Bye bye Joe, Justin & 'Fact' Checkers

January was not just a good day but a good month! Three rogues were removed.

Over the break, there were a number of farewells, resignations & sackings. And they were all excellent.

1. JOE

Obviously the first major departure – our first Bye Bye - was President Joe Biden, although nobody realised he was actually still in the job.

Here’s some reasons we won’t miss him

According to a very good summary from the Daily Signal

Abortion - Biden began by implementing abortion policies that have become standard for Democratic administrations. He rescinded the Trump administration’s strengthened version of the Mexico City Policy, which prevents U.S. tax dollars from funding abortion organizations overseas. The Biden administration Department of Justice challenged state laws that protected unborn babies in the womb. However, the Biden administration took its pro-abortion agenda much further, especially after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. Biden’s Food and Drug Administration removed the basic safety requirement for chemical abortion pills to be dispensed in person. Biden’s Department of Defense unilaterally changed its policy to begin paying for service members and their family members to travel across state lines to obtain an abortion.

Biden was obsessed with abortion, and so was Kamala – it was basically their whole campaign. Their only campaign. And it’s good riddance to all of it. Although, sadly, Kamala may be back.

LGBT Agenda - Earlier in his term, Biden directed all executive agencies to pursue a “whole of government” approach to advancing the LGBT agenda… the State Department added preferred pronouns to all email bylines.. . Also, on Easter Sunday 2024, Biden issued a public proclamation recognizing a Transgender Day of Visibility, but not one recognizing Easter.

The Biden administration wanted to allow biological males to compete in women’s sports, it would have punished school officials for using incorrect pronouns, and it would have let biological males into women’s locker rooms and restrooms. A so-called Title IX which has just been defeated, thankfully.

And Biden was a big campaigner for gender ideology and transing our children

But probably most concerning was the weaponisation of the law.

The Biden administration’s weaponization of justice was not only directed against Trump. The DOJ colluded with school boards to investigate (using counterterrorism resources) parents who confronted the school boards at public meetings over their woke policies. The FBI spied on traditional Catholics on the absurd notion that they were domestic terrorists.

The DOJ also aggressively prosecuted pro-lifers for protesting at abortion facilities years earlier, while doing nearly nothing to investigate scores of acts of vandalism against pro-life pregnancy resource centers committed in 2022. It arrested Mark Houck, father of seven, in an early-morning SWAT raid on his home, only for a jury to later acquit him for the trumped-up charges the DOJ brought against him.

When a doctor blew the whistle on a hospital secretly providing gender-transition drugs to minors, in violation of state law, the DOJ investigated the doctor (not the hospital), charged him with serious criminal penalties, and tried to obtain a gag order against him.

The weaponization of government stretches all the way back to the COVID-19 era, where the Biden administration fired military service members and others who refused to take an untested vaccine. The Biden administration tried to implement a similar mandate for private businesses, but federal courts quickly struck that down.

Additionally, files released after Elon Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter showed intense collusion between the government and Big Tech entities to censor the legitimate opinions of American citizens who questioned the official government narratives about COVID-19 or other issues.

And then to add insult to injury, at the beginning of this year…

President Joe Biden rewarded one of the Left’s most influential and notorious donors Saturday, giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros. The White House announced the honor in a list of 19 recipients, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and LGBTQ megadonor Tim Gill. Biden framed Soros’ funding as philanthropy in service of “democracy” and “social justice.”

If you haven’t heard of George Soros

Soros, a Hungarian-American billionaire investor, has funneled more than $15.2 billion through his Open Society Foundations (now run by his son Alex), which has awarded more than 50,000 grants worldwide, according to the World Economic Forum.

Soros bankrolled the “rogue prosecutor” soft-on-crime movement by funding the campaigns of local prosecutors who oppose the death penalty and use prosecutorial discretion to avoid charging crimes they consider minor.

… his massive funding network enabled Biden’s allies to implement their radical agenda through the administrative state.

Abortion. LGBT. Soft on crime. Prostitution. Surrogacy. Conversion therapy laws. Gender studies. Anti-semitism. Woke ideology. Soros has helped fund them all.

He has also worked overtime to censor his opposition and label them as “anti-rights.”

The Open Society Foundations had funneled millions to the Center for American Progress, a hub of left-wing advocacy and woke influence in the federal government. Different arms of the Open Society Foundations have funded Demos, the LGBTQ activist group the Human Rights Campaign, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, among many others. Biden’s decision to honor Tim Gill also echoes this woke funding. Gill has poured millions into the LGBTQ activist movement, including in an effort to prevent social conservatives from opting out of celebrating same-sex weddings.

