Category: Tech Media

Associated Press Under Fire for Calling Antisemitic Anti-Israel Demonstrations ‘Anti-War’ Protests

Just the News
Pro-Palestine protest

The Associated Press is under fire for portraying the protests wracking college campuses across the United States as “anti-war demonstrations” while omitting how many of the demonstrations include violent rhetoric and have been connected to the assault of Jews.

“When people are chanting in their protests, ‘intifada now,’ simply look up the definition of ‘intifada’ – that is not anti war,” said Natalie Sanandaji, a New Yorker who survived the Nova music festival massacre, where more than 360 people were killed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023. “To downplay it is to make these people feel like what they’re doing is okay. We need to talk about how serious it is. Downplaying it is just putting more people at risk,” she said on the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show.

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Biden Campaign Says It Will Stay on TikTok Despite Foreign Aid Package That Could Ban It

Just the News
President Biden in front of TikTok logo (composite image)

Supporters of the legislation claim that the app poses a national security risk because it is owned by a Chinese company, and thereby could expose sensitive U.S. data to the Chinese government.

President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign said on Wednesday that it still plans to stay on the controversial app TikTok, despite the president’s signing a foreign aid package that could eventually ban it in the United States.

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Tesla Reports One of Its Worst Quarters in Years in Latest Sign of Trouble for EV Market

Virginia Star Staff
Tesla Factory

Tesla disclosed a shaky earnings report to the public on Tuesday in the latest sign of weakness in the U.S. electric vehicle (EV) market.

The EV maker’s revenue for the first quarter of this year came in nearly 10 percent below its revenue for the first quarter of 2023, marking the largest decline the company has seen since 2012, according to its quarterly report and CNBC. Tesla’s net income also fell by about 55 percent relative to 2023, and the company warned investors that “volume growth rate may be notably lower than the growth rate achieved in 2023.”

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MSNBC Legal Analyst Predicts Chance of ‘Mistrial’ in Trump’s Bragg Case

Virginia Star Staff
Attorney Danny Cevallos

MSNBC legal analyst Danny Cevallos predicted on Monday that there is a possibility for a mistrial in the case Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought against former President Donald Trump.

Trump is currently on trial for 34 felony counts pertaining to a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels for her silence regarding an alleged affair, and all 12 jurors were selected on Thursday. Two jurors were initially excused before the full jury was seated, which Cevallos on “Morning Joe” said indicates the possibility of forthcoming issues that could cause a mistrial.

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Fresh Revelations About TikTok Come as Senate Considers the Divestment Bill

Just the News
TikTok app in front of Chinese flag

Pressure is mounting in Washington to finally pass a bill requiring TikTok’s China-based parent company to divest of the popular social media app amid new revelations that the company is much closer to the Chinese government than it has previously claimed.

Now, the House has passed a comprehensive foreign aid package which included a revised TikTok divestment bill. This makes it more likely to become law sooner rather than later as the Senate is set to consider the legislation.

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Commentary: NPR Scandal Should Kill Taxpayer-Funded Broadcasting

RealClearWire
NPR Building

“I don’t want any yes-men around me,” said Sam Goldwyn, the Hollywood producer famed for his movies and malapropisms. “I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job.” The brass at National Public Radio must have heard Sam, but they add a slight amendment. We want only “yes-men” (they/them) and will boot anyone who dares to dissent.

Lest there be any doubt, NPR just proved it by suspending, without pay, the staffer who exposed the pervasive problems there. He dared to write publicly that that National Public Radio was uniformly ideological, deeply committed to its strident left-wing views, and determined to exclude any alternatives. For saying that out loud, they cut off Uri Berliner’s paycheck for five days. It’s their way of saying, “Thank you for your feedback.” Q.E.D.

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Biden Vows to Block Foreign Acquisition of Iconic American Company

Virginia Star Staff
President Joe Biden

President Joe Biden promised on Wednesday to block the acquisition of U.S. Steel by a Japanese competitor in remarks to a crowd in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, made up of unionized steelworkers.

The Japanese Nippon Steel Corporation, the fourth-largest steel producer, first announced that it would be acquiring U.S. Steel in December for around $14.9 billion after turning down other offers, including from American steel company Cleveland Cliffs. The president, in his remarks, emphasized the importance of the American steel industry and called out China for subsidizing their own steel producers.

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China Lobbying Congress amid TikTok Ban Efforts

Virginia Star Staff
iPhone with TikTok app logo

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been secretly attempting to lobby members of Congress over recent proposals to ban the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok.

