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Defining Dissent: How the Federal Crackdown on Anti-Semitism Redefines the Boundaries of Speech

The Lancaster Patriot | May 21, 2026

A dual-track federal offensive aimed at combating anti-semitism is rapidly altering the landscape of American public discourse, civil rights enforcement, and immigration policy.

The strategy is unfolding simultaneously across both the executive and legislative branches. On May 19, 2026, the Department of Justice (DOJ) Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism officially launched a 15-city “National Awareness & Action Tour.” Concurrently, Senators Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and James Lankford (R-OK) introduced the bipartisan Jewish American Security Act, a comprehensive bill that seeks to mandate strict Title VI frameworks on college campuses, boost nonprofit security funding to $1 billion, and force social media platforms to disclose their moderation algorithms.

At the core of this sweeping nationwide push is a highly controversial legal mechanism: the codification of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “working definition” of anti-semitism into federal civil rights investigations. By linking this specific definition to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, federal agencies are increasingly treating political criticism of the State of Israel as potential instances of unlawful discrimination.

The Executive Foundation: EOs 13899 and 14188

The DOJ’s new 15-city tour serves as the public enforcement rollout of two pivotal executive actions spanning two administrations: Executive Order 13899, signed in 2019, and Executive Order 14188, signed on January 29, 2025.

Together, these orders dictate how the federal government defines, monitors, and punishes anti-semitism. EO 13899 explicitly instructs federal departments—including the Department of Education and the DOJ—to “consider” the IHRA definition when adjudicating discrimination complaints. EO 14188 escalated these measures by ordering agencies to utilize “all available and appropriate legal tools” to prosecute violators and aggressively targeted campus protests.

Crucially, EO 14188 directs federal agencies to leverage immigration laws (specifically 8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(3)) to investigate, block entry, or initiate deportation proceedings against foreign students and visa holders who “endorse or espouse terrorist activity” during political demonstrations. It also tasks universities with actively monitoring and reporting the activities of non-citizen students and staff to federal authorities.

The Litmus Test: What Now Counts as a Civil Rights Violation?

Because the IHRA framework is now the operational standard for federal civil rights compliance, public scrutiny has shifted heavily toward the specific “contemporary examples” of anti-semitism outlined in the text.

Under this framework, actions and statements that historically fell under protected political speech, theological debate, or historical revisionism are now systematically flagged for federal review. The specific criteria include:

1. The Nazi Comparison Ban

The IHRA framework explicitly classifies “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” as an act of anti-semitism.

  • The Impact: In practice, this guideline establishes a unique legal standard for the State of Israel. While political commentators, historians, and activists routinely draw analogies between various global governments and 20th-century authoritarian regimes (such as comparing U.S., Russian, or Chinese policies to Nazi or fascist systems), doing so specifically in reference to Israeli military or domestic policy can now trigger a federal civil rights investigation, risking a university’s federal funding.

2. The “Racist Endeavor” Test

The definition labels anti-semitic any claim that “the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”

  • The Impact: This standard directly intersects with academic and political discussions regarding the geopolitical founding of modern states. Under this rule, analyzing or criticizing the historical displacement of populations during the 1948 foundational period of Israel, or arguing that the state’s structural laws inherently favor one ethnic group over another, transitions from a matter of political theory into a potential violation of federal civil rights law.

3. Placing Historical Atrocities Outside Normal Inquiry

The framework flags “accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.”

  • The Impact: The inclusion of the word “exaggerating” introduces an unprecedented legal boundary around historical analysis. Scholars note that every major historical event—including wars, genocides, and revolutions—is subject to ongoing demographic debates, revisions of casualty numbers, and critiques regarding how governments politically leverage historical trauma. Under the federal framework, subjecting this specific historical atrocity to standard revisionist or critical analysis can be interpreted as a civil rights offense.

4. The Codification of Theological Interpretation

The IHRA definition includes “using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.”

  • The Impact: This provision brings traditional Christian theology and historical textual interpretation into the crosshairs of federal oversight. For centuries, various Christian denominations have maintained specific theological positions regarding the New Testament accounts of first-century Jewish authorities and the rejection of Jesus Christ. If a religious group or individual applies these traditional covenantal critiques or biblical interpretations to the actions of the modern, secular State of Israel, those statements can now be legally categorized as anti-semitic harassment.

5. The “Double Standard” Mandate

The definition includes “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

  • The Impact: Legal experts have pointed out the extreme ambiguity of this clause. Because there is no objective legal metric to determine whether a protest group or political candidate is demanding “more” from Israel than they do from other nations, this clause gives federal investigators vast discretion to classify selective foreign policy criticism as a discriminatory act.

The Chilling Effect on Domestic Dissent

The combination of the DOJ’s 15-city tour and the newly introduced Jewish American Security Act marks a systemic shift in how the state monitors local communities. The stated objectives of the DOJ tour include “increasing reporting of antisemitic incidents by local officials” and embedding federal oversight directly into K-12 public schools and teacher unions.

Critics from across the ideological spectrum—ranging from civil liberties lawyers to anti-war activists—warn that these measures create a de facto speech code. By utilizing the machinery of the state to insulate a foreign government, its lobbying apparatus, and billions of dollars in annual U.S. foreign aid from severe public criticism, the federal government has effectively created a protected political class under the guise of civil rights enforcement.

May 27, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Comments Off on Defining Dissent: How the Federal Crackdown on Anti-Semitism Redefines the Boundaries of Speech

Trump advances his Arctic strategy

Washington will have many difficulties implementing its plans for the Arctic

By Lucas Leiroz | May 26, 2026

US interests in the Arctic continue to pose a significant threat to the European security architecture. Washington continues to advance its plans to expand its military and economic presence in the Arctic, despite the proven inability of the current American naval apparatus to conduct operations in the region efficiently. In practice, the irresponsibility with which the US conducts its Arctic policy could lead to a serious escalation of tensions in the near future.

According to recent reports, the US and Denmark are finally reaching an understanding on the Greenland issue. The Danish government has allegedly given permission for the US to proceed with a plan to build two military bases on Greenlandic territory. This will allow Washington to control specific territorial zones in the region, expanding its influence in the Arctic without having the burden of a formal annexation of Greenland.