So it’s bye bye to President Biden – apparently the most unpopular president since Richard Nixon.

Which leads to our second Bye Bye – don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

2. ‘FACT’-CHECKERS

And this actually links to just to confirm how sneaky and underhand the Biden administration has been. It’s just been conclusively proved.

Mark Zuckerberg who founded Facebook and who for so many years used “fact checkers” to take down posts they didn’t like – or anybody who said that only women can get pregnant – Zuckerberg admitted that the fact checkers would be fact checked into retirement. Brilliant.

According to Breitbart

Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, is undergoing a major overhaul of its content moderation practices. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that the company will end its third party fact-checking program, plagued by severe leftist bias, and replace it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes. The changes come as a response to what Zuckerberg perceives as a “cultural tipping point” towards prioritizing speech, influenced by the recent elections.

Have a listen to some of his announcement. Note that he admits that they’ve been shutting down discussion on gender ideology – which I think is one of the most significant thing in this announcement. But also his dig at the legacy media – and their declining trust.

But Zuckerberg then went onto Joe Rogan’s podcast to spill even more beans…

Listen to the pressure that the Biden administration placed on these social media companies – not only to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story – but to attack any dissenting voice against DA SCIENCE

Remember, this is the same silencing and censoring that the Ardern administration was doing here in NZ, and has continued to try and do through Disinformation Projects and the Christchurch Call etc.

VIDEO

In April 2018, Senator Ted Cruz asked the CEO of Meta/Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg: “Are you a neutral platform?” Zuckerberg responded: “We consider ourselves to be a platform for all ideas.”

In 2019, Zuckerberg has admitted that his company deliberately banned pro-life adverts from running on the social media site during the abortions referendum in Ireland last year. Don’t trust the people eh. Also in 2019 when speaking before Congress he agreed that there “clearly was bias” in repeated false “fact-checking” of Lila Rose’s Live Action, the largest pro-life organization on social media.

But ‘fact’ checkers has always been an oxymoron. Because it’s always been left wing groups or media doing the checking.

Commentator Liam Hehir on his substack The Blue Review highlighted another pro abortion “fact check”

In 2008, Politifact examined a claim that then-Senator Barack Obama had opposed the Illinois “Born-Alive Infants Protection” laws. These are designed to ensure that an infant who is born alive, even during or after an attempted abortion, is afforded the same legal rights and protections as any other living person. In other words, if the abortion fails to kill the baby, which is subsequently born, the state is required to provide care to ensure it does not die. The answer was simple: Obama had, as a state senator, opposed various versions of the law multiple times. The central fact—that Obama voted against the bill—was indisputable. Yet Politifact appeared more interested in explaining away the vote than simply verifying the claim. So instead of stating the facts clearly, it buried the lead under a mountain of defensive context about why Obama had opposed the bill, offering justifications about its wording and its perceived implications for abortion rights. This approach wasn’t fact-checking; it was advocacy. And it was an early indication of the fatal flaw in the fact-checking industry: the inability to separate facts from the broader political narratives surrounding them.

Of course the same happened here in NZ with Jacinda Ardern’s abortion bill and late term abortions and disability abortions. The media worked overtime to hide the true intent and effect of the law. They still are.

And there’s been other examples of censorship as highlighted by Breitbart’s report

In December 2021, Science Feedback, a third-party Facebook fact-checking partner, acknowledged it was mistaken in flagging and censoring a Reason article that criticized a study used by the CDC to support mask mandates in schools…

In October 2020, Breitbart News reporter John Nolte reported that The Dispatch published a fake fact check that gave Facebook an excuse to blacklist a series of pro-life ads.

Breitbart News reported:.. The ads correctly point out that the Democrat Party, and Joe Biden in particular, are now in favor of abortion-on-demand right up until the moment of birth.

See the trend here!

In September 2020, Facebook applied a “fact check” label to an ad campaign that drew attention to Democrats’ support for allowing transgender women, who are biologically male, to compete in women’s sports.

Yet it was true. And we’ve seen the evidence. The Democrats do support it.