As reported by Breitbart, employees of the Chinese Embassy have been meeting with congressional staffers to try to persuade members to vote against the bill that would force the Chinese company ByteDance to sell TikTok, or else face an indefinite ban on the app’s use in the United States. The bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives in March with bipartisan support, and is now being reviewed by the Senate.

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Media Picks Up Novel Legal Theory Suggesting Big Oil Is Homicidal

Virginia Star Staff
Oil Rig

A new narrative is making its way through major media outlets about major oil corporations: climate change that they purportedly caused is taking lives, and they could be held liable for homicide.

In recent weeks, numerous outlets have run stories or opinion pieces promoting or otherwise examining the novel legal theory, which is the subject of a new paper published by the Harvard Environmental Law Review, according to a Tuesday E&E News report detailing the architects’ efforts to market their idea to prosecutors. The Boston Globe, The Guardian, Newsweek, Inside Climate News and other outlets have all recently published pieces promoting the idea that leading oil companies could or should be charged with murder for their role in climate change, which the theory’s architects claim has caused thousands of deaths in the U.S.

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Conservatives Urge House to Hold Hearing on Google Gemini Over 2024 Election Integrity Concerns

Just the News
Rep. Jim Jordan

The hearing Republicans are calling for would increase public scrutiny on Google’s AI application and potentially inherent bias.

Conservative and Republican groups nationwide are urging House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan to hold a hearing about potential problems posed by Google Gemini, with concerns specifically about whether it could influence the 2024 presidential election.

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Commentary: At This Point, Disney Deserves to Die

Virginia Star Staff
Bob Iger Disney

That Disney has been dying a slow death for a long time should be clear to anyone even remotely familiar with the entertainment industry. Last summer, the company lost $900 million at the box office, and its streaming platform, Disney+, lost 1.3 million subscribers in just the last quarter of 2023.

Numbers like these should be easy red flags to stockholders and investors — as should the growing amount of blowback condemning woke content in TV shows and blockbuster films.

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Groups Coordinate with Hundreds of Media Outlets to Push Climate ‘Crisis’ in News and Entertainment

Just the News
Planet B Protest

Ahead of the Easter weekend, multiple media outlets reported that chocolate prices are soaring, and according to the coverage, the main culprit driving the inflating costs is climate change.

Across multiple platforms, the reports followed a similar message, using similar language to describe the problem and its causes — and the reports all came out the same week.

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Commentary: VDARE’s Fight Against Letitia James Is Our Fight, Too

Virginia Star Staff
New York AG

For all its gesticulations about “free speech,” the conservative mainstream often plays a supporting role in America’s censorship regime. It’s a two-step dance: The Right styles itself as the sworn defender of free speech and the mortal enemy of censorship while simultaneously downplaying or outright ignoring brazen censorship of speech that ventures a bit too far outside the Overton window. By claiming to defend all free speech in principle but only defending some in practice, the Right concedes, by omission, that certain ideas fall outside the bounds of free expression — and that it’s perfectly appropriate (or, at least, not particularly objectionable) to bring the full force of regime power to bear against any individual so unwise as to express them.

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Commentary: Big Tech Wants to Sneak Its AI Agenda Through State Legislatures

Virginia Star Staff
Connecticut State Sen. James Moroney with Texas State Rep. Giovanni Capriglione

Most conservatives are aware Big Tech is an insidious force in American life. Tech giants censor free speech, promote wokeness, and fund far-left groups. A number of Republicans at the federal level want to curtail the massive power Big Tech wields in our country.

However, at the state level, many Republicans are lining up to serve the interests of the tech giants. Big Tech knows that there’s little appetite at the federal level to do its bidding. So corporations like Microsoft are now lobbying state legislators to enact the AI regulations they want. It’s a campaign few Americans know about, but it could dramatically impact their lives.

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Biosafety Committee Found Dozens of Accidents at NIH-Funded Colorado Lab in Three years

Just the News
Science Lab

Bats and hamsters and cats, and mice!

Fort Collins, Colorado, could have become the next Wuhan, China, with dozens of lab accidents just this decade involving outbreak-prone pathogens in animals including coronaviruses, Zika and tuberculosis, according to a group that fights taxpayer-funded animal testing.

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Google Threatens to Demonetize Wall Street Watchdog as GOP Targets Ad Collusion

Just the News
Wall Street Bull

Google’s artificial intelligence isn’t particularly bright when it comes to evaluating publishers’ compliance with its advertising policies, if the experience of a heterodox economics blog with outsized influence is any indication.

