Didn’t we just have a case where a gay activist faked a hate crime against himself in order to shame his political enemies for disagreeing with him on policy and morality? Well, that was last week. This week it’s another gay activist,. The fake hate crime was arson and five animals were killed in the burning home.
Michigan prosecutors charged 54-year-old Nikki Joly — a transgender person — for allegedly burning down their own home in 2017 in what investigators appear to believe was intended to be a fake hate crime.
The LGBT activist — whose five pets were killed in the fire — had allegedly received threats in the past and was instrumental in leading a battle for LGBT rights in Jackson, Michigan.
“Authorities later determined the fire was intentionally set, but the person they arrested came as a shock to both supporters and opponents of the gay rights movement,” The Detroit News reported on Monday. “It was the citizen of the year — Nikki Joly.”
It was two dogs and three cats, by the way.
He lied to the police, perhaps hoping that someone else would be blamed for the crime that he committed:
Two weeks after the fire, Joly was questioned for four hours by a city police detective and two FBI agents.
During the interview, he drooped his head, staring at the floor, not looking at his interlocutors, according to the report. He didn’t admit setting the fire and didn’t deny it, either.
This MLive article speculated about two possible motives:
Joly’s church set him and Moore up in a hotel room and aided in collecting clothes and money as the couple lost everything and had no insurance. Joly received more than $50,000 in donations after the fire, according to the report.
[…]A $60,000 insurance claim was paid to the owner of the home, Stephen Carlson. Joly was in the process of buying the home for $57,000 through a land contract, paying $621.54 a month beginning in June 2015, the report says.
Security footage confirmed Carlson was shopping at Meijer at the time of the fire, ruling him out as a suspect, according to police.
Joly missed about a year of payments on the house before receiving aid from St. John’s Church, which paid $6,700 to help get Joly caught up and settle a lawsuit with Carlson.
[…]Joly, witnesses told police, also had a volatile temperament and would often call people who did not agree with him a bigot, or homophobic.
While dozens of people told police Joly loved his pets and would never willfully harm them, some believed Joly thought there was a lack of controversy following the city’s inaugural Pride Parade, and may have started the fire to spark outrage, according to the report.
Burning down your own house is pretty extreme, but I found another fake hate crime that was even more shocking, in my opinion. It just makes me feel bad for the person who did this – except that he was trying to blame innocent people who disagreed with him for the crimes he committed against himself.
A man who reported someone beat him and carved a homophobic slur into his arm staged the attacks, authorities in rural Utah said Tuesday.
Millard County Sheriff Robert Dekker said Rick Jones, 21, could face charges after officers investigating the series of reported attacks found inconsistencies in the evidence. The Delta man eventually acknowledged faking the harassment, Dekker said.
[…]Jones has since begun mental health treatment, the lawyer said.
The purported attacks began with a beating at his family’s pizza business in April that left Jones with head and facial bruising.
Five days later, the family’s home was found spray-painted with a homophobic slur. On June 10, a rock and a molotov cocktail were thrown through the window of the home. That same day, the business was spray-painted, broken into and robbed of $1,000.
Jones told KSL-TV earlier this month he believed he was targeted because he is gay.
Dekker said prosecutors are considering possible charges including filing a false report and reckless burning.
I wonder if we’ll get another one of these fake hate crimes next week?
By the way, there was a news story about an actual hate crime committed this week, reported by The College Fix. This one has a video of the actual hate crime being committed. But it was not national news, because the victim was a Trump supporter.
Big social media companies like Google, YouTube and Twitter are very open about censoring and shadow-banning conservative voices. These companies do not support free speech or ideological diversity. They are careful to hire only those who share their secular leftism and fascism. But sometimes, one accidentally hires a non-fascist, and we get a glimpse at the internal workings of company.
Here’s Project Veritas, doing the journalism that the mainstream media won’t do:
Project Veritas has obtained and published documents and presentation materials from a former Facebook insider. This information describes how Facebook engineers plan and go about policing political speech. Screenshots from a Facebook workstation show the specific technical actions taken against political figures, as well as “[e]xisting strategies” taken to combat political speech.
[…]According to the insider, the documents revealed a routine suppression of the distribution of conservative Facebook pages. The technical action she repeatedly saw, and for which Project Veritas was provided documentation, was labeled ActionDeboostLiveDistribution. Said the insider, “I would see [this term] appear on several different conservative pages. I first noticed it with an account that I can’t remember, but I remember once I started looking at it, I also saw it on Mike Cernovich’s page, saw it on Steven Crowder’s page, as well as the Daily Caller’s page.”