The measure, if confirmed by Danish authorities, will certainly face strong opposition from the local population. The current situation of Greenland is unpopular among native Greenlanders, who do not want their homeland administered by a European country – nor by the US. Without the political power necessary to fight for independence, the locals end up having their future defined in negotiations between Europeans and Americans, in which they do not participate.

However, despite the disapproval of the local people, it is likely that the US will be able to impose its presence in the region in a reasonably peaceful manner. Local citizens do not have sufficient political power to prevent these moves, leaving them only with formal disapproval. Furthermore, regardless of how this process unfolds in practice, the final result will be the expansion of the American military presence in the Arctic zones, which will bring an atmosphere of tension and insecurity to the Greenlandic people.

Still, Greenland is just one of the regions where the US plans to enter in order to increase its Arctic presence. Washington is also reportedly planning to occupy the Norwegian island of Svalbard, which would have even more significant impacts on regional security. Despite Norwegian sovereignty, the island is regulated by an international treaty that guarantees Russia the right to economic exploration of the region, which is why, even today – despite sanctions – Moscow maintains activities in Svalbard.

Militarizing Svalbard would be a terrible move, as well as a violation of international law. The treaty regulating the island prohibits its militarization, and there is a historical Russian presence that cannot be ignored. Furthermore, even if the US does not use the island for public military purposes, the mere expansion of the American presence in a European Arctic region – so close to Russia – would be enough to substantially escalate regional tensions.

However, in both Greenland and Svalbard, the US will face the same problem: its logistical weakness in Arctic environment. Washington has historically ignored the Arctic, focusing on other regions of the world for its military and economic expansion. The result has been a significant lag in US Arctic technologies. The country does not have a significant icebreaker fleet, which severely diminishes its ability to operate in the Arctic. For decades, the Arctic has been seen by American experts as an inhospitable region of low strategic value, leading the country to not give due attention to its military and economic potential.

In recent military exercises in the Arctic, the US has proven incapable of conducting complex operations due to the low quantity and quality of its icebreakers. While the country is attempting to rehabilitate its Arctic strategy and produce high-quality equipment for the region, it is practically impossible for the US to achieve any status as an “Arctic superpower” in the near future. In practice, Washington is only beginning to take an interest in the region, but its possibilities for action are extremely limited.

In fact, instead of seeking to expand its Arctic presence aggressively and unilaterally, the US should simply engage in joint peaceful cooperation projects in the Arctic – especially with Russia, which is the country that currently possesses the most advanced Arctic technology in the world. Unfortunately, warmongering and pro-hegemonic sectors have gained considerable influence in the Trump administration in recent months, which explains his irresponsible decisions on several recent issues.

If Trump manages to regain control of his own government and contain the pressure from pro-war sectors, the US may in the future engage in fruitful international cooperation in the Arctic. Without this, however, the Americans will remain unable to explore the economic and strategic potential of the region for a long time.

Lucas Leiroz, member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert.

You can follow Lucas on X (formerly Twitter) and Telegram.

May 26, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , , , | Comments Off on Trump advances his Arctic strategy

Villains of Judea: Abe Foxman

Foxman turned the ADL into a powerhouse but left behind a legacy of surveillance scandals, political vendettas, and selective outrage.

José Niño Unfiltered | May 24, 2026

When Abraham Foxman died on May 10, 2026, tributes poured in from presidents, prime ministers, and Jewish leaders worldwide, yet his legacy remains defined as much by controversy as by accomplishment.

Foxman described himself as “a passionate supporter of the State of Israel” and spent his career building the ADL into a roughly $60 million per year organization that defined mainstream American Jewish advocacy on antisemitism, civil rights, and the Jewish state.

Foxman was born Avraham Chanoch Hanach Fuksman on May 1, 1940, in Baranovichi, then under Soviet occupation, now Belarus. When German forces entered Vilnius in June 1941 and began subjecting the Jewish population to forced labor and deportation, his parents placed their 15-month-old son in the care of his Polish Catholic nanny Bronisława Kurpi. Kurpi baptized the child into the Catholic Church, gave him the Polish Christian name Henryk Stanisław Kurpi, and raised him as a Catholic in Vilnius for four years. He learned to pray the rosary, attended church every Sunday, and genuinely believed he was Catholic.

His parents survived the war. After bitter custody battles—Kurpi initially refused to release him, telling the Fuksmans, “I raised him, and he belongs to me, and he is Catholic”—the family escaped to a displaced persons’ camp in Vienna in 1947 and arrived in the United States in 1950.

Foxman settled in Brooklyn, attended the Yeshivah of Flatbush, earned a Bachelor of Arts from the City College of New York, and received his J.D. from New York University School of Law. He joined the ADL in 1965 as a legal assistant and rose quickly through the organization’s ranks. When longtime director Nathan Perlmutter died of cancer in July 1987, Foxman became National Director.

Under Foxman’s 28-year leadership, the ADL built a formidable research arm monitoring white advocacy groups, neo-Nazis, and other dissident groups. The ADL expanded its international reach with consultations across Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. Foxman was appointed to the council of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 and was re-appointed by Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden—making him, as the USHMM confirmed, “the only member of the Museum’s governing Council to be appointed by four presidents from both parties.”

With Foxman at the helm, the ADL also advocated for LGBTQ rights, including protesting the Supreme Court’s 2000 ruling in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale—which held 5-4 that the Boy Scouts could exclude a gay scoutmaster on First Amendment associational grounds. The organization also developed diversity training for law enforcement agencies and advocated for policies promoting mass migration.

Foxman operated at the center of American Jewry. The ADL and AIPAC were close partners in White House meetings and lobbying coordination. Foxman was a key participant in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and worked closely with the American Jewish Committee on public advocacy.

Further, Foxman was one of the most internationally active American Jewish leaders of his era. In March 2012, releasing the ADL’s survey of ten European countries, Foxman warned that antisemitism in Europe remained a dangerous reality. “In Hungary, Spain and Poland the numbers for anti-Semitic attitudes are literally off-the-charts and demand a serious response from political, civic and religious leaders,” he stated—findings based on poll data showing 63% of Hungarians, 53% of Spaniards, and 48% of Poles holding antisemitic views.

