Category: Propaganda
Librarian refuses to move LGBTQ+ propaganda away from kids — and seals her fate
Radicals in Alabama appear to have found a gray-haired figure around which to rally to oppose the broader conservative effort to shield American children from mature and perverse content.
The Rutherford County Library Board removed Luanne James from her position as director of the library system after she refused to fulfill her duties and move hundreds of titles containing inappropriate content — ranging from a book targeting adolescents about sexual activity to books about “genderfluidity” and transgenderism — from the kids’ section to the adult section.
‘I stand by my decision.’
The usual suspects have characterized the bespectacled obstructionist as a free-speech champion and her termination as unlawful.
How it started
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) repeatedly expressed concern in 2023 over children’s exposure to “inappropriate, sexually suggestive materials without adequate means of parental supervision” in her state’s taxpayer-funded libraries.
Ivey noted in a Sept. 1, 2023, letter to the director of the Alabama Public Library Service that the growing parental concern underpinning her own would not be remedied by removing books containing inappropriate content, including radical “gender transition” propaganda, but rather by “ensuring that these books are placed in an appropriate location.”
In the same spirit, the Alabama Legislative Services Agency proposed rule changes to the APLS in 2024 that would make libraries’ state funding conditional on moving content “inappropriate” for kids to an adult section.
Last month, the APLS board of trustees said that the Legislative Services Agency approved the change, reported AL.com.
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Luis Soto/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images
Rutherford County Library board meeting documents reveal that Luanne James expressed a willingness to relocate some thematically and graphically mature titles but dug in her heels to keep numerous provocative works of LGBT agitprop in the juvenile sections of her county’s libraries.
The Murfreesboro Daily News Journal reported that among the over 130 titles that James refused to move are:
- “Pride in Sports,” an LGBT activist book by a lesbian couple that apparently attempts to normalize non-straight sexual preferences and sex-rejection procedures;
- “Welcome to Your Period,” a book about menstruation that contains illustrations of female body parts and claims that doctors can administer drugs to “try to block or stop periods and other physical changes” for “transgender children,” which the authors claim “have existed for as long as time”;
- “The Every Body Book,” a book that discusses and illustrates various body parts while pushing gender ideology on kids; and
- “Lily and Dunkin,” a story about a romance involving an 8th-grade boy deluded into thinking he’s really a girl.
To James’ chagrin, the board decided in an 8-3 vote on March 16 to move over 100 of the inappropriate LGBT titles to the adult section.
James noted in a letter to the board two days later that “restricting access to these materials through subjective relocation or removal constitutes a violation of the community’s right to information and a direct infringement on the principles of free speech.”
“I will not comply with the Board’s decision to relocate these books,” wrote James. “Doing so would violate the First Amendment right of all citizens of Rutherford County and myself.”
How it’s going
Having proven unwilling to do her job, James was relieved of it on March 30.
The board’s 8-3 vote to kick James to the curb was met by a mix of applause by detractors and furious booing by supporters at the packed Rutherford County Courthouse. James later said, “I stand by my decision,” reported the Murfreesboro Daily News Journal.
Cody York said in a statement obtained by the Daily News Journal that James’ “refusal to implement a lawful directive of the Rutherford County Library Board constitutes insubordination.”
Nashville attorney Chuck Mangelsdorf said, “Her termination we believe is completely unlawful,” and said James is “a guardian of the First Amendment.”
PEN America said in a statement that it “stands with Rutherford County Library System Director Luanne James in her refusal to banish LGBTQ+ children’s books from access by relocating them to the adult section. Children and teens deserve access to diverse books that represent their identities and stories and books that introduce young people to new ideas and perspectives.”
Kasey Meehan, the director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, claimed that James’ “story will echo from the courthouse in Murfreesboro, Tenn., across the country as emblematic of the fight against censorship and suppression,” reported the Advocate.
Supporters have already crowdfunded over $72,000 on GoFundMe for James.
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Woke UK video game backfires: ‘Extremist’ Amelia becomes viral symbol of British pride
Hull City Council in Yorkshire, England — an area overwhelmed by third-world asylum seekers in recent years — wasted no time setting a high bar for self-owns this year.
The local authority teamed up with the East Riding of Yorkshire Council and the woke media literacy outfit Shout Out UK to create an online choose-your-own adventure video game targeting young Britons titled “Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism.”
‘The government is betraying white British people.’