Conservative commentator Steven Crowder’s page had been suppressed before in April 2016, and Crowder told Project Veritas they settled a dispute related to the issue with Facebook out of court. Asked for comment on this story, Steven Crowder’s attorney Bill Richmond said:
“Louder With Crowder is investigating the allegations of concealed stream throttling by Facebook. The accusations are deeply troubling given the previously settled dispute with Facebook uncovered by Gizmodo.com, which found the show was targeted by Facebook workers with secret audience restrictions on political grounds alongside other prominent conservative voices.”
A screenshot of an action log on Mike Cernovich’s Facebook page provided by the insider, shows the tag. The insider believes that the “deboost” code suppresses the distribution of livestream videos on Facebook. Project Veritas spoke to a current Facebook employee off the record who said that the code could limit a video’s visibility in news feeds, remove sharing features, and disable interactive notifications.
When approached for comment, author and filmmaker Mike Cernovich said the troubling issue is that Facebook could just “make stuff up” about people through these systems. “Facebook, or an individual at Facebook, has the unilateral power to create false allegations against someone he or she doesn’t like. The person accused not only can’t do anything about the allegation, they don’t even have an idea the allegation was made,” said Cernovich.
The insider says that unlike many actions that Facebook content moderators can take against pages, the “deboost” action, which appears to occur algorithmically, does not notify the page’s owner.
[…]Upon further review, the insider says she did not notice the tag on any left-wing pages.
Here’s a screencap of one the documents that was leaked:
Facebook doesn’t want people to see conservative videos
So, the question is, what is that “example video”, which Facebook says is “troll behavior” that must be censored? Well, it’s a video produced by a mainstream conservative journalist who works for The Blaze, a mainstream conservative news site:
The video linked in the presentation was made by Lauren Chen, a conservative commentator who now hosts a program on BlazeTV. “If you actually watch the video you can see that it clearly isn’t abusive or promoting harassment, the video was a criticism of social justice,” said Chen when asked for comment on this story. She added that “the video actually promotes equality and individualism.”
What’s the purpose of all of this censorship? Why, to suppress conservative voices before important elections, of course:
Yamamoto and de la Rubia’s presentation says that “troll accounts,” can have their internet bandwidth limited and experience forced glitches like frequent “auto-logout[s]” and the failed upload of comments. These “special features” would be triggered “leading up to important elections.”
This isn’t the first time that Facebook has been caught censoring conservatives in order to help their allies in the Democrat Party.
The Rev. Franklin Graham was kicked off Facebook for defending North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” which the social-media giant’s review team decided was hate speech.
Facebook acknowledged over the weekend it had banned the prominent evangelist over transgender issues and called the 24-hour ban a mistake that it had already undone. But Mr. Graham was having none of it Sunday, calling the move “a personal attack towards me” and an example of the censorship that Silicon Valley has in store for Christians and/or conservatives.
A spokesman for Facebook told the Charlotte Observer on condition of anonymity that the review team had decided a 2016 post violated rules against “dehumanizing language” and exclusion of people based on, among other things, sexual orientation and gender self-identification. The post was deleted and Mr. Graham prevented from using the service for 24 hours.
I guess Facebook thinks that anyone who is serious about Christianity needs to be “de-boosted”, i.e. – have their free speech censored by fascists on the secular left.
And what about this article from the Daily Caller:
Facebook is censoring PragerU videos for violating its speech codes that prohibit so-called “hate speech” and shadow banning its posts, PragerU wrote on Twitter Friday.
“We’re being heavily censored on @Facebook. Our last 9 posts are reaching 0 of our 3 million followers. At least two videos were deleted last night for ‘hate speech’ including our recent video with @ConservativeMillen,” PragerU tweeted.
The official PragerU Facebook page is still up on Facebook at the time of publication. Its Facebook page reposts the same videos consistently and others can still be found on the page.
However, it appears that one specific PragerU social media administrator — the one who posted the videos that Facebook considered violated its “hate speech” policies — is unable to post on behalf of PragerU, resulting only other PragerU administrators being able to see the post. No one else can see the posts.
What kind of people work at Facebook? They are not moral people. They do not understand basic human rights. They do not respect free speech and they don’t value diversity of opinion. They are ignorant, intolerant, close-minded, bigoted fascists.
William Lane Craig lecturing to university students
Here is the video of the debate:
TOPIC: DOES GOD EXIST?
