Earth from a polar orbit and fly over the Earth’s polar regions for the first time,” SpaceX wrote in a press release. 

SpaceX said the Fram2 mission will be commanded by Chun Wang, an entrepreneur and adventurer from Malta.

Joining Wang will be Jannicke Mikkelsen from Norway, who will serve as vehicle commander; Eric Philips of Australia, the vehicle pilot; and Germany’s Rabea Rogge, mission specialist. Musk’s space company said, “This will be the first spaceflight for each of the crewmembers.”

“Throughout the 3-to-5-day mission, the crew plans to observe Earth’s polar regions through Dragon’s cupola at an altitude of 425-450 km [249 to 264 miles], leveraging insight from space physicists and citizen scientists to study unusual light emissions resembling auroras,” SpaceX noted. 

The company added, “The crew will study green fragments and mauve ribbons of continuous emissions comparable to the phenomenon known as STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement), which has been measured at an altitude of approximately 400-500 km [249 to 311 miles] above Earth’s atmosphere.” 

Fram2 crew will also study how spaceflight affects the human body; this study includes capturing the first-ever X-ray image of a human in space. 

Returning to Boeing’s stranded Starliner, NASA could soon decide to have SpaceX rescue the two-person crew on the ISS. 

Commentary by Richard Porter via RealClearPolitics,

With stunning swiftness, Donald J. Trump knocked President Biden out of the presidential campaign with the one, two, three of a dominating debate, a near-death experience, and a compelling convention.

Then, also with stunning swiftness, the entire Democrat media/cultural complex coalesced around Joe Biden’s famously vacuous veep, best known for her meaningless word salads, inappropriate giggles, and utter ineffectiveness at dealing with the chaos at the border.

Yet in August, Democrats are coronating June’s misfit as their new queen bee, forcing Trump to win the election by beating Kamala Harris, who’s trying a different strategy and who offers different challenges and opportunities.

Harris’ strategy is to win by being cool, not by being competent. Democrats aren’t even trying to prove that she has the brains, judgment, and gravitas to be the leader of the free world. Instead, they’re embracing her skin-deep nature, highlighting her energy and appearance, and building her campaign on a foundation of social memes, social standing – and social ridicule, too.

For example, when British pop star Charlie XCX said that “Kamala is brat” – cool-girl slang for someone who’s disorganized and says dumb things, but powers through it and gets what she wants anyway  – Kamala’s campaign immediately embraced the meme.

Call it Kamala’s “Mean Girls” strategy: Turn the 2024 presidential campaign into an election for prom queen. (“Mean Girls” is Tina Fey’s brilliant political allegory about a high school girl named Regina George who leverages her looks, gossip, and adolescent insecurities and cravings to rule over the student body – until the uncool kids topple her to restore their freedom.)

The Harris campaign isn’t even subtle about its strategy. Campaigns choose rally music to reinforce campaign themes. So, who did the campaign ask to headline its Atlanta rally? Megan Thee Stallion, who calls herself the “Black Regina George” and mimics the movie in her “Not My Fault” video.

It’s crazy to think that the leader of the free world could be elected with tactics high school bullies use to dominate a student body, but her skin-deep strategy closed the Biden chasm by co-opting other cool people and controlling the gossip, turning this back into a close contest.

Kamala wasn’t cool in June before the Hollywood/media/cultural clique unified around their newly anointed leader. But her social standing soared when glamorous Hollywood stars showered her with money and love, and beautiful anchors and hip commentators on all mainstream media outlets gushed over her in unison while burying any talk of previous policies and statements.

Her first anti-Trump riposte is right out of the movie, too, as she and her parroting cool clique seek to make Trump and J.D. Vance as socially toxic as high school Mathletes. “They’re weird!” the Queen and her acolytes say in unison (and everyone knows it’s social suicide to like people who are weird)!

So, how should the Trump team bring Kamala George down? The 2004 movie and the 2016 campaign (when Clinton’s “deplorables” social cut backfired) offer suggestions.

First, undermine the Democrats’ standing by ridiculing their nominee’s skin-deep strategy. Team Trump has always been adept at labeling and defining opponents, and they are already hard at work. Social media memes are flying on the right, almost all of which highlight the many vapid things Harris has said or done; keep updating these to mock her strategy now.

Second, remind voters why they didn’t take Kamala seriously as recently as June: She has no common sense, and her policies help her rich friends at our expense. J.D. Vance is already laser-focused on highlighting all the ways in which Harris’ policies make us worse off today than we were four years ago.