Foxman held consultations in Russia on “problems of ethnic hatred, violence, terrorism and promoting democracy,” attended Limmud FSU conferences engaging Russian-speaking Jewish youth, and remained deeply concerned about antisemitism in post-Soviet states. He consistently condemned Arab and Palestinian resistance and Hamas’s liberation agenda. He insisted that much criticism of Israel crossed into antisemitism, arguing: “If the only nationalism that you find apartheid in is Jewish nationalism, then you’re an anti-Semite.”

Retiring in 2015, Foxman warned that antisemitism was “the worst that it has been since World War II, and it is global”—saying he “never thought anti-Semitism would still be a clear and present danger to Jews around the world.” In 2024, he delivered an address at the ADL’s “Never Is Now” conference stating that antisemitism is “a disease without an antidote and without a vaccine.”

Foxman viewed Iran under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an existential threat. In a 2007 speech to the ADL National Commission, he declared: “The greatest threat to the Jewish people and closest thing to dangers of the 1930s and 1940s is a potent cocktail consisting of the ideology of hate from an Iran with a potential nuclear weapon. This is an existential threat to Israel from an irrational regime that must be taken with the utmost seriousness.” When Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei posted content questioning the Holocaust on Twitter in 2014, Foxman responded: “Once again, the injection of Holocaust denial by an Iranian leader shows the world how such deep-seated hatred exists at the helm in Iran. We have seen the Ayatollah spew his vehement animosity toward Jews before on other national occasions in Iran and these statements once again show the bigotry and hypocrisy of this regime.”

Weeks before his death, Foxman backed the U.S.-Israel war on Iran. On February 28, 2026—the day the war broke out—he posted on social media: “Thank you President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu for standing up to evil and jihadist extremism. The world hopefully will be a better and safer place in the future.”

Foxman’s willingness to take controversial public stands was no late development. He led or supported numerous high-profile campaigns throughout his career. When Nation of Islam spokesperson Khalid Abdul Muhammad delivered a speech at Kean College in November 1993 referring to Jews as “bloodsuckers” and calling for the genocide of white people, Foxman’s ADL ran a full-page ad in The New York Times reprinting Muhammad’s statements. This mobilization directly contributed to Congress issuing a bipartisan condemnation of the speech in February 1994.

Foxman regularly addressed antisemitic or borderline remarks by public figures. In September 2003, during pre-release controversy over The Passion of the Christ, he asserted that Gibson’s remarks were painting “the portrait of an anti-Semite”—though he walked back the characterization the following day, and by February 2004 told ABC’s Diane Sawyer that Gibson was not an anti-Semite and the film was not antisemitic. Foxman co-authored the 2013 book Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet with attorney Christopher Wolf, who served as national chair of the ADL Civil Rights Committee, addressing how antisemites and racists exploited the internet.

Foxman produced several other books warning about the alleged scourge of antisemitism. Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism appeared in 2003. The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control came out in 2007 as a direct rebuttal to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which Publishers Weekly described as “a rebuttal of a pernicious theory about a mythically powerful Jewish lobby.”

Not all of Foxman’s tenure at the ADL would be remembered in such favorable terms. In April 1993, San Francisco police and the FBI executed searches at ADL offices in California and discovered that the organization had been running an extensive domestic intelligence operation for decades. The operation centered on Roy Bullock, an undercover operative and art dealer who had collected files on more than 12,000 individuals and 950 organizations for more than three decades. His targets included not just white advocates and neo-Nazis but also Arab American groups, the American Civil Liberties Union, the African National Congress, Central America solidarity organizations, Greenpeace, the Earth Island Institute, approximately 20 San Francisco area labor unions, anti-apartheid activists, and Jewish peace groups. Bullock had also sold information to South African intelligence for $16,000.

Foxman denied any improper activity while testifying that the ADL had a right to do “whatever it must” to monitor antisemitism and threats to Jews. Critics across the political spectrum condemned the operation as a massive breach of civil liberties.

One of the most sustained controversies of Foxman’s career involved his refusal to unequivocally recognize the Armenian genocide. Critics, including the Armenian National Committee of America, accused Foxman of “genocide denial” motivated by the ADL’s desire to maintain good relations with the Turkish government. The backlash was severe. A dozen Massachusetts communities and the Massachusetts Municipal Association withdrew from the ADL’s “No Place for Hate” program. The ADL’s 2007 statement that the “consequences” of Ottoman actions were “tantamount to genocide” was widely rejected as insufficient because it circumvented the “intent” required under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. Foxman also sent a letter to Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan expressing regret over the difficulty his position caused for the Turkish government. It was not until May 2014 that Foxman publicly and unambiguously used the word “genocide” in remarks at Suffolk University Law School’s commencement, after years of sustained pressure.

The Armenian Genocide controversy was not the only multi-decade fight to mark Foxman’s career. Foxman engaged in a 22-year campaign against paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan. After Buchanan’s 2011 book Suicide of a Superpower was published, Foxman called him “a racist and an anti-Semite.” Buchanan was suspended from MSNBC in January 2012 and fired in February, and he publicly credited Foxman with playing a role in his dismissal. The ADL published a formal report titled “Patrick Buchanan: Over the Line.” Buchanan described Foxman as leading efforts to “blacklist” him, working “behind closed doors, with phone calls, mailed threats, and off-the-record meetings.” In a similar vein, Justin Raimondo, founder of Antiwar.com, was one of the most sustained libertarian critics of the ADL and Foxman. Raimondo argued that the ADL used antisemitism accusations to suppress foreign policy debate.

Whatever his American critics made of him, Foxman moved comfortably among Israel’s top political leadership across multiple governments. Foxman met with multiple Israeli prime ministers, some of whom made direct appeals to President Bill Clinton for the Marc Rich pardon. Foxman cooperated with World Jewish Congress leader Edgar Bronfman on major campaigns including Holocaust-era Swiss bank restitution. While the primary negotiation was led by Bronfman and the World Jewish Congress, the ADL under Foxman was a coalition partner in pressing Swiss banks to settle Holocaust-era claims, which resulted in a $1.25 billion settlement in 1998.