MY NOTES ON THE DEBATE: (WC = William Lane Craig, CH = Christopher Hitchens)
WC opening speech:
Introduction:
WC makes two contentions:
– there are no good arguments for atheism
– there are good arguments for theism
These topics are IRRELEVANT tonight:
– social impact of christianity
– morality of Old Testament passages
– biblical inerrancy
– the debate is whether god (a creator and designer of the universe) exists
1. cosmological argument
– an actually infinite number of past events is impossible
– number of past events must be finite
– therefore universe has a beginning
– the beginning of the universe is confirmed by science – universe began to exist from nothing
– space, time, matter, energy began at the big bang
– the creation of the universe requires a cause
– the cause is uncaused, timeless, spaceless, powerful
– the cause must be beyond space and time, because it created space and time
– the cause is not physical, because it created all matter and energy
– but there are only two kinds of non-physical cause: abstract objects or minds
– abstract objects don’t cause effects
– therefore must be mind
2. teleological argument
– fine-tuned constants and ratios
– constants not determined by laws of nature
– also, there are arbitrary quantities
– constants and quantities are in narrow range of life-permitting values
– an example: if the weak force were different by 1 in 10 to the 100, then no life
– there are 3 explanations: physical law or chance or design
– not due to law: because constants and quantities are independent of the laws
– not due to chance: the odds are too high for chance
– therefore, due to design
– the atheist response is the world ensemble (multiverse)
– but world ensemble has unobservable universes, no evidence that they exist
– and world ensemble contradicts scientific observations we have today
3. moral argument
– objective moral values are values that exist regardless of what humans think
– objective values are not personal preferences
– objective values are not evolved standards that cultures have depending on time and place
– objective moral values and duties exist
– objective moral values and duties require a moral lawgiver
4. argument from resurrection miracle
– resurrection implies miracle
– miracle implies God
– 3 minimal facts pass the historical tests (early attestation, eyewitness testimony, multiple attestation, etc.)
– minimal fact 1: empty tomb
– minimal fact 2: appearances
– minimal fact 3: early belief in the resurrection
– jewish theology prohibits a dying messiah – messiah is not supposed to die
– jewish theology has a general resurrection of everybody, there is not supposed to be a resurrection of one person
– jewish theology certainly does not predict a single resurrection of the messiah after he dies
– therefore, the belief in the resurrection is unlikely to have been invented
– disciples were willing to die for that belief in the resurrection
– naturalistic explanations don’t work for the 3 minimal facts
5. properly basic belief in god
– religious experience is properly basic
– it’s just like the belief in the external world, grounded in experience
– in the absence of defeaters, those experiences are valid
Conclusion: What CH must do:
– destroy all 5 of WC’s arguments
– erect his own case in its place
CH opening speech:
1. evolution disproves biological design argument
– evolution disproves paley’s argument for a watchmaker
2. god wouldn’t have done it that way
– god wouldn’t have waited that long before the incarnation
– mass extinction and death before Jesus
– god wouldn’t have allowed humans to have almost gone extinct a while back in africa
– why insist that this wasteful and incompetent history of life is for us, that’s a bad design
– the universe is so vast, why would god need so much space, that’s a bad design
– there is too much destruction in the universe, like exploding stars – that’s a bad design
– the heat death of the universe is a bad design
– too many of the other planets don’t support life, that’s a bad design
– the sun is going to become a red giant and incinerate us, that’s a bad design
3. hitchens’ burden of proof
– there is no good reason that supports the existence of god
– all arguments for god can be explained without god
– atheists can’t prove there is no god
– but they can prove there is no good argument for god
4. craig’s scientific arguments don’t go far enough, they only prove deism, not theism
– the scientific arguments don’t prove prayer works
– the scientific arguments don’t prove specific moral teachings of christianity
5. if the laws of physics are so great then miracles shouldn’t be allowed
– good laws and miracles seem to be in contradiction
6. extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence
– none of craig’s evidence was extraordinary
7. science can change, so craig can’t use the progress of science
– it’s too early for craig to use the big bang and fine-tuning
– the big bang and fine-tuning evidences are too new
– they could be overturned by the progress of science
8. craig wrote in his book that the internal conviction of god’s existence should trump contradicting evidence
– but then he isn’t forming his view based on evidence
– he refuses to let evidence disprove his view
– but then how can atheists be to blame if they don’t believe
– so evidence is not really relevant to accepting theism
9. the progress of science has disproved religion
– christianity taught that earth was center of the universe
– but then cosmology disproved that
Response to the big bang and fine-tuning arguments:
– was there pre-existing material?