Third, force the vice president onto a stage where she can be questioned about how the current administration’s policies have affected real lives; people will want to know what she’s got going on up there, to paraphrase Kamala’s spirit animal Charli XCX. This will work as well for Kamala as it did for Regina George.

Finally, remember that Democrats live in a make-believe world. Donald Trump can climb into that world and ridicule it, but the real world always intervenes, and when it does, Republicans should contrast Trump’s toughness with Kamala’s fluff.

As the movie ends, the “Mean Girls” queen is hit by a bus because she literally lacks street sense. Trump needs to reassure America that he has the common sense to manage our very real problems and the courage to fight for us – and that no bus will take America down when he’s president again.

Richard Porter is a lawyer in Chicago and National Committeeman to the RNC from Illinois.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Modernity.news,

There was an awkward but amusing moment when Stephen Colbert seriously stated that CNN was “objective” and “just reports the news as it is,” prompting his own audience to laugh hysterically at the notion when they weren’t supposed to.

The incident occurred during Colbert’s interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, who has repeatedly betrayed her anti-Trump bias, including infamously during a town hall event she hosted with Trump last year.

Collins claimed Trump was on the back foot because he didn’t know how to “go after” Kamala Harris due to her being a non-white woman.

“It’s kind of been this moment where he has not been able to coalesce behind a single attack line,” asserted Collins.

NEW: Audience starts cracking up after a serious Stephen Colbert tells CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that CNN “just reports the news as it is.”

Remarkable.

Colbert: “I know you guys are objective over [at CNN], you just report the news as it is.”

Audience: *Laughs hysterically*… pic.twitter.com/9R8iv2UXeN

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) August 13, 2024

Colbert responded: “I know you guys are objective over there, that you just report the news as it is,” to which his audience reacted by laughing.

A surprised Collins responded, “Was that supposed to be a laugh line?”

“It wasn’t supposed to be but ah, I guess it is,” said Colbert.

Whoops.

How revealing that Colbert’s own virulently NPC audience even knows instinctively that claiming CNN is “objective” is utterly hilarious.

“Lmaooo, the public knows,” commented Elon Musk.

*  *  *

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Authored by Jon Miltimore via The American Institute for Economic Research,

In January, Axios reported a developing trend in corporate America: corporations across the United States were backing away from DEI, which had become a “minefield” for companies.

Following a multi-year boom in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion space following the 2020 death of George Floyd, corporations were pulling back on DEI initiatives.

The risks were too great — especially in what was expected to be a politically charged election season amid growing attacks from conservatives targeting “woke” corporations.

“It’s hard to imagine with the amped up rhetoric of an election year that people really want to stick out their neck more,” Kevin Delaney, co-founder of media and insights company Charter, told markets correspondent Emily Peck.

Axios wasn’t wrong about the trend, which has only picked up steam this summer.

In July, John Deere announced that it was stepping away from DEI efforts and would cease sponsoring “social or cultural awareness” events. The announcement came a week after Business Insider reported that Microsoft had laid off its entire DEI team. Microsoft’s action, in turn, had come just weeks after Tractor Supply, a Brentwood, Tennessee-based company, decided to pull the plug on its social activism efforts in the face of a social media campaign targeting the company.

The backlash against DEI has been so intense that the term itself appears to be going the way of the dodo. The Society for Human Resource Management recently announced it was ditching the word equity from its acronym.

Preaching to Consumers

DEI is just one form of corporate social activism, which comes in various forms and includes its cousin Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG). Both ideas fall under, to some degree, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the idea that corporations have a duty to take social and environmental actions into consideration in their business models.

If you’re wondering why Burger King has commercials on climate change and cow farts, and why Bud Light’s commercials went from featuring Rodney Dangerfield and Bob Uecker to trans activist Dylan Mulvaney, it’s because of CSR.

The idea that corporations should fight for social causes has skyrocketed in recent years to such an extent that activism is inhibiting companies in their primary mission: generating profits by serving customers.

“Firms leveraging situations and social issues is not new, but showcasing their moral authority despite a disinterested consumer base is,” Kimberlee Josephson, an Associate Professor of Business at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania, has observed.

Bud Light’s decision to feature Mulvaney cost them an estimated $1.4 billion in sales, and it revealed the danger of corporations leaning into social activism, particularly campaigns and policies that alienate their own consumer bases.

