'Really? Oh, then you’re, then we’re not as alike as you think,' Maher said

$25 million less than their competitors

'Mr. Brimhall then places his right arm on the victim’s arms and his left hand around the victim’s neck, choking her'

Harper, who's earned 78 outfield assists in his 13 year career, earned an assist off the field

XDefiant has a ton of unlockable gear and weapons locked behind challenges. Some of these tasks are much harder than others, so let me show you how to get Quick-Swap kills in XDefiant. What is a Quick-Swap Kill in XDefiant? A Quick-Swap kill occurs when you damage your opponent with one weapon and quickly finish them with another. You may even do this during normal gameplay, as swapping to your secondary is faster than reloading your primary in a gunfight.  The default controls are fine for Quick-Swap kills, but there’s plenty of room for tuning, should you need it. XDefiant: How to score Quick-Swap Kills It can be a little tricky to make Quick-Swap kills happen deliberately. If you get into a fair gunfight and swap your pistol in the middle, you’ll lose the battle. With this in mind, I only recommend trying to score Quick-Swap kills on enemies who don’t know you’re there. The mode also matters if you’re trying to rack u...

The default weapon loadouts are fine enough in XDefiant, but if you want to dominate your lobbies and cement your place at the top of the leaderboard, you’ll need to level up your guns and equip custom attachments to suit your playstyle. How to Unlock Attachments in XDefiant Just like in Call of Duty or Battlefield, you can unlock custom attachments by leveling up weapons in XDefiant. As you level up a weapon, you’ll unlock muzzle attachments like suppressors and compensators, grips, stocks, and scopes that will boost the gun’s stats. Screenshot: PC Invasion Unlike Call of Duty, XDefiant’s attachments are not universal. You’ll need to level up each gun individually if you want to customize them with sights and other attachments for a custom loadout. There aren’t too many weapons in XDefiant just yet, though, so you thankfully won’t have to repeat the leveling process too many times. How to Get Weapon XP in XDefiant Unfortuna...

Dystopia Alert!

"News" outlets are engaged in feverish speculation about just how dystopian Donald Trump's second term might be. Their fervent imaginations overrule the reality of Trump's first term, which never devolved into dictatorship.  On Sunday, Politico's Joanna Weiss conducted a Q&A with liberal Samantha Rose Hill, a scholar of totalitarianism and the author Hannah Arendt. The headline was "‘A Truer Reality Beyond Reality’: Hannah Arendt’s Warning About How Totalitarianism Takes Root." Although Stalinism and Nazism are touched upon (barely), the main focus was Orange Man Bad. Weiss somehow manages to go two paragraphs of the interview before latching on to Trump:  Samantha Rose Hill is a professor at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a leading interpreter of Arendt’s thinking, particularly as it relates to loneliness. She notes that The Origins of Totalitarianism became a bestseller in 2016 because it helped explain an aspect of Donald Trump’s election: how economic and social conditions create feelings of loneliness and rootlessness and lead people to seek out belonging and meaning in political movements. Today, Hill says, Arendt might have connected loneliness not just to the rise of Trump, but also the actions of groups like Moms for Liberty on the right and the fervor of identity politics on the left. Arendt died almost 50 years ago, but Hill can somehow conjure up her spirit to tell us how she would have thought about Trump? How very, very convenient. Oh, and would it be too much to expect the interviewer to ask the interpreter of Arendt's thinking what Arendt might have thought about the state employing partisan lawfare to suppress and interfere with their opponents in an election year? And here we have "evidence" for the authoritarian cult of Trump based on weather reports:  Ideology teaches people that there is a truer reality beyond reality. Think of QAnon, Pizzagate and the many Americans who believe Donald Trump won the last presidential election. Another example that comes to mind is Trump’s inauguration. It was very clearly raining. You could see the rain. People were holding umbrellas. And yet, Trump said, “It isn’t raining.” Many people affirmed his statement, because the point of the statement wasn’t to reflect upon the experience as it was, but to assert his ideology of dominance. Hey Politico! How's this for an alternate reality? The CIA narrative fed to you that you enthusiastically recited in 2020, "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say." But wait! The rain! The rain! Finally they speculate about Trump being merely being in the authoritarian stage before he finally achieves true totalitarianism. Weiss asks: When people object to Trump or a politician like him, it seems what they’re often concerned about is authoritarianism, as opposed to totalitarianism. What’s the relationship between the two? Does totalitarianism lead to authoritarianism? Or is it the other way around? To which self-styled Arendt thought interpreter Hill answers: In Arendt’s account, it would be the other way around. She distinguishes between authoritarianism, fascism, tyranny and totalitarianism. Totalitarianism, she argued, depended upon the radical atomization of the whole, the absolute elimination of all spontaneity. One lived in absolute fear all the time, even those in the party, and the aim of totalitarianism was total world domination. Within an authoritarian system, you still have limited political freedom. There isn’t a totalizing state of fear, but there is domination: domination that aims at political control within a state, without the means of persuasion. So if we were to think of Trump trying to overturn the election results of 2020, that I think we can read as a kind of authoritarian grab. Sniff! You mean Donald Trump still has not quite reached totalitarian level yet? So how would Hannah Arendt as conjured up by her 2024 thought interpreter regard the massive governmental lawfare being used against Trump? Politico thinks you can never suggest Democrats might engage in authoritarian behavior as they claim they're just "safeguarding democracy."