And one more shocking one

Breitbart News reported:

Facebook notified Live Action founder and president Lila Rose on Friday that her organization’s pro-life posts would be subjected to “reduced distribution and other restrictions” after “additional reporting from an independent fact-checker” had deemed the content “false news.”… Facebook had also notified Live Action and its founder’s combined 3 million followers that they had shared “false news.”… According to Live Action, the content marked “false” by Facebook had been two videos affirming that “abortion is never medically necessary.” One video featured neonatologist Dr. Kendra Kolb discussing the topic. The second video showed a recent speech by the organization’s founder speaking on the same subject. Live Action told Breitbart News that Facebook’s third-party “fact-checking” consisted of an article that quoted two abortionists — Daniel Grossman and Robyn Schickler — “who both have a vested interest in profiting off of the procedure.”

So maybe it’s not only the fact checkers that need to be booted, but also Mark Zuckerberg. Many people are rightly suspicious about his sudden change of tune.

3. TRUDEAU

And our final bye bye goes to Canada’s worst ever leader Justin Trudeau.

Where do we start!?

Let me just quote a few bits from Daily Signal’s analysis

[Trudeau] has essentially become the poster child for the unpopular policies that Canadians see as contributing to higher prices of living and the current housing crisis. … Most fascinating during the speech is how Trudeau listed his administration’s COVID-19 policies as being among one of his greatest achievements in office. His COVID-19 policies led to the monthslong “Freedom Convoy” in 2022…

Yeah you might remember that. Canadian authorities then blocked funding and seized bank accounts associated with the protests and cleared out the encampments. Just like the protest in Wellington over mandates, Canada’s political establishment and legacy media lined up to blast the Freedom Convoy.

Months later, CBC News reported that the Canadian government had known even before it invoked the Emergencies Act that its rationale was nonsense. And in January 2024, a Canadian court ruled the government should never have invoked the act. Trudeau said he had no regrets.

He originally called people protesting against the mandates as a “fringe minority”. Yeah we had that against protestors in NZ also

But then a report came out in 2023 criticising Trudeau's "fringe" remark has having emboldened the protesters and further embittered them toward government authorities. And the Commissioner who authored the report said “more of an effort should have been made by government leaders at all levels during the protests to acknowledge that the majority of protesters were exercising their fundamental democratic rights."

Amazing what a COVID report can do eh – when we objectively and rationally look at the evidence without shutting down any dissenting view.

Anyway, Trudeau then sort-of expressed regret – but then tried to justify himself by using the old trope – disinformation and misinformation

But of course we had that with that Labour MP calling protestors here a “river of filth”. Did he ever apologise for that??

Back to Canada –

The Canadian courts across the country denied numerous requests for religious or conscientious exemptions.

What was most egregious during the COVID-19 pandemic was Trudeau’s apathy toward Christians. His most blatant public display of this was in 2021. In June 2021, there was a mass grave site of First Nations children found at a residential school run by the Roman Catholic Church in southeastern Saskatchewan. Just a few weeks prior, a similar mass grave site was found in British Columbia.

This set in motion the summer of fire. In 2021 alone, 90 churches across the country were burned to the ground. Being such a nationwide epidemic, one would think Trudeau would have strongly condemned such violence. However, in his statement after the height of these attacks, he discussed that he understood the anger the arsonists were feeling. He went on to apologize for the government and then called on the schools and Pope Francis himself to apologize. Speaking of the arsonists he said, “It’s real and it is fully understandable given the shameful history we are all become more aware of.”

This all happened as Trudeau’s administration imposed COVID-19 lockdown restrictions upon churches as well. While most of the world was locking down to prevent the spread of disease, Canada was also jailing pastors, fining them, and seizing properties and assets if these congregants tried to worship together.

…all the while grocery stores, liquor stores, marijuana dispensaries, and other “essential” businesses remained legally open.

Some of us still remember Trudeau’s campaign beginning with promises of freedom of choices, most prominently a woman’s right to choose abortion and a person’s right to choose the LGBTQ+ lifestyle. However, his policies did not include protecting the freedoms of those who believed in upholding Christ and Christian values.

Thus, as he steps down, let us not forget his legacy (lest we become doomed to repeat it). Let us remember the Trudeau legacy as one of true religious bigotry and persecution and vow to not let it happen again, either on Canadian or American shores.

As ex New York Times journalist Alex Berenson commented (and Berenson was actually here in New Zealand as our guest just before COVID struck)

Trudeau’s approval rating, which lurked around 40 percent for most of 2022, sank further since as media-driven Covid panic receded and anger at the rampage over civil liberties grew. Now Trudeau has joined Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand and of course our own [President Biden] on a long list of tinpot Covid dictators who have faced their own reckonings. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch.

Bye Bye Joe, Justin & “fact” checkers.

The adults are back in charge - thankfully.