This guy just… did a cartwheel on a cop??
Twitter Announces Widespread Crackdown on QAnon Activity With Potential for ‘Offline Harm,’ Removes 7,000 Accounts
Twitter announced on Tuesday that it had banned 7,000 accounts and limited 150,000 others as part of a widespread crackdown on QAnon activity on the site that “has the potential to lead to offline harm.” Last summer, the FBI officially designated the baseless QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories as new “domestic extremism” threats. Pizzagate infamously involved a bizarre myth that the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant was a secret den of pedophilia, which prompted one fervent believer to storm the pizzeria with a loaded rifle and start shooting before surrendering to police — he was subsequently sentenced for four years in prison. Some journalists who have studied the even more byzantine and fanciful QAnon phenomenon have labeled it “Pizzagate on bath salts.”
U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley Challenges Nike, NBA: ‘Will You Pledge You Are Slave Free?’
U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R, MO) took to Twitter on Tuesday to challenge Nike and its business partner, the NBA, to end its association with the companies that use Chinese slave labor to manufacture their products.
The Senator is urging corporate leaders and high-profile athletes including LeBron James to eliminate the products that they endorse that are made with slave labor:
Hawley was spurred to his questions by the many reports that Nike and the NBA use Chinese slave labor to produce their shoes, jerseys, and other products that they earn billions from by selling to American sports fans and athletes.
Only months ago, for instance, the Washington Post reported that Nike shoes are made in factories in Qingdao, China, where Chinese authorities imprison its ethnic Muslim Uyghur and force them to work in the factories that make Nike products.
Last year, activists also revealed a shocking video that showed hundreds of young men in prison uniforms, bound and blindfolded, and sitting cross-legged on the ground near a railroad depot as armed guards in black watched over them.
Analysis of the video lends credence to its veracity and finds that the video was recorded in mid-August of last year near the factory sector of Xinjiang, China.
It has been reported that many of the prisoners in this region are comprised of China’s Uyghur ethnic minority. The use of Uyghurs as a forced labor force was recently chronicled in an extensive report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
The reports says that between 2017 and 2019, the Chinese government relocated a minimum 80,000 Uighurs from Xinjiang in western China to factories across the country where they work “under conditions that strongly suggest forced labor.” The government is reportedly using the slave labor for manufacturing items ordered by some 83 international companies making everything from footwear to electronics.
