Prince Harry accuses social media of stoking a 'crisis of hate'

The Prince is right to be disturbed by hate.  One hopes that his opposition to it extends to the vast outpourting of Leftist hate directed towards President Trump and other conservatives

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have spent the last month contacting the leaders of major corporations, lobbying them to withdraw advertising spending from "lawless" social media companies such as Facebook.

Prince Harry revealed that he and his wife have set their sights on “remodelling the architecture” of social media, warning that sweeping change is needed to protect mental health and stop the spread of misinformation.

In a 1,400-word opinion piece for US business magazine Fast Company, he said the cost of using social media use was “very high”, with personal data traded for profit in a “relatively lawless space”.

He questioned what such susceptibility to “the coercive forces in digital spaces” would mean for our children, adding: “As a father, this is especially concerning to me.”

The issue will become one of the main focuses of the couple’s longer term work through their non-profit organisation, Archewell.

The article, for which the Duke was not paid, is considered an introduction to the couple’s mindset as they plough their own furrow in Los Angeles, the Telegraph understands.

The decision to focus on online behaviour was inspired in part by the work they have both undertaken in recent years on mental health and more recently by the civil and racial justice campaigns in the wake of the death of George Floyd.

In a speech last month, the Duchess urged teen girls and young women to drown out sometimes "painfully loud" negative online chatter with positivity.

The Duke warned in his article that online communities should be "defined more by compassion than hate; by truth instead of misinformation; by equity and inclusiveness instead of injustice and fearmongering; by free, rather than weaponised, speech."

He wrote: “A little over four weeks ago, my wife and I started calling business leaders, heads of major corporations, and chief marketing officers at brands and organisations we all use in our daily lives.

“Our message was clear: The digital landscape is unwell and companies like yours have the chance to reconsider your role in funding and supporting online platforms that have contributed to, stoked, and created the conditions for a crisis of hate, a crisis of health, and a crisis of truth.”

The pair stepped down from royal duties earlier this year
The pair stepped down from royal duties earlier this year CREDIT: AFP
He called for meaningful digital reform, adding: “We’ve spoken with leaders across the racial justice movement, experts in humane tech, and advocates of mental health. And the collective opinion is abundantly clear: We do not have the luxury of time.”

The intervention coincided with the launch of the US-based Stop Hate for Profit campaign, which is putting mounting pressure on Facebook to tackle hate speech on its platform. In recent weeks, more than 1,000 companies, including adidas, Ford and Unilever, have withdrawn their advertising spend as a result.

Although the Sussexes support the campaign, their own work on the issue will be independent.

The Duke said that while social media was a seemingly free resource, ostensibly used for connecting, sharing and organising, the “price we’re all paying is much higher than it appears.” 

“Every time you click they learn more about you,” he wrote. “Our information, private data, and unknown habits are traded on for advertising space and dollars.

“Whereas normally we’re the consumer buying a product, in this ever-changing digital world, we are the product.”

He said that he and his wife had “felt it necessary” to speak out about the rise of what he called an “unchecked and divisive attention economy” which could even drive people towards radicalism and extremism.

“This remodeling must include industry leaders from all areas drawing a line in the sand against unacceptable online practices as well as being active participants in the process of establishing new standards for our online world," he added.

In 2018, the Duke of Cambridge criticised technology giants, warning they were failing to protect children from the hate and bile of social media and out of their depth in tackling the negative side of their platforms.

SOURCE 






The new face of race hate: Marching through London they claimed to be fighting bigotry - but their leader revels in anti-Semitic abuse

A group of protesters dressed in black military-style uniforms march in tight formation through the streets of London.

They are led by strapping men who bellow orders such as 'Atten-hut!' and 'Right face!' and look like a highly trained group of soldiers out on parade.

Some have dark berets, gloves and knee-high leather boots. A few carry walkie-talkies. At least one is wearing an IRA- style balaclava.

In some ways the scene appears to echo the 1930s, when Oswald Mosley's 'Blackshirts' took their ugly brand of fascism to working-class neighbourhoods of our capital city. But this was Brixton, last Saturday.