In Monday evening’s edition of The ReidOut, MSNBC’s Joy Reid took a stab at apparent conservative “distress,” explaining their recent actions as irrational efforts to advance an impending Trump “dictatorship.” Her chief targets included former White House Personnel Director John McEntee, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, NFL kicker Harrison Butker, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott, among others. Reid attacked McEntee’s involvement in Project 2025, labeling it as “the plan for the Trump dictatorship.” She went on to list a series of miseries that plague conservatives, whom she collectivized as “the Alitos and McEntees of the world.” These included: “out-of-control liberated women who won't marry conservative men, have babies, and give up no-fault divorce, people who keep insisting that Black Lives Matter, immigrants of course, and accurate history that doesn’t always make the white guys look good.”      McEntee wasn’t the only alleged culprit. Reid criticized Youngkin’s veto of two bills protecting access to contraception in Virginia. She failed to note, however, that Youngkin vetoed the bills because they specifically excluded parental rights in making medical decisions for their children.  In the same sentence, suggesting Youngkin’s hand in the matter, she announced the decisions of two Virginia school boards to keep the names of Confederate generals on schools. In reality, only the Shenandoah County School Board made this change and Youngkin, in a press conference four days after the decision, told a reporter he was unaware of the situation.  Reid also added her own spin on Butker’s commencement speech, hilariously oversimplifying his statements as telling “a graduating class, including scores of women, that their degrees are a lie and they should just embrace their true vocation of making their husbands a sandwich.”  In Butker’s actual words, he first congratulated the female graduates on their accomplishment, adding that “Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.” She further commented on Abbott’s recent pardon of Daniel Perry, a man convicted of shooting and killing a Black Lives Matter activist. Reid didn’t bother to explain that the pardon was granted on the basis of Texas’ “Stand Your Ground” law, which protects the right of self-defense using deadly force.  The MSNBC host falsely asserted that Perry, an Uber driver, simply “[drove] his car into a group of pedestrian marchers,” though he actually stopped his car when he reached the intersection blocked by protestors and allowed some of them to cross. It was then that Garrett Foster, one of the activists, allegedly raised his weapon, an AK-47, prompting Perry to fire his own revolver. Reid summed up the entire situation by stating it occurred “Because in Texas, the only thing actually illegal is trying to vote while black and on parole.” Foster was white. Reid closed out the segment by tying the stories together as an “answer to the Alito question,” mockingly pondering “Who do MAGA believe is in distress, such that they need a King Trump to put things right again?” The transcript is below. Click "expand" to read: MSNBC’s The ReidOut 5/20/2024 07:52:58 PM ET JOY REID: John McEntee is a big part of Project 2025, the plan for the Trump dictatorship, and he would be in charge of personnel again in a new Trump administration. McEntee is the kind of guy who is in distress, in the MAGA mind. And the cause of the distress for the Alitos and McEntees of the world, are out-of-control liberated women who won't marry conservative men, have babies, and give up no-fault divorce, people who keep insisting that Black Lives Matter, immigrants of course, and accurate history that doesn’t always make the white guys look good. And John McEntee and his friends at Project 2025 aren’t the only ones with a plan to fix it. Just in the last week, Governor Glenn Youngkin vetoed two bills that would protect access to contraception in Virginia and two Virginia school boards put the names of Confederate generals back onto schools, meaning black students in the schools will be forced to venerate men who enslaved their ancestors while not being allowed to learn true facts about slavery or read books by a number of black authors. NFL kicker and "fashion pics with Bible quotes" aficionado, Harrison Butker, told a graduating class, including scores of women, that their degrees are a lie and they should just embrace their true vocation of making their husbands a sandwich. And Texas governor Greg Abbott granted a full pardon to a man who was convicted by a jury of shooting a Black Lives Matter activist dead, after threatening and racist rants on his social media that he wanted to do just that, and then driving his car into a group of pedestrian marchers. Because in Texas, the only thing actually illegal is trying to vote while black and on parole. Did I mention that if you’re pregnant, it’s illegal to get a divorce in Missouri? Scores of U.S. states allow child marriage and Project 2025 includes the national abortion ban. I know these stories don't seem obviously related, but they are. They are the answer to the Alito question. Who do MAGA believe is in distress, such that they need a “King Trump” to put things right again?