Foxman made a well-documented intervention in favor of fugitive financier Marc Rich’s pardon from President Clinton. The ADL had received $250,000 from Rich over a period of 16 years, including a $100,000 pledge made just before Foxman traveled to Paris. In February 2000, Foxman met at a Paris restaurant with Avner Azulay, head of the Marc Rich Foundation, and Zvi Rafiah, an Israeli arms consultant, and it was Foxman himself who proposed the strategy of recruiting Denise Rich to approach Clinton for a pardon. “I told them maybe they should consider trying to get a pardon,” Foxman said. “I told them, ‘Why don’t you reach out to Denise Rich… and have her approach the president and see about a pardon.’”

He wrote Clinton on December 7, 2000, urging a pardon on the grounds that “we are a country that was founded on the belief in second chances.” New York Times columnist William Safire called for Foxman to resign, writing that Rich’s $250,000 to the ADL had “induced its national director to lobby President Bill Clinton for forgiveness and thereby bring glee to the hearts of anti-Semites.”

Abraham Foxman was the consummate architect of a specific brand of ethnic activism, relentlessly searching for every angle to advance Jewish institutional interests and cement a landscape where the concerns of world Jewry were elevated above all others. Yet, even as he built these formidable structures of influence, he unwittingly accelerated the very forces he claimed to fight.

His career served as a catalyst for a tide of grassroots resentment against World Jewry that has only surged since October 7, 2023. Like many of his kin who sought to reshape Western nations in their own image, Foxman dedicated his life to the systematic erosion of gentile civilization for the benefit of his tribe.

Now that he has exited the stage, he leaves behind a nation awakening to the nature of his subversion. May he face that eternal justice that human institutions could not provide, aware that the tide has finally turned against the Jewish supremacist agenda he spent his entire life promoting.

May 26, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Comments Off on Villains of Judea: Abe Foxman

France criminalizing pro‑Palestine speech for ‘antisemitism’: Op-Ed

Al Mayadeen | May 22, 2026

French authorities have systematically silenced and criminalised pro-Palestinian solidarity under the guise of combating antisemitism, columnist Rokhaya Diallo writes in The Guardian, warning that a now‑shelved government bill aimed at punishing “indirect incitement” and “denial of a state” would have made it impossible to criticise “Israel” without risking legal sanctions.

Diallo notes that tensions in France over how to respond to a rise in antisemitism have been running high. A government‑backed bill introduced in 2024 by Caroline Yadan, a member of the National Assembly, was intended to counter “new forms of antisemitism.” However, its wording quickly veered toward a different objective: curbing the ability to criticise “Israel.”

“It must be possible to denounce the many crimes – extensively documented – committed by Israel, and to do so repeatedly without risking sanctions,” Diallo writes. “Freedom of expression in France allows individuals to voice any form of sentiment towards any country as long as there is no incitement to violence.”

Bill would have criminalised ‘indirect incitement’ and ‘denial of a state’

The Yadan bill proposed widening the existing offence of “glorifying terrorism” so that “indirect incitement” could be punished. It also introduced a new offence penalising the act of “inciting the destruction or denial of a state.”

Diallo argues that such a prohibition would run counter to the fundamental right to decolonization.

“Under the proposed legal framework, what would become of the right to question France’s own borders?” she asks, noting that France’s overseas departments are former colonies where independence movements have not disappeared.

A petition opposing the bill gathered a record 700,000 signatures. Rights bodies warned of the dangerously illiberal trajectory of the proposal. Five UN special rapporteurs issued an open letter expressing concern that the bill threatened “the exercise of protected rights, in particular the right to freedom of expression and opinion, including media freedom.”

Rima Hassan arrested, charged with ‘glorifying terrorism’

Diallo points to the case of French‑Palestinian MEP Rima Hassan of the left‑wing France Unbowed party, a prominent voice for Palestinian liberation. Hassan was arrested last month, taken into police custody and questioned for “glorifying terrorism.” Her alleged offence was a post on X quoting Kozo Okamoto, a member of a Japanese group that carried out a 1972 attack at Tel Aviv’s Ben‑Gurion airport.

News of her detention leaked as she was being questioned, accompanied by false claims that synthetic drugs had been found among her personal effects. The drug probe was later dropped, but only after days of negative media coverage.

It then emerged that Hassan’s phone had been under police surveillance from the beginning of the year without her knowledge. She will be tried in July and says she intends to refer the matter to an independent UN rapporteur and to the European Parliament.

Pattern of structural criminalisation of pro‑Palestinian activism

Diallo argues that the Yadan proposals should be seen as part of a broader pattern of structural criminalisation of pro‑Palestinian activism. After October 7, 2023, the French interior minister attempted to ban Palestinian solidarity demonstrations. University students who mobilised against the Yadan bill faced violent police repression. Prosecutions for alleged glorifying terrorism have multiplied since 2023, targeting influencers, athletes, trade union activists, and even members of parliament.

“The disproportionate response to pro‑Palestinian activism over what human rights groups have called a genocide raises questions about the lengths deployed, apparently to restrict a form of expression that is essential in a democracy,” Diallo writes.

While the Yadan bill is dead, she concludes, its provisions should be seen within a broader dynamic: one that seeks systematically to conflate anti‑Zionism with antisemitism and narrow the space for any pro‑Palestinian discourse.

May 22, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Comments Off on France criminalizing pro‑Palestine speech for ‘antisemitism’: Op-Ed

Merkel Urges EU to Keep Regulating Social Media Speech

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | May 21, 2026

Angela Merkel used her first major European platform since leaving office to tell the EU exactly what it wanted to hear: keep regulating speech online, and don’t worry too much about getting it wrong.

The former German chancellor, speaking Tuesday at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, urged the bloc to “continue regulating the social media” and artificial intelligence. “To believe that responsibility for spreading information is no longer necessary, that accountability – there should be no accountability for lies, then that would undermine democracy,” she told the chamber.

Lies. Who decides what counts as a lie? In the EU’s model, that question gets answered by the European Commission, by government-appointed regulators, by “trusted flaggers” that platforms are legally required to obey. Not by courts. Not through anything resembling due process.