The occasion was a march for African Emancipation Day, held on the first day of August each year to mark both the anniversary of the date in 1834 when the Abolition of Slavery Act came into force, and to campaign for Britain to pay reparations for its role in the transatlantic slave trade.

The protesters in their stab vests and paramilitary-style fatigues belonged to a strange new organisation that calls itself the Forever Family Force.

Formed last month, to pursue what its social media feed has described as 'the battle against racism, inequality and injustice', it seems to have been conceived as a sort of British version of the Black Panthers, the radical far-Left protest group which wore similar garb as it campaigned against police brutality in 1960s America.

In keeping with this tradition, Forever Family has already sparked controversy.

To critics, the group appears to be importing an inflammatory brand of American-style identity politics — given oxygen by the Black Lives Matter movement — in which people of colour are encouraged to believe that society is so intrinsically racist, their only hope is to mount an organised resistance against the ruling class.

Those who see them as divisive and intimidating include Nigel Farage, who circulated images of last Saturday's protest on Twitter, saying: 'Terrifying scenes in Brixton today. A paramilitary-style force marching in the streets. This is what the BLM movement wanted from the start and it will divide our society like never before.'

Supporters, for their part, point out that the Brixton event was largely peaceful, with just three arrests, and argue that Forever Family is a harmless, if somewhat eccentric, group of well-meaning activists who enjoy dressing up.

This camp includes Jonathan Bartley, co-leader of the Green Party, who responded to Farage by declaring: 'You are just trying to create division. But these people in Brixton today know that love and justice will conquer the fear and hate you peddle. Hope is what people need right now and they are showing the pathway towards it.'

So, what is the truth? Well, here is where it starts to get interesting.

Despite Mr Bartley's remark about 'love and justice', I can reveal that Forever Family is led by a highly controversial musician who has recently used social media to voice vile slurs against other minority groups.

Among other things, he has shared deeply anti-transgender 'memes', circulated bizarre anti-vaccination conspiracy theories and suggested that Bill Gates has killed tens of thousands of children in Third World countries and is somehow responsible for the coronavirus pandemic.

Forever Family's leader has also made a series of anti-Semitic remarks blaming Jews for slavery.

In a series of Instagram posts this month, he described the Jewish community's alleged role in the slave trade as 'the original holocaust', criticised 'devils' who campaigned against Left-wing anti-Semitism on social media, and advanced a further selection of conspiracy theories claiming that Jews 'own' the banking system via what he calls the 'Rothschild bloodline'.

It is a wholly revolting world-view for anyone to hold, especially the leader of a group that purports to campaign against racism.

Indeed, some might argue that the real agenda of this militaristic protest group is not so far removed from that of the Black Panthers, the leaders of whose unofficial successors have denied the Holocaust and called Jews 'hook-nosed' impostors and 'bloodsuckers of the poor' who profiteer from the black community.

Perhaps that explains why, despite Forever Family's highprofile protests, its founder appears to have taken extensive steps to keep his identity secret.

On paper, the organisation is opaque. Its website consists of an image of a clenched fist, along with links to Twitter and Instagram accounts that have been set to 'private', so they can be read only by approved users.

A Facebook page, which can also be accessed from the website, allows viewers to watch two short videos which claim the organisation exists to 'mobilise, organise and centralise community initiatives to empower and support organisations with similar objectives' and say it is 'united in building a self-sufficient and stable community'.

What these vague mission statements mean, and how the group proposes to actually achieve its aims, are unclear.

Neither its social media accounts nor its website contain any information about who is behind it.

The only supporter who has made his identity publicly known is a musician called Mega — not the leader of the group referred to above — who performs with the hip-hop collective So Solid Crew. He used Twitter to declare that he took part in last Saturday's protest, boasting: 'We locked down Brixton today.'

Ironically, given this secretive modus operandi, the films circulated by Forever Family also claim that its values are 'integrity, transparency and accountability'.

One thing Forever Family is keen to get its hands on, though, is money. And that is what allows us to trace its founder: several of its social media pages carry links to a PayPal site where supporters can donate to the cause.

