Authored by Jonathan Lesser via RealClear Wire,
The green energy subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) have been justified by the Biden Administration as a booster of U.S. economic growth and jobs. But when the subsidies are tallied and the overall impacts evaluated, the IRA is a job and economic growth killer.
The First Amendment has long been understood as settling matters where government manipulation of the press is concerned.
“Congress shall make no law,” the text plainly states, “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
The amendment is so clear that only a politician could manage to miss the point.
And when politicians miss the point of a straightforward, necessary protection, they manage to find all kinds of people willing to help them place ideology above constitutionality, common sense and simple decency.
We give you the Biden State Department and NewsGuard.
NewsGuard bills itself “The Internet Trust Tool” and purports to offer “transparent tools to counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies,” which admittedly sounds impressive.
But what is the likely outcome when the US government funds this corporation through something called the Global Engagement Center?
A lawsuit Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed in federal court Wednesday along with The Daily Wire and The Federalist declares the outcome was the State Department funding technology that could “render disfavored press outlets unprofitable.”
Conservative voices, it says, are being suppressed.
And when they’re suppressed, their advertising revenues drop.
And if their advertising revenues drop far enough, they will eventually be forced to exit the market.
We know this to be NewsGuard’s modus operandi because it did this to us at the American Institute for Economic Research.
In October 2020, AIER hosted the conference that produced the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement that opposed the use of lockdowns during the COVID pandemic.
The GBD’s text went viral, but it also provoked the wrath of the federal government.
National Institutes of Health chief Francis Collins instructed Anthony Fauci to wage a “quick and devastating published take down” of the document, which was the first major scientific challenge to their disastrous lockdown strategy.
The GBD also placed us on NewsGuard’s radar, prompting the organization to conduct a “fact-check” rating of our website.
Although it represented itself as a neutral and unbiased company, it quickly became clear NewsGuard intended to push a pro-lockdown agenda.
The “reviewer” it assigned to evaluate us had few professional qualifications in either science or health policy.
Instead of consulting experts, NewsGuard built its attack on the GBD on the word of a politician, former United Kingdom Health Secretary Matt Hancock.
As the architect of Britain’s draconian lockdown policies, Hancock was hardly a neutral party.
Indeed, he left his position in disgrace after being caught violating his own lockdown rules.
Despite presenting itself as a fact-checker, NewsGuard also has a penchant for spreading misinformation of its own.
NewsGuard spent most of 2020 specifically targeting websites that shared or promoted the lab-leak hypothesis of COVID-19.
According to the same reviewer who attacked the GBD, websites that mentioned the lab leak were promoting “unfounded conspiracy theories about the virus’s origins” and deserved to be branded “misinformation.”
Almost three years after the pandemic’s start, an accidental lab leak is now widely believed to be the virus’ most likely origin.
NewsGuard had its facts wrong, yet toed the Biden administration line.
But, hey — that’s where the money was.
After revelations about the likelihood of a lab leak forced its hand, NewsGuard quietly retracted 21 ratings it had inappropriately applied to other websites.
That’s what happens when politicians enlist the help of (read: pay for) ideologically motivated but wholly unqualified journalists to determine what should and, more important in this case, should not be freely available for the public to read.
The result is an almost farcical situation in which accomplished scientists have their expertise pilloried by uncredentialed activist-journalists.
And now we know the US government is paying their salaries to do so.
Who knows what else we’ll find as the federal lawsuit enters discovery?
The filers are doing the First Amendment — and all Americans — a real service.
Phillip W. Magness, James R. Harrigan and Ryan M. Yonk are senior research faculty at the American Institute for Economic Research.
'I thought the worst I've seen in my life is what ISIS has done in Iraq and Syria...I have never imagined saying I've seen something worse'
With the holiday season in full swing, most Americans are not paying close attention to the latest UN climate change conference -- COP 28 -- which is currently taking place in Dubai. I get it; the vast majority of Americans are busy preparing for family gatherings, shopping for presents, and attending holiday festivities. They have neither the time nor the energy to follow the daily happenings at a climate change conference halfway around the world.
However, the American people must be made aware of what exactly is occurring at COP28 simply because the ideas and policies being espoused by the hundreds of global leaders attending the annual event are downright terrifying and would cause undue harm to billions of people.
The conference began on an ominous note when UN secretary general Antonio Guterres declared that we must “ultimately stop burning all fossil fuels. Not reduce. Not abate.”
Guterres is demanding that we eliminate all use of fossil fuels in short order, not over many decades, but just years from today. However, that is literally impossible and would destroy the lives of billions of people who depend on fossil fuels daily.
According to the left-leaning Environmental and Energy Study Institute, “Fossil fuels -- including coal, oil, and natural gas -- have been powering economies for over 150 years, and currently supply about 80 percent of the world’s energy.”
In other words, Guterres, who surely knows that more than 80 percent of the world’s energy is currently derived from fossil fuels, is calling for the economic and social regression of humanity.
This is anti-human, anti-progress, and extremely disturbing, to say the least
While Guterres and many others are calling for the comprehensive elimination of fossil fuels, they are also constantly touting so-called renewable energy as the ready-and-waiting replacement.
But, despite ample subsidies, including $15.6 billion from the U.S. government last year alone, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar account for a miniscule proportion of the world’s total energy consumption.
How small? In 2019, wind accounted for 2.2 percent of the world’s energy consumption and solar produced 1.1 percent.
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