With a megaphone from Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi, both darlings of progressives in the “Occupy Wall Street” era, Naked Capitalism accused Google of making “flagrant errors” in its threats to demonetize the 18-year-old site for verboten content.

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Commentary: In 2024, Digital Is Everything in Politics

RealClearWire
Computer

As the 2024 election heats up, now is the time for campaigns to invest wisely. Questions abound: Do you invest in cable news advertising? Door-to-door canvassing? Social media? Something else?

For answers, I look back to the past. In 2000, I oversaw the South Carolina Republican Party’s history-making effort to post real-time presidential primary results online. The election night vote-counting for the epic Bush vs. McCain battle played out on screens across the world – not just in the South Carolina GOP’s vote tabulation center. On that night, the ground shifted beneath our feet.

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Commentary: The Winners of RealClearPolitics’ Samizdat Prize

RealClearWire
RCP Award Show

Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” hosts a panel with the winners of the first RealClearPolitics Samizdat Prize — “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi, “Great Barrington Declaration” co-author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and NY Post reporter and “Laptop From Hell” author Miranda Devine.

The three were chosen for their bravery in resisting censorship. They discuss the cost of taking a stand as well as the future of free speech and online discourse.

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Commentary: Voters Be Beware That Google Interferes in U.S. Elections

Virginia Star Staff
Person searching Google on their laptop

A brand new investigation has found that Google interfered in American elections at least 41 times over the last 16 years.

Published on March 18, the Media Research Center Special Report traced election interference efforts by the world’s most popular search engine all the way back to the 2008 election of former President Barack Obama.

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Dem Megadonor Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced to 25 Years in Prison

Virginia Star Staff
Sam Bankman-Fried in courtroom (composite image)

Convicted cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried on Thursday received a prison sentence of 25 years.

A jury found Bankman-Fried guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy-related charges in November and the New York probation department’s sentence recommendation was 100 years in prison, according to a February court filing pleading for a lighter sentence. Bankman-Fried’s lawyer had asked for a 60-78 month sentence, citing the convicted fraudster’s philanthropic ventures and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

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Firm Tied to China’s Military Industrial Complex Plans to Roll Out Massive Battery Chemical Plants in U.S.

Virginia Star Staff
Shenzhen Capchem Technology plant floor

The Chinese manufacturer of chemicals for electric vehicle batteries planning to build two U.S. factories has long-standing ties to China’s military industrial complex, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.

Capchem Technology USA, the wholly-owned subsidiary of China-based Shenzhen Capchem Technology (Capchem), plans to build factories in both Ohio and Louisiana that would produce components for electric vehicle batteries. Chinese government documents reveal the Chinese chemical giant was selected over a decade ago to conduct aerospace research for China’s military industrial complex as part of a program overseen by a blacklisted Chinese government agency.

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Senate Intel Chair: ‘There May Need to be Certain Changes Made’ to House-Passed TikTok Bill

Just the News
Senator Mark Warner

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expects the House-passed bill that could lead to a ban on TikTok in the U.S. might need to be amended in the Senate

Warner told reporters last week the changes could involve the timeline that it requires Bytedance to divest in the popular smartphone app.

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Top Doctors Complain Detransitioners Posed ‘Harm’ to Trans Members at Medical Conference

Virginia Star Staff
Chloe Cole

Several gender doctors complained that detransitioners and “anti-trans” activists were allowed to attend an American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) conference and claimed they made attendees feel unsafe, according to a series of emails exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The AAP holds its National Conference and Exhibition (NCE) each year, and in October 2023, the organization allowed the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) in Medicine, which opposes the medical transition of minors, to have a booth in the exhibit hall, prompting outrage from attendees, according to emails obtained through a public records request. Dr. Gina Sequeira, the co-director of the Gender Clinic at Seattle Children’s Hospital, sent an email to colleagues on Oct. 25 claiming that having detransitioners like Chloe Cole and Prisha Mosley and gender industry whistleblowers such as Jamie Reed at the conference had made doctors and “LGBTQ-identified” attendees question whether NCE could be a “safe space for them.”

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Team Biden Rolls Out Massive $30 Million Ad Campaign to Capture Crucial Voting Blocs

Virginia Star Staff
Joe Biden

President Joe Biden’s campaign is rolling out a new $30 million six-week ad buy in several swing states in a bid to capture crucial voting blocs ahead of November.