Contributions are then, according to PayPal, passed to a company called Forever Family Limited, which was incorporated on June 20 and operates out of a service address in Hoxton, East London.

Companies House records show the firm's secretary is a 27-year-old woman from Wandsworth, South London, called Rachelle Emanuel. The only director — and the group's leader and founder — is a 28-year-old resident of Ilford, East London, called Khari McKenzie.

Neither has responded to a request for comment.

Little is known about Ms Emanuel. However, McKenzie, who is listed as having 'significant control' over Forever Family, is a rap artist who performs under the stage name Raspect.

He appears to have become politically active in 2011 after the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old gang member whose death sparked the riots in London and elsewhere that year.

In more recent years, McKenzie has been active in a community group called 'GANG', whose supporters arrive at incidents of gang violence wearing stab vests and using loudhailers to encourage locals onto the streets to 'reclaim the space'.

In early 2018, McKenzie made a series of appearances on Victoria Derbyshire's BBC chat show to discuss race relations following the death of Edson Da Costa, a 25-year-old from East London who died after swallowing plastic bags of heroin and crack cocaine when his car was stopped by the police.

In one bizarre interview with Derbyshire that year, he urged viewers not to call the police to incidents of crime, saying: 'Don't call 999, call the g-line,' an apparent reference to GANG's contact number. At around the same time, he was photographed shaking hands with London mayor Sadiq Khan at City Hall.

More recently, McKenzie filmed himself being, as he put it, 'rudely interrupted, harassed and threatened' by police officers, who asked why he appeared to be breaking lockdown rules to socialise with a group of acquaintances in a park at the height of the Covid epidemic.

And in early June, soon after the killing of George Floyd in the U.S., he began taking photographs of himself in military clothes at Black Lives Matter protests in London.

In more recent times, McKenzie's public statements — particularly since Forever Family came into being — have become more volatile, not to mention offensive.

Last year, for example, he used Instagram to share a transphobic joke suggesting that people who identify as female but are born male are likely to be sex offenders.

'A man followed a young girl into Asda toilets in London, saying he identifies as a woman,' it read. 'The man's teeth were knocked out by the girl's father, who said he identifies as the tooth fairy.'

In spring this year, he uploaded several posts to Instagram making various claims about Bill Gates, suggesting that the Microsoft founder is somehow exploiting the Covid crisis to try to force mandatory vaccinations on the world.

This odd conspiracy theory — doing the rounds in corners of the internet popular with the anti-vaccination movement — reflects the senseless belief that Mr Gates has established that vaccines will kill people who take them, and is therefore endorsing them as part of a plot to reduce the global population.

'The same guy who says we need to depopulate suddenly wants to save everyone with his vaccines,' read one such post by McKenzie.

Another claimed, wrongly, that 48,000 children in India had been 'paralysed by Bill Gates's polio vaccine'. A third post called him a 'documented thief' who 'owns vaccine companies' and 'visited [Jeffrey] Epstein's pedo [sic] island countless times'.

In fact, there is no evidence that Mr Gates is a criminal, nor that he ever visited Mr Epstein's private island (although he did meet him and once travelled on his private jet).

McKenzie isn't just posting paranoid content on Instagram, however. He also uploads blatantly anti-Semitic content.

In June, he began using the network to attack the Jewish community, sharing a false conspiracy theory that the restraining technique of kneeling on the neck, as used by the police officer who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, had been learnt during secret seminars with Israeli security forces.

'Research who funded the transatlantic slave trade biggest holocaust and crime against humanity, with no reparations,' he declared in one Instagram post, illustrated with images of the Israeli Defence Force. 'Look who is behind training police in the USA and the UK to put there [sic] legs on our necks.'

Similar sentiments were voiced, at around the same time, by the Corbynite actress Maxine Peake, leading to the sacking of Shadow Cabinet minister Rebecca Long-Bailey, who described her as 'a diamond'. Peake later apologised.

Last week, McKenzie continued in this questionable vein by using Instagram to share a video of himself giving a rambling speech about Zionism.