Merkel knows this system well. Her government built the prototype. Germany’s NetzDG law, passed under her chancellorship in 2017, required platforms to delete “clearly illegal” content within 24 hours or face fines up to €50 million.

The people whose speech got censored under it included a satirical magazine, a political street artist, and an opposition party leader. NetzDG became an export product, copied by governments in Russia, Turkey, and across Southeast Asia, each adapting it to their own definition of “illegal.”

The EU took the concept continent-wide with the Digital Services Act, which requires major platforms to assess and reduce “systemic risks,” a category broad enough to cover “civic discourse,” “electoral processes,” and “public security.”

The Commission writes the rules, decides whether platforms comply, and levies fines of up to 6% of global revenue when they don’t. No independent prosecutor. X is currently challenging the first DSA fine ever imposed, a €120 million penalty from December 2025, arguing the process involved “grave procedural errors” and “systematic breaches of rights of defence and basic due process.”

More than 50 European NGOs have warned that the DSA’s vague terms could violate the EU Charter’s own free expression protections. The Commission’s response was to declare the law “content-agnostic” and move on.

Merkel acknowledged none of this. She told parliamentarians that “perhaps mistakes will be made, but we learn through mistakes.” That’s cold comfort when the mistakes involve censoring legal speech and silencing political opposition through systems with no judicial oversight and no meaningful appeal.

Her remarks came at the inaugural ceremony for the European Order of Merit, where she was honored alongside 19 other laureates, including Lech Wałęsa, Moldovan President Maia Sandu, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. She framed regulation as essential to democracy. “We’ve had 75 years of European thought,” she said. “Peace, prosperity, and democracy.”

Democracy requires that citizens can speak, argue, and be wrong without a regulator deciding which claims are permissible. The EU’s apparatus does the opposite. Merkel said mistakes would be made. She didn’t say who would pay for them. The answer, as always, is the people who get silenced.

May 21, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Comments Off on Merkel Urges EU to Keep Regulating Social Media Speech

Canada’s Military Punished Whistleblowers Who Flagged Illegal COVID Speech Monitoring

Six years later, the legal vacuum that made domestic surveillance possible hasn’t moved an inch.

By Rick Findlay | Reclaim The Net | May 20, 2026

The Canadian Armed Forces reprimanded soldiers who warned that an order to spy on citizens during COVID-19 could violate intelligence-gathering rules. The soldiers were right. The military punished them anyway.

Internal records and emails obtained by CBC News show that on March 11, 2020, a team called Joint Operational Effects (JOE) was ordered to create anonymous social media accounts and scour the internet for information about Canadians.

Under the direction of Col. Chris Henderson, the team produced dozens of reports between March 19 and June 5, tracking what the federal Conservative, NDP, and Bloc Québécois parties were saying about the pandemic.

The Canadian military was monitoring opposition political parties using anonymous accounts created specifically for surveillance.

At least two JOE team members pushed back. They emailed their chain of command, warning that creating anonymous accounts without authorization, while working from home on personal computers, could breach intelligence directives.

One soldier wrote to Maj. John Zwicewicz on March 12, 2020: “Given the sensitivity around social media and military use I have concerns about this.”

They added: “My concern is that by creating these accounts without following proper procedure would come close to, or cross the line set out in the policy.” Another asked to go into the office because they felt it “represented a serious risk” to do the work at home.

Zwicewicz claimed a legal adviser had approved the activities and ordered the group to “cease barrack room lawyering” and get back to work. The team was formally reprimanded more than a week after raising concerns. A source told CBC News that within months, some members quit or were medically released.

The people who raised alarms about potentially illegal surveillance of Canadian citizens got punished. The people who ordered the surveillance kept their positions.

The military’s own top lawyer flagged the problem. Then-commodore Geneviève Bernatchez, the judge advocate general, warned that “this issue has a significant legal component, and… could present legal risk to the rights of Canadian citizens, but also legal risks to the institution.” She noted that, unlike overseas deployments, “the full range of domestic law” would apply, and “such operations will often directly or indirectly implicate the rights of Canadian citizens.” The command structure absorbed the warning and carried on.

A compliance assessment by the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command, reported by CBC News in April 2026, found three separate military units violated intelligence-gathering rules during Operation Laser between March and July 2020.

One unit used personal laptops to trawl Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and Facebook. Another produced over 50 reports on political discourse and was ordered to create accounts to “monitor key regional actors,” but “deliberately disregarded” that order and used personal accounts instead.

Six years later, the legal gap that allowed all of this remains open. The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians urged the government in 2020 to legislate rules governing what the military can collect about Canadians. Ottawa has not acted.

DND spokesperson Andrée-Anne Poulin told CBC News that “additional guidance and oversight measures were put in place to prevent a recurrence and to strengthen adherence to established rules.”

Additional guidance. Oversight measures: The standard institutional language for getting caught.

May 20, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , | Comments Off on Canada’s Military Punished Whistleblowers Who Flagged Illegal COVID Speech Monitoring

The San Diego Shooting and the Effort to Silence Criticism of Zionism

By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | May 20, 2026

Not long after a couple kids shot up a mosque in San Diego, the Jewish American Security Act (JASA) was rolled out in the Senate by two uniparty “representatives,” Jacky Rosen (Democrat faction) and James Lankford (Republican faction).

From the Jewish Insider :

Rosen, leaders from the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and BBYO International and local leaders whose communities have been impacted by antisemitic violence in recent years spoke in favor of the bill at a Jewish Federations of North America press conference on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. JFNA activists are on Capitol Hill this week meeting with more than 200 lawmakers to advocate for the bill and other legislation.

Rosen and Lankford are paid handsomely to violate your free speech. AIPAC gave Rosen $2,253,099 and Lankford received $311,655.

While you may have a difficult time filling up your car for the commute to work and are deep into foreclosure as a credit card burns a hole in your wallet, rest assured your uniparty “representatives” are poised to fork over a billion dollars in “federal support for security personnel costs that Jewish communities are forced to bear,” according to the Jewish Federations of North America.