Not very long ago, companies like Chick-fil-A faced backlash from progressive activists for supporting traditional marriage. Culture war advocates on the right have responded in similar fashion.

Conservative influencers have made a point of raising awareness around “woke” corporate initiatives — white privilege campaigns, climate change goals, LGBTQ events, etc. The most successful ones, such as Robby Starbuck who pioneered the campaign against Tractor Supply and John Deere, made a point of targeting corporations with conservative consumer bases.

“If I started a boycott against Starbucks right now, I know that it wouldn’t get anywhere near the same result,” Starbuck recently told the Wall Street Journal.

One can support Robby Starbuck’s tactics or oppose them. What’s clear is that corporations increasingly face risks for participating in social activism campaigns, and the threats now come from both sides of the political aisle.

Social Responsibility and ‘Social Justice’

The idea that businesses have responsibilities that go beyond their shareholders, workers, and consumers stretches back at least to Howard Bowen’s 1953 book Social Responsibilities of the Businessman. Bowen, an economist who served as president of Grinnell College and the University of Iowa, is widely considered to be the godfather of corporate social responsibility.

“CSR can help business reach the goals of social justice and economic prosperity by creating welfare for a broad range of social groups, beyond the corporations and their shareholders,” he wrote.

This is a version of “stakeholder capitalism,” an idea that says corporations must look beyond serving customers to generate profits for shareholders. Various other “stakeholders” must be considered.

Over time, other incantations of stakeholder capitalism emerged, including ESG, which stemmed directly from a 2004 report — “Who Cares Wins” — spearheaded by the United Nations, asset management groups, and banks. Its purpose was “to develop guidelines and recommendations on how to better integrate environmental, social and corporate governance issues in asset management, securities brokerage services and associated research functions.”

These “guidelines and recommendations” eventually morphed into a global ESG framework which graded publicly traded companies on “social responsibility.” Though ESG scoring is notoriously opaque, what’s clear is that a small number of rating firms were allowed to determine what values corporations should have, and penalized them if they deviated. A bad score could see a company cut from a trillion-dollar index fund.

This no doubt explains why companies like Tractor Supply, known for selling farming equipment and animal feed to farmers, had carved out ambitious plans to cut emissions by 50 percent by 2030 and achieve a “net zero” carbon footprint by 2040 (in addition to various other social objectives).

Those plans are now scrapped, and media outlets are aghast, pointing out that not very long ago Tractor Supply argued that these initiatives made “great business sense for Tractor Supply.”

But this analysis misses the reality that social activism now carries greater potential risks and rewards, particularly in light of the collapse of the ESG movement, which earlier this year saw an exodus of $14 trillion, as asset managers like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs fled for cover.

The Problem with Taking Sides

Many Americans likely feel that corporations should have social responsibilities. They just tend to have different views on what those values should be.

I was in church recently, and a pastor spoke of an entrepreneurial friend who was excited to realize how he could use profits from his business to spread the gospel. I suspect that many people who support CSR would be appalled at corporations using their business to spread religion, just like many religious Americans are appalled at corporations embracing what they see as “woke” agendas.

While corporations are free to inject values into the workplace and support social and religious programs, they have no societal responsibility to do so. In fact, there are compelling reasons they should not be doing so.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman wrote what is perhaps the most famous rebuttal to CSR. In a 1970 New York Times article titled “A Friedman Doctrine — The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” Friedman accused champions of CSR of “preaching pure and unadulterated socialism” and being “puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society.”

Friedman understood that corporations don’t have a social responsibility (or a religious one) beyond serving their consumers and generating profits. This is their raison d’être, and how they best serve society. They don’t have a responsibility to spread religion or to champion diversity or to stop climate change or to promote equity. These values might be good, but it’s not the responsibility of corporations to promote them.

“[T]here is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits,” Friedman wrote, “so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

This is the most famous element of the Friedman Doctrine, but I don’t think it’s the most important one. The most important line is Friedman’s warning on the dangers of straying from this model, which he makes at the beginning of the same paragraph:

[T]he doctrine of ‘social responsibility’ taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity. It does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collectivist doctrine. It differs only by professing to believe that collectivist ends can be attained without collectivist means.

This is the true danger of CSR, stakeholder capitalism, or any of the alphabet soup acronyms that seek to replace capitalism with collectivist systems that seek to undermine the rights of property owners: it risks extending politics into our private lives beyond its proper scope.