– who designed the designer?
WC first rebuttal:
Reiterates his 2 basic contentions
CH agrees that there is no good argument for atheism
– then all you’ve got is agnosticism
– because CH did not claim to know there is no God
– and he gave no arguments that there is no God
CH’s evolution argument
– irrelevant to christianity
– Genesis 1 allows for evolution to have occurred
– christianity is not committed to young earth creationism
– the origin of biological diversity is not central to christianity
– st. augustine in 300 AD said days can be long, special potencies unfold over time
– also there are scientific reasons to doubt evolution
– cites barrow and tipler, and they say:
– each of 10 steps in evolution is very improbable
– chances are so low, it would be a miracle if evolution occurred
CH’s argument that god is wasteful
– efficiency is only important to people with limited time or limited resources
– therefore god doesn’t need to be efficient
CH’s argument that god waits too long to send Jesus
– population was not that high before jesus
– jesus appears just before the exponential explosion of population
– conditions were stable – roman empire, peace, literacy, law, etc.
CH’s argument that Craig’s scientific arguments only prove deism, not theism
– deism a type of theism, so those scientific arguments work
– all that deism denies is miraculous intervention
CH’s argument that Craig has a burden of proof
– theism doesn’t need to be proven with certainty
– must only prove best explanation of the evidence
CH’s citation of Craig’s book saying that evidence should not overrule experience
– there is a difference between knowing and showing christianity is true
– knowing is by religious experience which is a properly basic belief
– showing is done through evidence, and there the evidence does matter
CH’s rebuttal to the big bang
– there was no pre-existent material
– space and time and matter came into being at the big bang
– the cause must be non-physical and eternal
– cause of universe outside of time means = cause of universe did not begin to exist
– this is the state of science today
CH’s rebuttal to the fine tuning
– CH says scientists are uncertain about the fine-tuning
– craig cites martin rees, an atheist, astronomer royal, to substantiate the fine tuning
– the fine-tuning is necessary for minimal requirements for life of any kind
– the progress of science is not going to dethrone the fine-tuning
CH’s argument about heat death of the universe
– duration of design is irrelevant to whether something was designed
– cars are designed, yet they break down
– design need not be optimal to be designed
– ch is saying why create if we all eventually go extinct
– but life doesn’t end in the grave on christianity
CH’s rebuttal to the moral argument
– CH says no obj moral values
– but CH uses them to argue against god and christians
– but CH has no foundation for a standard that applies to God and Christians
CH’s rebuttal to the resurrection argument
– empty tomb and appearances are virtually certain
– these are minimal facts, well evidenced using standard historical criteria
– best explanation of these minimal facts is the resurrection
CH’s rebuttal to religious experience
– prop basic belief is rational in the absence of defeaters
– so long as craig has no psychological deficiency, experience is admissible
CH first rebuttal:
it’s not agnosticism
– if there are no good arguments for theism
– then there is no reason for belief in god
– that is atheism
– everything can be explained without god
god wouldn’t have done it that way
– homo sapiens is 100K years old
– for 98K years, they had no communication from God
– lots of people died in childbirth
– disease and volcanos are a mystery to them
– life expectancy is very low
– they die terrible deaths
– their teeth are badly designed
– their genitalia are badly designed
– why solve the problem of sin by allowing a man to be tortured to death
– that’s a stupid, cruel, bumbling plan
lots of people haven’t even heard of jesus
– many of them die without knowing about him
– they cannot be held responsible if they do not know about jesus
the early success of christianity doesn’t prove christianity is true
– because then it applies to mormonism and islam, they’re growing fast
objective morality
– belief in a supreme dictator doesn’t improve moral behavior
– i can do moral actions that you can do
– i can repeat moral positions that you can say
religious people are immoral
– genital mutilation
– suicide bombing
moral behavior doesn’t need god
– we need to act moral for social cohesion
– it evolved for our survival
– that’s why people act morally
– it’s degrading to humans, and servile, to require god for morality
free will
– i believe in free will
– i don’t know why, because i can’t ground free will on atheism
– a bossy god seems to reduce free will because then we are accountable to god
WC cross-examination of CH:
WC why call yourself an atheist when you have no reasons?
CH because absence of belief is atheism
WC but agnosticism, atheism, verificationism all don’t hold that belief, which are you?