There is not much you can do about it. Now that Thomas Massie was thrown out of Congress and a bought-and-paid-for AIPAC simp was put in his place, both chambers of the uniparty are that much closer to complete fealty to a tiny outlaw nation.

In addition to “addressing antisemitism [antizionism] on college campuses,” JASA will make sure you don’t say mean things online about ethnosupremacist baby killers. The proposed law promises to address the “spread of antisemitism online by requiring new transparency reports from social media companies.”

Addressing antisemitism online, the bill requires platforms with more than 50 million unique monthly American users to submit to the Federal Trade Commission and to share publicly a transparency report on their “content moderation practices and efforts to detect, remove, limit the visibility of, and prevent the amplification of antisemitic content” on their platform, twice each year.

The “transparency report” on social media users outraged over genocide, the murder of paramedics, journalists, and activists in Gaza and Lebanon

would include details on the specific review mechanisms and content moderation tools the platforms use; the total number of pieces of content on the platform that were determined to violate their policies on antisemitism and what action the platforms took; the amount of antisemitic content that reached more than 100 viewers or was promoted by the platform’s algorithms; the percentage of antisemitic content that violated the platforms’ policies but remained online; and details on accounts that were suspended or removed for sharing antisemitic content.

“Platforms that do not comply with these reporting requirements would be subject to penalties by the FTC.”

The suspicious shooting in San Diego and a subsequent “manifesto” were perfectly timed to inject urgency into JASA and additional legislation designed to banish and criminalize criticism of Israel’s crimes against humanity.

The teenager Caleb Vazquez, said to be the author of the manifesto, defined himself as a “Third Positionist,” an advocate of the Third Position, a far-right political ideology that rejects both capitalism and communism and is said to be tied to fascist movements. “I’d call myself a Third Positionist specifically aligning most with Nationalist Socialism and Eco Fascism though any Third Positionism especially those that prioritize its people, nationalism, racial homogeneity, nature, traditionalist ideals, etc.,” Vasquez allegedly wrote.

I find it rather unusual that an 18-year old kid would be this politically astute, but then maybe he was a genius or an idiot savant.

The suicidal manifesto writer name-drops John Earnest, the racist Poway synagogue shooter; Patrick Crusius, the white supremacist El Paso shooter; Phillip Manhaus, the Norwegian shooter at the Al-Noor Islamic Center; and Stephan Balliet, the German perpetrator of the Halle synagogue shooting. He also mentions “Saint Tarrant,” aka Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand.

“The number one goal of this New Crusade is to restart and bring back the momentum that Saint Tarrant had started, to convince many other would be Saints that the time is now, and most importantly to kick start the race war,” Vasquez writes.

Everyone has their own idea of who is to blame for all the wrong in the world, they will say its the government, the elite, the rich, the politicians, the 1%, the left, the right, the capitalists, the communists, the illuminati, the fags and trannies, the immigrants, and many more. All of them can be traced back to be or be caused by one group, the jews.

“IT’S THE JEWS,” he writes in all caps. “The Jews across all of time have been behind an EXTREMELY disproportionate amount of the world’s problems… There is no moderate option to this problem, they’ll always rise back to power or do the same again wherever you exile them to, for any sane man seeing all this the only logical solution would be to just kill them all,” he concludes.

It really is remarkable how the shooting in San Diego, Vasquez’s supposed manifesto, and JASA dovetail to create a perfect storm aimed at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

“In politics,” FDR said, “nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” I don’t have definitive evidence that the San Diego shooting was a psyop designed to push through legislation that violates the natural right of free speech, but it sure looks that way.

May 20, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Comments Off on The San Diego Shooting and the Effort to Silence Criticism of Zionism

In the UK, the classroom has become ground zero for woke ideology

By George Samuelson | Strategic Culture Foundation | May 20, 2026

In yet another chapter pulled straight from the pages of Orwell, educators across Wales are being trained to identify and report “racist incidents” by toddlers – yes, you read that right, toddlers – under new legislation endorsed by government ministers and funded by taxpayers.

The initiative turns daycare centers into miniature surveillance camps for the government’s “anti-racism” agenda.

The program has received over £1.3 million in taxpayer funding via the Welsh Government, and distributed to more than 300 nurseries, daycare centers and kindergartens.

Administrators are absurdly advised to determine whether a child’s interaction with other children could be considered a hate crime and, if so, contact police.

The teaching material, which includes lessons on “white privilege,” also compels educators to review their resources for “diversity,” and engage in discussions on skin color and race with toddlers.

The guidance goes so far as to even document toddler-to-toddler interactions as potential “racist incidents” or “wrongthink” requiring possible intervention by law enforcement.

Meanwhile, secondary classroom books are increasingly focused on the question of mass migration, indoctrinating schoolchildren to the government agenda. More than 1,000 schools have signed up to a program that promotes a so-called “culture of welcome” towards child refugees in Britain.

The Schools of Sanctuary organization has shared a number of recommended book lists with secondary schools, primaries, and nurseries.

In one of the book selections, “Bobble” by Helen May, tells the story of a blue creature who washes ashore on a beach in his small boat, having escaped an unspecified tragedy in some “distant land.”

Extract from “Bobble”

Finally he made it

Finally he made it

He washed up onto land.

Bobble lay there for a while

Just playing in the sand

 

… He sadly wasn’t ready for the welcome he’d receive

… the others stopped their dancing, but they didn’t say hello

They didn’t want to welcome him, they wanted him to go

 

“There’s no room for you here with us

You’ll have to try elsewhere

Travel to the next island

And ask if there’s space there”

As things turn out, the Bobble becomes a hero, having saved the indigenous people on the island from a natural disaster.

The lesson here is obvious: helping the mass of migrants can only have positive consequences for the local population.

And of course, things don’t get any better as the child enters high school and college. For example, the British government has introduced a government-funded video game that informs teenagers they could be reported to counter-terrorism authorities for merely questioning mass migration.

The video game, titled “Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism,” is intended for students aged 11 to 18 and aims to deter young people from “extreme right-wing” ideologies.

Students select a character called Charlie – either male or female, using “they” pronouns regardless of which sex the player picks – who has just entered university. Players must answer multiple-choice questions throughout the game, with options color-coded red for bad and green for good.