To the chagrin of the re-education tool’s makers, one of its supposed villains, a purple-haired patriotic character named Amelia, has been appropriated and used to great effect in counter-messaging campaigns by the right and other critics of the woke British establishment.
The game
Hull City Council announced last year that the game would be “made available to schools, education settings, and community and youth organizations throughout the city” and used to teach youths “about the dangers of extremism and radicalization.”
One of the stated objectives of the propaganda tool was to “demonstrate the local threat picture of Extreme Right Wing activities specifically.”
The game offers six scenarios in which users decide the path the protagonist, Charlie, will take.
In the third scenario, Charlie — who is referred to as “they” — watches a video that claims both that “Muslim men are stealing the places of British war veterans in emergency accommodation” and that “the government is betraying white British people.”
Screenshots from Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism.
If the player decides that “this seems unfair” and has Charlie engage with the post, Charlie ends up inadvertently sharing the content with online bad actors, sending the player’s radicalization risk score through the roof.
Charlie avoids arrest long enough to attend class with Amelia in the third scenario, where she suggests that “immigrants are coming to the U.K. and taking our jobs.”
Amelia features prominently in the fourth scenario, where she is introduced as a close friend of Charlie who has “made a video encouraging young people in Birdlington to join a political group that seeks to defend English rights.”
After Amelia — who is depicted holding the Union Jack and a sign that says, “No entry” — asks Charlie to join a group called Action for Britain and shares a video on-theme, the player is given the option of having Charlie: ignore the video, like the video but not join the group, or share the video and join the group.
If the player chooses the third option, their radicalization risk score increases just as it will increase if they agree in the final scenario to go in Amelia’s place to protest “the erosion of British values.”
Screenshot from Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism.
Regardless of inputs, the game inevitably suggests that exposure to supposedly extremist views such as love for nation, concern over wage suppression by immigrants, and cultural erasure warrant Charlie’s referral to an anti-terrorism expert and re-education on “how to engage positively with ideology and the difference between right and wrong in expressing political beliefs.”
The Telegraph, citing official documents, revealed last year that the British government listed “cultural nationalism,” defined as the belief that Western culture is “under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups,” as a terrorist ideology.
The game concludes with the suggestion that only after receiving counseling on “harmful ideology” from a hijab-wearing counselor is Charlie able to “rebuild their confidence, find their identity, and continue their college course successfully.”
New pathway for Amelia
Amelia has recently featured in numerous viral online videos and memes where she warns of the Islamification of Britain, champions national pride, promotes normalcy, and criticizes leftist policies.
In a popular Amelia meme shared by Elon Musk, the character underscores that the English people aren’t “immigrants” and “didn’t ‘arrive’ in England. They became England — over more than a millennium.”
In another popular meme, Amelia is shown bonding with Charlie over their common love of country, getting married, then starting a family.
Amelia has also been depicted as the Lady of the Lake of Arthurian legend, handing an armored knight the sword Aerondight; in photo-realistic images mocking political figures; and in a multitude of other images making a wide range of political commentary.
British journalist Mary Harrington writing for UnHerd noted that “Amelia stands as a potent illustration of how desperately an officialdom accustomed to comparatively comprehensive public message control is struggling to adapt to the recursive online environment.”
When pressed for comment, Hull City Council referred Blaze News to the U.K. Home Office, which did not respond. Shout Out UK for comment similarly did not respond.
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China Sucks. Even Their Propaganda Makes America Look Awesome.
The American raid to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro was deeply embarrassing for Red China. The third-world communist thugs had provided much of the military equipment designed to protect Maduro’s regime from foreign intervention. It proved utterly useless against U.S. forces, who snatched Maduro just hours after his meeting with a delegation of Chinese officials.
The post China Sucks. Even Their Propaganda Makes America Look Awesome. appeared first on .
Trump sues BBC for billions over ‘deceptive and defamatory’ edit of his Jan. 6 speech, blasts foreign election interference
President Donald Trump filed a massive defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corporation on Monday over an edit of his Jan. 6, 2021, speech that appeared in a BBC “Panorama” documentary.
The lawsuit claims that the BBC’s “deceptive and defamatory distortion, doctoring, manipulation, and splicing damaged President Trump in his occupation, damaged his professional reputation, and portrayed him as engaging in supposed calls for rioting and violence that he never actually made.”
‘The FAKE NEWS “reporters” in the UK are just as dishonest and full of s**t as the ones here in America.’