One of the hallmarks of a totalitarian society is that public and private levers of power are utilized to enforce adherence to state dogmas, and Friedman wasn’t the first to recognize the potential dangers of corporate social activism.

Writing in Harvard Business Review in 1958, the German-born American economist Theodore Levitt warned of replacing the profit motive with corporate do-goodism in an article titled “The Dangers of Social Responsibility”:

The trouble with our society today is not that government is becoming a player rather than an umpire, or that it is a huge welfare colossus dipping into every nook and cranny of our lives. The trouble is, all major functional groups — business, labor, agriculture, and government — are each trying so piously to outdo the other in intruding themselves into what should be our private lives. Each is seeking to extend its own narrow tyranny over the widest possible range of our institutions, people, ideas, values, and beliefs, and all for the purest motive — to do what it honestly believes is best for society.

This is precisely what stakeholder capitalism has done, and it’s a primary reason why culture today is saturated with politics and political messaging. Corporations, by embracing Bowen’s idea that corporations have a duty to pursue “social justice,” have helped blur the line between private and public life.

Though many Americans are alarmed by corporate America’s retreat from social activism, it’s actually a sign that nature is healing.

The move likely will not only help the bottom lines of companies like John Deere and Tractor Supply, but it will allow them to serve their customers more effectively. Keeping politics and “social responsibilities” out of corporate boardrooms, charters, and messaging is likely to result in a more harmonious society.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday said his military has seized dozens of Russian settlements and towns spanning hundreds of kilometers in Russia’s Kursk oblast.

The surprise offensive is now one week in, and Zelensky boasted in an X post: “Ukraine controls 74 communities.” This is a significantly higher figure than the Kremlin has publicized, and there remain deeply contrasting accounts of what is going on in the war-ravaged border region, or whether Russian forces have yet repelled the invasion.

“Despite the difficult and intense battles, our forces continue to advance in the Kursk region,” Zelensky added, saying that many Russian border troops have been captured and can be used to eventually get Ukrainian POWs back.

Kiev says that the ultimate purpose of the high-risk operation is to protect its populace from Russian strikes, many of which happen from across the border. Currently, it is unclear the amount of territory the Ukraine invading force actually holds. By all accounts, Russian border posts were poorly manned and armed at the time of the attack which started Tuesday morning a week ago.

“Ukraine is not interested in taking the territory of the Kursk region, but we want to protect the lives of our people,” Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi has stated.

Things are still desperate on the Russian side amid a state of emergency in southern oblasts along the border. Well over 100,000 citizens have been evacuated.

“There is no light, no connection, no water. There is nothing. It’s as if everyone has flown to another planet, and you are left alone. And the birds stopped singing,” an elderly man identified as Mikhail told Russian state television on Tuesday. “Helicopters and planes fly over the yard and shells were flying. What could we do? We left everything behind.”

Acting Kursk Region Governor Aleksey Smirnov has announced that at least 12 Russian civilians have been killed and another 121 injured, including ten children, amid the ongoing Ukraine military incursion.

President Putin has meanwhile reportedly appointed a special official to take charge of efforts to restore order to Kursk and the border regions. He’s been identified in regional press as the president’s personal aide and former bodyguard Alexei Dyumin.

One report details: 

“Indeed, Alexei Gennadyevich Dyumin was summoned yesterday and tasked with supervising the counterterrorist operation,” State Duma lawmaker Nikolai Ivanov, whose district is in the Kursk region, told the RTVI broadcaster.

Dyumin was the only non-cabinet member not connected with the military or security services who was present at a televised meeting with Putin on Monday. During that meeting, which was focused on the fighting in the Kursk region, the Kremlin leader ordered the military to “dislodge” Ukraine’s forces from Russian territory.

Later, an anonymous Telegram channel claiming insider knowledge claimed that Putin directed Dyumin to “coordinate all agencies currently operating in the Kursk region.”

However, the Kremlin has not officially verified whether Dyumin has indeed been put in charge of Kursk operations.

At this moment a United Nations agency is trying to gain access to the region. The office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has issued formal request for Moscow to grant access to the Kursk Region to investigate Russian allegations of abuses and war crimes committed by invading Ukrainian troops.

More dumb takes from hopelessly inept washed up politico. https://t.co/Zsz0f6t5VK

— Daniel McAdams (@DanielLMcAdams) August 13, 2024

“We are trying to gather information about the situation in Kursk Region, but without access it is very difficult,” OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani said in a fresh statement. “We have requested access to Russia to be able to obtain additional information.”