The game guides players through various scenarios where “making the wrong choices”—such as engaging with content critical of mass migration, questioning the “erosion of British values,” or attending protests—results in the character being referred for anti-terrorism counseling.

Charlie comes into contact with a video claiming “Muslim men are stealing the places of British veterans in emergency accommodation” and “the Government is betraying white British people and we need to take back control of our country”. It should be obvious what the correct response to such scenarios would be. Anything that questions the government’s immigration policies is flagged.

The character has the option to attend a protest against “the changes that Britain has been through in the last few years and the erosion of British values”.

Attending the protest nearly results in arrest in this interactive world.

In another episode, Charlie performs worse academically than a black student. At this point the student must then choose whether to simply accept his or her fate or blame immigrants for “stealing jobs”.

The initiative has come under fire for warning teenagers that questioning mass migration or even simply researching immigration statistics could lead to being reported as an extremist.

Students risk referrals to Prevent, an anti-terror organization, if they interact with groups spreading “harmful ideological messages” or opt to attend protests opposing the “erosion of British values”.

Critics have described the classroom tool as highly “manipulative,” and an attempt at “political conditioning,” arguing that it treats mainstream concerns about immigration as terrorist-level ideologies.

All of this effectively illustrates that the classroom in the UK is being used as a hotbed of woke ideology, intent on destroying the very fabric of the nation with unrealistic goals and objectives that help nobody, and possibly least of all the migrant population.

May 20, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Comments Off on In the UK, the classroom has become ground zero for woke ideology

Russia once again denounces Kiev’s crimes against the Orthodox Church

By Lucas Leiroz | Strategic Culture Foundation | May 20, 2026

The Ukrainian regime continues intensifying its persecution against the faith traditionally followed by the majority of the local population. In yet another episode exposing the worsening internal crisis in Kiev, a Russian human rights organization recently sent an official letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, denouncing what can be described as a systematic campaign of persecution against the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

The document, signed by Ivan Melnikov, vice-president of the International Movement Human Rights Defense Committee, described a series of violations allegedly committed by Ukrainian authorities and radical nationalist groups. According to the complaint, the Kiev regime has been promoting continuous repression against representatives of the Orthodox Church historically linked to the Moscow Patriarchate, while simultaneously favoring the so-called “Orthodox Church of Ukraine”, considered politically aligned with the Ukrainian government.

According to the letter sent to the UN, the process of religious persecution has intensified proportionally to the escalation of the war. In recent years, hundreds of canonical Orthodox churches have been forcibly seized by radical activists and Ukrainian security forces. The purpose of these operations would be to transfer the temples to religious structures considered more loyal to Kiev’s current political project.

The most emblematic case mentioned in the document involves the historic Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, one of the most important spiritual centers of Slavic Orthodoxy and an architectural heritage site of global significance. According to the allegations, the monastic complex has been subjected to a systematic process of expropriation conducted by Ukrainian authorities. More than 220 monks have been deprived of their residences within the monastery, in what is described as a direct violation of international norms protecting human rights and religious freedom.

The letter further states that, on May 12, 2026, employees of the state administration responsible for the Lavra’s architectural reserve allegedly invaded the Church of the Conception of Saint Anna without awaiting a judicial decision, breaking locks and forcibly entering the temple. According to the complainants, the episode symbolizes the deterioration of the rule of law in Ukraine and the growing political instrumentalization of religious institutions.

Another particularly serious point mentioned in the document concerns the alleged forced mobilization of Orthodox monks into the Ukrainian army. According to information presented to the UN, more than twenty religious figures have been compulsorily recruited since the beginning of the year. The complaint even includes reports of torture and physical violence against members of the clergy, presented by Metropolitan Longin of Banchensk during a recent sermon.

According to the report, Ukrainian military representatives allegedly subjected religious figures to extreme psychological pressure and mistreatment in order to force them to sign military mobilization documents. The accusation reinforces the perception that the conflict is no longer limited to the geopolitical sphere and has begun directly affecting civilian and religious sectors considered politically inconvenient for Kiev.

The letter also states that hundreds of Orthodox priests are currently being persecuted, arrested, or investigated by Ukrainian authorities under accusations related to state security. Many of these religious figures, according to the complainants, have no involvement whatsoever in the political disputes between Moscow and Kiev, yet are still treated as suspects solely because of their religious affiliation.

The document maintains that several clergy members remain in pre-trial detention centers under precarious conditions, subjected to prolonged pressure and even torture. The Russian organization argues that such practices openly violate international conventions such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention Against Torture, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself.

This is not the first time the matter has reached the United Nations. The author of the letter recalls that similar allegations had already been presented during a UN Security Council meeting in May 2023. According to him, however, the situation has only deteriorated since then.

The case reveals a dimension of the Ukrainian conflict that is frequently neglected: the deepening of religious and identity tensions within the country itself. While European governments continue portraying Kiev as an absolute symbol of so-called “Western values,” accusations involving censorship, political persecution, and religious repression continue to multiply.

The offensive against the Canonical Orthodox Church appears to reflect a broader attempt to redefine Ukrainian national identity on radically anti-Russian foundations, even if this implies restricting the fundamental rights of millions of believers. Ukraine should face collective sanctions in the international arena for such actions.

May 20, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Russophobia | , | Comments Off on Russia once again denounces Kiev’s crimes against the Orthodox Church

If Thomas Massie Was President…

By Alan Mosley | The Libertarian Institute | May 20, 2026

If Thomas Massie were president, there would be no American involvement in the war in Iran. Rep. Massie (R-KY) introduced a bipartisan resolution barring “unauthorized hostilities” against Iran and said flatly that, “The ongoing war between Israel and Iran is not our war.” Massie respects the Constitution: Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 grants Congress the exclusive power to declare war. A Massie presidency would not begin hostilities at the behest of a foreign nation and then pretend the War Powers Resolution clock never started when Iran didn’t turn out like Venezuela (which he also wouldn’t have started).