The ad campaign will air in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, according to Politico, and aims to tout several Biden initiatives on “climate change” and abortion, as well as address concerns surrounding the president’s mental fitness. The ad campaign parallels a wider administration effort to gain support among African Americans and young people as the president continues to lag behind former President Donald Trump in the polls.

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House Panel Unanimously Passes Bill to Ban TikTok in U.S., Final Vote as Early as Next Week

Just the News
TikTok China

A GOP-led House committee has unanimously passed a bill that attempts to ban TikTok nationwide on all electronic devices.

The bill passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday and could get a final vote as early as next week, amid concerns about the China-based owner of the popular, short-form video platform giving user data to the Chinese Communist Party.

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Commentary: Technology Changes and Bipartisanship are Causing Journalism’s Woes

RealClearWire
Journalists Press

by Carl M. Cannon   For the American media, 2024 has been a fiasco. And it’s still only February. Nine days into the new year, highly respected Los Angeles Times editor Kevin Merida resigned rather than tolerate another round of layoffs and the meddlesome ways of a billionaire publisher and his…

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Security State Sees Internet Free Speech as ‘Massive Crisis’

Peter D'Abrosca

An internet free speech expert said in a recent interview that freedom of speech online combined with massive audiences for independent journalists and news sources created a “massive crisis” for America’s security state. 

“So initially, even these dissident voices within the U.S., even though they may have been loud in moments, they never reached 30 million followers,” Founder and Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) Mike Benz told Tucker Carlson in an interview. “They never reached the one billion impressions per year type thing. As an uncensored mature ecosystem allowed citizen journalists and independent voices to be able to outcompete legacy news media, this induced a massive crisis both in our military and in our State Department and intelligence services.” 

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Commentary: President Trump, NATO, and ‘Swamp Talk’

Virginia Star Staff
Donald Trump in South Carolina

The hysteria in response to President Trump’s comment about NATO offers a great insight into Swamp Talk™. It’s how swamp creatures use their media dominance to gaslight Americans into voting for Democrats in spite of always disastrous results. They frighten voters into opposing candidates like President Trump, who want to make America stronger, safer, more prosperous, and free.

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Commentary: The Cancelled Black Harvard Professor Who Found No Racial Bias in Police Shootings

Virginia Star Staff
Roland Fryer Junior

Unless you have lived under a rock for the last four years, you will be very familiar with the claim that black Americans are disproportionately victims of police shootings compared with their white counterparts.

But a nearly eight-year-old study challenging this narrative is enjoying renewed attention thanks to a recent high-profile interview of the study’s author, African American economist Roland Fryer, by journalist Bari Weiss of The Free Press.

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Vice Media ‘Eliminating Several Hundred Positions’, Will Stop Publishing on Website

Just the News
Empty Office

Vice Media on Thursday announced that it would stop publishing content on its website and lay off hundreds of its employees as a cost-cutting measure.

“We create and produce outstanding original content true to the Vice brand,” CEO Bruce Dixon said in a statement obtained by the Washington Post. “However, it is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously.”

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Moms Inadvertently Expose Daughters to Predators on Instagram in Quest for Money and Fame, Investigation Reveals

Virginia Star Staff
Instagram User

Mothers are inadvertently exposing their young daughters to male predators on Instagram in a quest to garner money and fame, an investigation published by The New York Times on Thursday found.

The accounts, numbering in the thousands, reveal how social media platforms are altering the definition of childhood and the increasing commodification of young girls, the NYT found. In some cases, mothers managing the accounts actively sell photographs, previously worn outfits and chat sessions with their underage daughters.

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Google News Moved Further Left in 2023, Compared to Previous Year: News Media Watchdog Finds

Just the News
Google Search

An analysis by the news media watchdog group AllSides Technology finds roughly 63% of stories last year on the Google News were from “left and left-leaning news sources.” 

In the new analysis released Thursday, 937 stories were reviewed from Oct. 30 to Nov. 14, 2023. 

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RussiaGate Hoax Paved Way for Security State’s Domestic Censorship During 2020 Election, Internet Free Speech Expert Says

Peter D'Abrosca
Mike Benz

According to an expert in internet free speech, the RussiaGate hoax perpetrated against former President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 election campaign was the beginning of the security state’s inward focus on domestic censorship online.

Mike Benz, the founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week that since the mid-20th century, there was an unwritten rule that security state apparatuses like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were not to be used domestically against the American people, but that the security state knew how powerful its apparatus could be if turned inward.

