A legal group is accusing the Biden regime of concealing documents related to an alleged targeting of X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk. America First Legal (AFL) filed a lawsuit against the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), alleging that the federal agency is “illegally” refusing to turn over documents detailing its actions against Musk. AFL, alongside House Republicans, accused the FTC of going after Musk for protecting the First Amendment. In a 41-page filing, AFL detailed the harrowing tactics used by the federal government to allegedly attack those critical of them. “[T]he FTC’s actions represent a gross abuse of government authority and a threat to the First Amendment,” the filing reads. “Our woke, weaponized federal government will stop at nothing to harass and attempt to intimidate its perceived opponents,” AFL Vice President Gene Hamilton said in a statement. “The American people have had enough. What they have done in the dark will be brought to the light.” AFL’s quest for the documents began after the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government issued an interim report highlighting a disturbing pattern of what Republicans called a potential “partisan retaliation” against Musk. The March 7 report, extending 113 pages, detailed an alleged mission of “partisan pressure to target Twitter and silence Musk.” It also found that the FTC “inappropriately stretched its regulatory power to harass Twitter.” The allegations stem from Musk’s hostile takeover of Twitter, which he later rebranded to X. The findings ignited a wave of criticism, with AFL filing a complaint to the Inspector General and a FOIA lawsuit. AFL’s efforts proved unsuccessful as the FTC adamantly refused to turn over documents. “Simply ignoring the law, the FTC declared itself immune from public scrutiny and refused to search for or hand over the requested documents,” AFL remarked in response to the blockade. This would not mark the first time that the federal government faced scrutiny over its alleged plot to slap down Musk. In a tense hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) pressed Attorney General Merrick Garland on two probes related to perks received by Musk during his tenure as the owner of electric car company Tesla. “These look like mafia tactics,” Massie said, referring to the investigations led by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and the Securities and Exchange Commission. “Elon Musk was a Democrat who admittedly supported Biden but then he became a critic of the administration and exposed the censorship regime,” Massie added. “Now, per public reports, the DOJ has opened — not one, but two — investigations of Elon Musk.” Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

What is the moral significance of humor?

The post Humor in <i>The Fountainhead</i> appeared first on New Ideal - Reason | Individualism | Capitalism.

 

It is said that in a complex, division of labor society like ours, no one can truly be independent. Rather, we are all “interdependent,” because we depend on others to make our shoes, build the cars we drive, generate the electricity that lights our homes, and much more. Is it true that we’re all “interdependent”? If so, what are the implications for how we think about what independence is, and whether it’s possible? Is there something wrong with thinking of ourselves as “interdependent”? Join Onkar Ghate and Aaron Smith as they discuss the nature of independence and what it means to practice it in a deeply interconnected world.










Download audio: https://media.blubrry.com/new_ideal_ari/content.blubrry.com/new_ideal_ari/20230920_Independence-in-an-Interdependent-World.mp3

“'Whatever the condition of human beings at the beginning of the species,' writes Thomas Sowell in his new book Social Justice Fallacies, 'scores of millennia had already come and gone before anyone coined the phrase social justice.' And during those vast expanses of time, 'different peoples evolved differently in very different settings around the world, developing different talents that created reciprocal inequalities of achievements in different endeavours.' They did so 'without necessarily creating equality, or even comparability, in any of those endeavours.'
    "The social-justice movement has changed all that, turning the quest for equity into a salient feature of Western culture and politics. The past century has seen this pursuit shift from the fringes of political discourse to the heart of the mainstream, and its narrative now exerts a profound influence on the arts, education, and even religious institutions. In large parts of society, it has instilled the notion that human disparities are entirely the result of oppression, exploitation, and discrimination, and that a remedial equality of outcome must therefore be pursued at all costs. But the attractive vision of an equitable future can only be constructed by ignoring evidence and repeating a litany of fallacies.
    "The gist of Thomas Sowell’s new work is that the flawed assumptions of social-justice activists are endangering Western societies....
    "The singleminded pursuit of [social] justice at all costs is not justice at all, Sowell argues, and will often result in injustice. The results sought by social-justice activists are what Hayek used to call 'cosmic justice,' and they are not attainable 'when there are differences in human fates for which clearly no human agency is responsible.' ...
    "'[W]e cannot demand justice from the cosmos'..."

~ Hannah Gal reviewing Thomas Sowell's latest book 'Social Justice Fallacies'

The worst enemy of the West is itself, and the same goes for our democracy. We are so arrogantly certain of our survival and superiority, we in the Western democracies, that we never give a moment’s thought to how we appear to others. We don’t have to do so, we think, because of our inherent […]