'Every Zionist is an Islamophobe,' he said. 'It don't make me anti-Semitic if I don't agree with the oppression in Palestine. That's foolishness, yeah.

So when we're talking about Zionists, and even talking about if I don't agree with the people that run the banks, yeah, and by them running the banks the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, if I don't agree with that, that don't make me anti-no one. I'm just anti-oppression.

'If I look in my history book and see there were people with Zionist blood that were heavily involved in the transatlantic slave trade, me pointing that out doesn't make me anti-Semitic...'

The next day, McKenzie attacked the 'devils' who had successfully persuaded Instagram, YouTube and Twitter to close the accounts of a rap artist called Wiley, who had made a series of highly anti-Semitic attacks on the Jewish community.

As well as circulating a petition calling for Wiley's reinstatement, his posts attacking the move carried a series of anti-Semitic hashtags, including #Rothschildbloodline and #whoownsthebanks, advancing the Nazi-era slur that Jews are in control of all international finance.

In response to those posts, a spokesman for the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism tells me: 'There is no justification for using anti-Semitic tropes to commemorate the horrors of slavery or protest [against] ongoing racism in society today.

'Forever Family should appreciate that, for ordinary decent people, and the Jewish community in particular, seeing a paramilitary [group] wearing black shirts and marching through the streets of London led by a man who rails against 'Zionist bloodlines' is frighteningly reminiscent of humanity's darkest hour and does nothing to further the noble cause of fighting racism. Prejudice cannot be beaten by more prejudice.'

To put things more bluntly, the group that dressed up in uniform to 'reclaim' the streets of Brixton a week ago — and was so publicly endorsed by the co-leader of the Green Party — has rather too much in common with those fascist blackshirts who paraded through London in similar garb more than 80 years ago.

SOURCE 






Make America Normal Again

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts

For four years, the left has up-ended everything that was once considered normal. An overwhelming Trump (and Republican) victory can bring normal back.

Over the past few days, when reading articles, conversing with friends, listening to podcasts, or just contemplating life, one word rings in my brain like a tocsin: “Normal.”

It’s not a very inspiring or impressive word. Like “nice,” it’s often one of those words you use when you want to damn something with faint praise. If you’re a kid in high school, you don’t want your prom date to be reduced to the words “nice” and “normal.” You want that date to be dazzling, gorgeous, popular, fun, cool, or whatever other superlatives we heap upon those things or people we desire.

But there’s a lot to be said for things that are nice and even more to be said for things that are “normal.”

One hundred years ago, there was another presidential election. It pitted Warren G. Harding, the Republican, against James M. Cox, the Democrat. Harding won with 60.3% of the electoral college votes. Cox got the South (except for Tennessee), but Harding won every other state. It was a decisive victory.

Harding’s winning slogan was “A return to normalcy.” That was what Americans desperately craved.

Although American participation in World War I was short compared to England’s and the Continental powers, that year had exposed a generation of American men to the incredible brutality of modern trench warfare. After only a year at the front, 116,516 men didn’t make it home. Those who did come home were changed both by the war experience itself and by their exposure to the wider world.

Another profoundly disruptive event was the Spanish Influenza. It started working its way through the troops the moment they were mobilized to military camps across America and then followed them to Europe. Meanwhile, it worked its way across the home front. At a guess, the flu may have killed 675,000 Americans out of a population of fewer than 106 million people, with most of the deaths taking healthy young people.

There was also tremendous socialist and anarchist ferment on the home front in the lead-up to the 1920 election. On September 16, 1920, a bomb went off on Wall Street, killing 38 people and wounding hundreds. This came on the heels of a series of bomb attacks across America by anarchists following Luigi Galleani.

Thinking about it, the parallels between now and one hundred years ago are uncanny. As in 1920, we’re heading into an election in 2020 on the heels of war (two decades of it), one epidemic disease (that politicized decision-making turned into an economic disaster), and a series of anarchist riots and terrorist attacks across America. All of which gets me back to Harding and his slogan: A return to normalcy.