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Report: CBS News Seized Files, Computers and Records of Fired Journalist Catherine Herridge

Virginia Star Staff
Catherine Herridge

CBS News has reportedly “seized the files, computers and records” of fired investigative reporter Catherine Herridge, including information on privileged sources.

“The network grabbed Herridge’s notes and files and informed her that it would decide what, if anything, would be turned over to her,” George Washington University law Professor Jonathan Turley reported at the Hill on Thursday. “The files likely contain confidential material from both her stints at Fox and CBS.”

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Revealed: U.S. Military is Working to Censor ‘Right-Wing Populist Groups’

Peter D'Abrosca
Military Cyber Warfare

According to an online free speech expert, the U.S. military is directly working to censor “right-wing populist groups” on the internet.

“An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense and Brussels into an organized political warfare outlet,” Mike Benz told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week. “Essentially, infrastructure that was created [and] initially stationed in Germany and in central and eastern Europe to create psychological buffer zones – basically the ability to have the military work with the social media companies to censor Russian propaganda or to censor domestic right wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis.”

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Mike Benz Details How the Foreign Policy Establishment is Actively Fighting Populism in the U.S.

Kaitlin Housler

Mike Benz, former Trump state department official and current Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, joined Monday’s edition of Steve Bannon’s War Room where he explained why the foreign policy establishment is the main driver of censorship in the U.S.

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University Hospital: Trans-Women’s Breast ‘Milk’ Just as Good as Biological Women’s

Virginia Star Staff
Baby with Parents

A UK university hospital system has claimed that milk produced by trans-women “is as good for babies” as biological women’s breast milk.

The Telegraph reports a University of Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust’s (USHT) “letter to campaigners” noted that “after a combination of drugs,” trans-women’s milk is “comparable to that produced following the birth of a baby.”

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Joe Biden Mocked Mercilessly for Mumbling, Bumbling ‘Shrinkflation’ Video Released on Super Bowl Sunday

Tom Pappert

President Joe Biden was mocked by conservatives on Sunday for a video he released ahead of the Super Bowl which derided “shrinkflation,” when manufacturers lower the size or quantity of items included for a given price without informing the consumer as a result of inflation, with pundits uniformly reminding the embattled president that his inflationary policies preceded the shrinkflation.

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Bill Ackman on Washington Post Hit Piece: ‘The Public Has Been Again Misled’

Michael Patrick Leahy

Bill Ackman, the highly successful investor and Harvard graduate whose criticism of Claudine Gay’s history of plagiarism led to her resignation as President of Harvard University, published a lengthy tweet on his X account Saturday evening responding to an article about him published by The Washington Post earlier in the day, “How a liberal billionaire became America’s leading anti-DEI crusader.”

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Report: Amazon Censored Books on COVID Vaccine After Pressure from Biden White House

Virginia Star Staff
Vaccine Shot

New internal emails from Amazon reveal that the tech giant ultimately censored books discussing the topic of Chinese Coronavirus vaccines after being pressured to do so by the Biden Administration.

As reported by the New York Post, the emails and other documents were released by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Monday in a series of posts on X, which Jordan referred to as “The Amazon Files.” The communications were obtained by a subpoena from the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which was established with the purpose of exposing abuse of federal powers to target political opponents, including collusion between the government and private sector entities such as Big Tech.

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Americans Increasingly Turning Away from Political News as 2024 Election Nears

Virginia Star Staff

The American public is focusing less and less on political news in recent months, even as a crucial presidential election draws nearer.

According to Axios, Americans are instead turning back to consumption of non-political content such as sports and entertainment, indicating a decline in political interest that spiked in 2020 ahead of that year’s presidential race. While numerous events in 2020, such as the nationwide race riots and the lockdowns as the result of the Chinese Coronavirus, led to increased political engagement and culminated in record-high voter turnout, there have been fewer major events in the lead-up to 2024.

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Commentary: Big Tech Needs First Amendment to Censor You

Virginia Star Staff
Smart Phone Filled with Apps

Big Tech is back at the Supreme Court.

Appealing from a big loss they suffered at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, social media platforms are challenging Texas’ social media law that prohibits those companies from engaging in viewpoint discrimination when curating their platforms.

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PR Group Behind ‘Watchdog’ NewsGuard Hit with $350 Million Settlement over OxyContin Marketing

Virginia Star Staff

French public and advertising giant Publicis Groupe — the lead funder of  “disinformation watchdog” NewsGuard — has agreed to pay $350 million as part of a settlement with state attorneys general over the company’s role in America’s opioid crisis. “Today’s filings describe how Publicis’ work contributed to the crisis by…

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