The complaint notes further that the “aggressively anti-Trump” documentary, which aired shortly before the 2024 presidential election and painted Kamala Harris as an optimal candidate, constituted “a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the Election’s outcome to President Trump’s detriment.”
A tale of two speeches
Trump originally said at 12:12 p.m. in his speech on Jan. 6, 2021:
Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down — and I’ll be there with you — we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down. Any one you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness.
The president noted nearly an hour later after first raising concerns about voting irregularities and potential fraud in the 2020 election, “Most people would stand there at nine o’clock in the evening and say, ‘I want to thank you very much,’ and they go off to some other life, but I said, ‘Something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong — can’t have happened.’ And we fight, we fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”
The “Panorama” documentary spliced and reorganized Trump’s remarks to make it appear as though he said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”
In addition to creating a false narrative by coupling two parts of the speech that were divided by over 50 minutes’ worth of content and omitting Trump’s call for supporters to behave “peacefully,” the documentary showed flag-waving men descending on the Capitol after the president spoke — despite the video having been recorded before Trump’s speech.
Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The Telegraph obtained and reported on a whistleblower memo earlier this year revealing that there were concerns at the BBC over the apparently deceptive work.
The whistleblower memo noted that the “mangled” footage made Trump “‘say’ things [he] never actually said” and insinuated, with the help of the footage of men marching on the Capitol, that “Trump’s supporters had taken up his ‘call to arms.'”
Too little, too late
Last month, the BBC came under fire both in the United States and in the United Kingdom.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Telegraph, “Trust in the media is at an all-time low because of deceptive editing, misleading reporting, and outright lies. This is yet another example, of many, highlighting why countless Americans turn to alternative media sources to get their news.”
Donald Trump Jr. tweeted, “The FAKE NEWS ‘reporters’ in the UK are just as dishonest and full of s**t as the ones here in America!!!”
“This is a total disgrace. The BBC has doctored footage of Trump to make it look as though he incited a riot — when he in fact said no such thing,” wrote former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. “We have Britain’s national broadcaster using a flagship programme to tell palpable untruths about Britain’s closest ally. Is anyone at the BBC going to take responsibility — and resign?”
In the face of mounting pressure, the BBC issued a retraction, and the director-general of the BBC, Tim Davie, and Deborah Turness, the head of BBC News, both resigned in disgrace.
“Like all public organizations, the BBC is not perfect, and we must always be open, transparent, and accountable,” Davie said in statement. “Overall the BBC is delivering well, but there have been some mistakes made, and as director-general I have to take ultimate responsibility.”
Turness similarly assumed some responsibility for the fiasco, noting the controversy had “reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC” and adding that “the buck stops with me.”
‘The BBC had no regard for the truth.’
Turness suggested, however, that the broadcast corporation was not biased.
“In public life, leaders need to be fully accountable, and that is why I am stepping down,” said Turness. “While mistakes have been made, I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.”
Samir Shah, the chair of the BBC, subsequently sent a personal letter to the White House apologizing for the edit; however, the network refused to pay compensation, claiming that there was no basis for Trump’s defamation claim.
Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss encouraged Trump to take legal action against the BBC, suggesting in a Nov. 15 interview that the network’s apology was insufficient “because they keep doing it again and again. They have painted a completely false picture of President Trump in Britain over a number of years. They’ve done the same thing about conservatives in our country.”
Pay the piper
Trump’s lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida and demands judgment against the BBC for at least $5 billion in damages, states:
The lack of any effort by the BBC to publish content even remotely resembling objective journalism, or to maintain even a slight semblance of objectivity in the Panorama Documentary, demonstrates that the BBC had no regard for the truth about President Trump, and that the doctoring of his Speech was not inadvertent, but instead was an intentional component of the BBC’s effort to craft as one-sided an impression and narrative against President Trump as possible.
A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team told the Guardian that “President Trump’s powerhouse lawsuit is holding the BBC accountable for its defamation and reckless election interference just as he has held other fake news mainstream media responsible for their wrongdoing.”
A spokesperson for the network said in a statement, “As we have made clear previously, we will be defending this case.”
A spokesperson for the prime minister’s office noted that while Downing Street will always “defend the principle of a strong, independent BBC as a trusted and relied-upon national broadcaster reporting without fear or favor,” the prime minister’s office has “also consistently said it is vitally important that they act to maintain trust, correcting mistakes quickly when they occur.”
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