While everyone likes a bit of excitement now and then, people crave the normal, especially people who care for young children or who are elderly. At least, they crave normal when normal is virtuous. In North Korea, normal is awful.

For the majority of Americans, however, normal has been a good thing. When our troops came home from WWII they craved the American normal as much as their fathers had upon their return from the first European War.

I was a child of the WWII generation (meaning that I was born after the war, but every adult in my world had experienced it, sometimes with incredible brutality), so I saw firsthand how all these adults also embraced normal. They walked out of the camps and off the battlefields, got jobs, got married, had children, and lived normal lives.

It doesn’t mean that they were necessarily all normal people. Looking back, my parents and many of their peers were deeply damaged by their experiences — but they were still creating lives of studied American normality. We boomers benefitted from it, although most of the boomers have been anything but grateful.

The same is true in the black community. Once the Republicans freed blacks from the slavery imposed upon them, they exploded into productivity. Leftists briefly obsessed about the deadly and vile Tulsa race riot in 1921 because they thought it would hurt Trump. What they didn’t note was that the Tulsa black community was an extraordinary, vibrant, and productive community only 60 years after blacks emerged from two centuries of slavery. Noting that, of course, would destroy the narrative that, 155 years after slavery ended, American blacks still can’t recover.

In fact, before the left got its tentacles into blacks with the welfare state, blacks were thriving. As Larry Elder points out in his extraordinary Uncle Tom documentary (which everyone should see), in many regions across America after WWII, blacks had more intact families (mom, dad, and kids), and faster economic growth than any other racial group. And think about the incredible creativity and growth of the Harlem Renaissance. Despite overt prejudice and the South and equally malevolent covert prejudice in the rest of America, blacks were still managing to thrive.

With welfare, though, leftists told black men that welfare was a form of reparations, so they should give up their jobs and their family should look to the government. That made men redundant, so many of them turned to fathering illegitimate children and engaging in crime to give their lives meaning and purpose, and created generational poverty with single mothers raising fatherless children. The left killed black normalcy.

One of the main differences between 1920 and 2020 is that, for the first time in American history, we have a major political party that absolutely rejects the entire notion of normal. They rejected it on racial grounds. They reject it on sex grounds. They reject it on climate grounds. They reject it on law and order grounds. They reject normal wherever it tries to take root. This is the leftist’s way of accruing power.

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 Australia: Chef puts out an advert for jobs in his restaurant and 470 people apply but only TWO of them are Australian - as he claims 'the youth of today simply don't work as hard as foreigners'

A chef says he has struggled to hire Australian employees during the coronavirus pandemic because they are happy receiving the JobSeeker payment.

Attila Yilmaz recently posted an advertisement for a couple of roles at Pazar Food Collective in Canterbury, Sydney's south-west. Mr Yilmaz was inundanted with 470 applications but only two of the candidates were Australian citizens, while an additional two were permanent residents.

'I don't want to sound like an old man, but I just don't feel like the youth of today are willing to do the work these foreign workers do,' he told the ABC.

Mr Yilmaz, who pays his workers above award wages and full entitlements, is concerned the JobSeeker payments are encouraging Australians to stay at home.

'It's been a very good deal for people in an industry that's been broken for a very long time,' he said.

The JobSeeker payment is financial help for Australians between 22 and the Age Pension age, who are looking for work. 

The elevated unemployment benefit will remain at $1,100 a fortnight until September 27.

From that date until the end of the year the $550 coronavirus supplement will be cut by $300 to make the overall fortnightly payment $800.

The mutual obligation rules requiring people to search for four jobs a month restarted on August 4.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison previously claimed Australians were refusing to work because the JobSeeker payment was too high.

'Well, on JobSeeker, we doubled the payment with the supplement because we knew unemployment was going to be rising steadily and it has and that's been devastating,' he told 2GB radio in June.

'What we have to be worried about now is that we can't allow the JobSeeker payment to become an impediment to people going out and doing work, getting extra shifts.

'And we are getting a lot of anecdotal feedback from small businesses, even large businesses where some of them are finding it hard to get people to come and take the shifts because they're on these higher levels of payment.'

SOURCE  


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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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