CH i think god does not exist
WC ok give me an argument for the claim you just made to know god does not exist
CH i have no argument, but i don’t believe in god because it depresses me to think he might be real
WC would you agree that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?
CH no i don’t agree
WC moral argument: it’s not epistemology it’s the ontology – have you got a foundation for moral values and duties?
CH i do not, it’s just evolution, an evolved standard based on social cohesion
CH cross-examination of WC:
CH you said that the historical reports of jesus doing exorcisms are generally accepted – do you believe in devils?
WC i commit to nothing, what I am saying there historical concensus on the reports that jesus did exorcisms
CH what about the devils going into the pigs, do you believe that?
WC yes i do, but the main point i’m making is that the historical reports show that jesus acted with divine authority
CH do you believe in the virgin birth?
WC yes, but that’s not historically provable using the minimal facts methods, and i did not use the virgin birth in my arguments tonight, because it doesn’t pass the historical tests to be a minimal fact
CH do you believe that all the graves opened and dead people all came out?
WC not sure if the author intended that part as apocalyptic imagery or as literal, i have no opinion on it, have not studied it
CH do exorcisms prove son of god?
WC no, i am only saying that the historical reports show that jesus exercised authority and put himself in the place of god
CH are any religions false? name one that’s false
WC islam
CH so some religions are wicked right?
WC yes
CH if a baby were born in saudi arabia would it be better if it were an atheist or a muslim?
WC i have no opinion on that
CH are any christian denominations wrong?
WC calvinism is wrong about some things, but they are still christians, i could be wrong about some things, i do the best i can studying theology so i’m not wrong
WC second rebuttal
Response to CH arguments:
no reasons for atheism
– no reasons to believe that god does not exist
– ch withholds belief in god
why wait so long before contacting humans with jesus
– population matters, not time – jesus waited until there was about to be a population explosion
– there is natural revelation (Romans 1) for those who lived before christ
what about those who never heard
– (Acts 17:22-31) god chooses the time and place of each person who is born to optimize their opportunity to know him based on how they will respond to evidence (this is called middle knowledge)
– those who haven’t heard will be judged based on general revelation
WC re-assess the state of his five arguments:
cosmological argument
– heat death of the universe won’t happen on christianity
moral argument
– if no objective moral standard, can’t judge other cultures as wrong
– no transcendent objective standard to be able to judge slavery as wrong
name an action argument
– e.g. – tithing
– the greatest command – love the lord your god your god with everything you’ve got
– atheists can’t do that, and that is the biggest commandment to follow
moral obligations
– there are no objective moral obligations for anyone on atheism
– on atheism, you feel obligated because of genetics and social pressure
– on atheism, we’re animals, and animals don’t have moral obligations
resurrection
– the belief in resurrection of 1 man, the messiah is totally unexpected on judaism
– they would not have made this up, it was unexpected
religious experience
– experience is valid in the absence of defeaters
CH second rebuttal:
faith and reason
– Tertullian says faith is better when it’s against reason
it’s easy to start a rumor with faith-based people
– mother teresa: to be canonized she needs to have done a miracle
– so there was a faked miracle report
– but everybody believes the fake miracle report!
– this proves that religious rumors are easy to start
– the resurrection could have started as a similar rumor by people wanting to believe it
name an action
– tithing is a religious action, i don’t have to do that
moral argument
– i can be as moral as you can without god
– i can say that other cultures are wrong, there i just said it
– without god, people would still be good, so god isn’t needed
religious people did bad things in history
– this church did a bad thing here
– that church did a bad thing there
– therfore god doesn’t exist
religion is the outcome of man’s struggle with natural phenomenon
– that is why there are so many religions
WC concluding speech
no arguments for atheism presented
What CH has said during the debate:
– god bad, mother teresa bad, religion bad
atheism is a worldview
– it claims to know the truth
– therefore it is exclusive of other views
what does theism explain
– theism explains a broad range of experiences
– origin of universe, CH has dropped the point
– fine-tuning, CH has dropped the point
– moral, CH says that humans are no different from animals – but an evolved standard is illusory, there are no actual moral values and standards, it’s just a genetic predisposition to act in a certain way – that’s not prescriptive morality
– resurrection, CH has dropped the point
– experience, craig tells his testimony and urges the audience to give it a shot
CH concluding speech
HITCHENS YIELDS HIS ENTIRE CONCLUDING SPEECH!
A question & answer Period followed end of the formal debate
Further study
Check out my analysis of the 11 arguments Hitchens made in his opening speech in his debate with Frank Turek.