Former director of the defunct Disinformation Governance Board (DGB), Nina Jankowicz, said President Joe Biden’s disinformation policing government does not even have a consistent definition of disinformation. Rep. Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee released the transcript of Jankowicz's sworn testimony to the committee which it gathered in April 2023. In her testimony, Jankowicz pointed out discrepancies in the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) definition of disinformation. DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency “has one definition, and one of the things that occurred to me while I was at DHS is that different entities were dealing with different definitions,” she said. But according to Jordan, CISA’s definition is merely “anything that they deem false.”  The leftist disinformation activist said that creating protocols for identifying misinformation, disinformation and misinformation “wasn’t really at the top of the list” of things to do. “And so, to get to identification, you first have to kind of have an agreement about what you're talking about,” said Jankowicz. “You can't say that something is a bear if you don't know what a bear looks like. So that's where we were.” During the interview, Jordan had Jankowicz read the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency’s definition of disinformation as noted in a CISA memorandum: “[F]alse information that is intentionally or inadvertently injected into the information environment.” Jankowicz, however, described this definition as “overbroad” and indicated that it “would be fair to say” that DHS was not even using definitions agreed upon within the Orwellian disinformation research community. She went on to provide her own definitions of mis-, dis- and mal- information. Jankowicz claimed that while mis-, and dis- information both refer to false information, disinformation is intentionally “spread with malign intent” while misinformation is not. Jankowicz defined malinformation as true information that is allegedly “injected into an information environment with ulterior motives.” During the interview, Jankowicz downplayed the role of the DGB claiming that it “had no operational authority or ability to act as an all-purpose arbiter of truth.” She claimed it merely had the power of suggestion.  However, The Twitter Files and The Facebook Files have demonstrated just how forceful the federal government’s so-called suggestions can be. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) similarly uncovered internal documents via a whistleblower that showed that the DGB was developing programs and forming relationships with social media companies. Jankowicz however maintains that meetings scheduled with Facebook and Twitter never took place. But Jankowicz, has a history of supporting censorship and organizations that prop themselves up as arbiters of truth. She was criticized heavily in 2022 for her support of Twitter’s fact-checking program “Bird Watch” and “demoting content.”  She now runs the gaslighting operation The American Sunlight Project, which specifically works to dispel allegations that “the Federal Government is overseeing a vast censorship regime in coordination with social media platforms, academic institutions, and civil society organizations.” 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 MRC Free Speech America’s  contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.