If Thomas Massie were president, Americans wouldn’t be funding Ukrainian oligarchs to the tune of billions of dollars. He said, “We shouldn’t send another penny to Ukraine,” and demanded an audit before another dollar moved. Congress, meanwhile, appropriated more than $174 billion for Ukraine-related purposes through FY 2024, passed another $60.84 billion package in April 2024, and oversight bodies documented serious tracking failures for sensitive equipment. A government that cannot account for what it sends abroad has not earned the moral right to demand more from taxpayers at home.

If Thomas Massie were president, there would be no more regime change wars, period. Years before Iran returned to the front page, Massie was already trying to block unauthorized aid to Syrian rebels, restrain intervention in Yemen, require congressional authorization for any action in Venezuela, and later withdraw the United States from NATO. The antiwar right is perfectly encapsulated by the non-interventionist foreign policy supported first by Dr. Ron Paul, and now by Massie. America First means supporting the troops, and supporting the troops means not sending them to police the world.

If Thomas Massie were president, a foreign government (Israel) wouldn’t control America. Massie voted against Israel’s 2024 supplemental, proposed forcing politically active organizations that principally advance foreign interests to register under FARA, and argued that federal officeholders should disclose dual citizenship and abstain from votes uniquely benefiting those countries. It was when Massie told Tucker Carlson about his colleagues in Washington having an “AIPAC Guy,” a handler to make sure they were always putting Israel’s interests first, that the Rubicon had been crossed. Israeli billionaires would then make the Republican primary in Kentucky’s 4th district the most expensive such race in America. To be Israel First is to be America Last.

If Thomas Massie were president, Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators would be in jail. He forced the U.S. House to vote on releasing the full Epstein files, gathered the signatures to bring the measure to the floor, and said Americans deserve to know “who’s implicated, and how deep this corruption goes.” Massie said we would know the movement to release the Epstein Files was a success when “rich men… powerful men are being perp-walked to the jail.” Such men have faced consequences abroad, but not in America. The Epstein class is politically active in the States.

If Thomas Massie were president, there would be no FISA Section 702, no warrantless spying on Americans. He has spent a decade attacking the “backdoor” searches that let intelligence agencies rummage through Americans’ communications without a warrant, and he warned in 2025 that, “The intelligence agencies will use these loopholes to spy on Americans.” His Republican colleagues were urged to unite behind extending Section 702, and Congress promptly bought more time for the program. A President Massie would be among the first since the days of Jefferson to repeal and restrict executive power, even when (or especially when) that executive is himself.

If Thomas Massie were president, there would be no automobile kill switch mandates. Massie authored a 2026 amendment to block federal funding for the impaired-driving technology mandate born in the 2021 infrastructure law, and he argued that a car should not become “your judge, your jury, and your executioner.” Regulators may prefer cleaner language, but the civil-liberties dispute is obvious enough: should Washington require vehicles to monitor drivers and intervene? Massie’s answer is no, and instead of being celebrated for voting to defund the Biden-era legislation, it became yet another grievance of those who prefer safety over liberty.

If Thomas Massie were president, there would have been no federal COVID mandates. He sued to end the CDC’s air-travel mask order, introduced legislation to terminate the vaccine mandate for international travelers, and condemned the “faceless bureaucrats” behind edicts Congress never enacted. The courts later blocked OSHA’s vaccine-or-test rule for large employers, and CMS eventually withdrew its healthcare-worker vaccine mandate. Massie was right earlier than most, and louder than nearly everyone who later pretended the whole episode had simply been an understandable excess.

If Thomas Massie were president, there wouldn’t have been record federal gun control prosecutions. His legislative instinct runs in the opposite direction: national constitutional carry, repeal of the Gun-Free School Zones Act, and fewer federal crimes piled onto conduct that the Second Amendment was written to protect. That outlook is irreconcilable with a Justice Department mentality that boasts it will “pursue every firearms case referred.” A Massie administration would treat gun ownership as a liberty to be secured, not as a pretext for one more bureaucratic dragnet.

If Thomas Massie were president, the national debt wouldn’t be $39 trillion and rising by trillions each year. Massie has spent years voting against omnibus bills and continuing resolutions, and he now calls the continuing resolutions ritual a “fake fight,” because both parties preserve the machinery that drives borrowing higher. The Biden-era spending levels were not only cut, but refusing to rubber-stamp said spending created yet more friction between him and the supposed party of “fiscal conservatism.” The 2025 tax-and-spending package was projected to add roughly $3.8 trillion more over a decade. In Washington, insolvency is bipartisan, but a President Massie would veto such bills, challenging Congress to keep trying until it could either balance the budget, or embrace shutdown.

If Thomas Massie were president, gas prices would be cheaper. His politics point toward more supply, fewer regulatory affectations, and less willingness to destabilize oil-producing regions in the name of grand strategy. In Congress he backed cross-border energy infrastructure, while current inflation data show energy prices surging and gasoline costs jumping as the Iran war drove up oil. A government that constrains energy at home and jeopardizes it abroad should not affect surprise when the reckoning arrives at the pump.

If Thomas Massie were president, grocery store prices would be cheaper. He has long argued that Washington makes food needlessly dear by burdening local production and intrastate processing, backing the PRIME Act, interstate raw-milk legislation, and country-of-origin transparency. USDA still shows food-at-home prices above year-earlier levels, and Federal Reserve research has noted that modern food inflation is driven heavily by supply-chain and processing costs, not merely by raw commodities. Massie attacks the most important problem facing everyday Americans, cost of living, from multiple angles, be it tackling inflation or clearing the path between producers and consumers.

If Thomas Massie were president, the swamp wouldn’t be bigger than ever. He calls out the political theater of Washington, attacks taxpayer-funded censorship programs, presses for foreign-agent transparency, and treats debt monetization as a racket and a ponzi scheme. In his view, the swamp is manned from all corners of DC: lobbyists, bureaucracies, intelligence agencies, subsidy-seekers, and legislators. A Massie presidency would work to dismantle the managerial state which is full to bursting with progressive lifers who somehow manage to retain their positions with each passing administration, both Democrat and Republican alike.

But with Donald Trump as president, the opposite is true. Under Trump, America enjoys new wars along with its decades-long police actions. It features extensions for spying apparati, even those used against Trump. It stares at $40 trillion in debt, not only without tapping the brakes, but with calls for even more spending. It navigates an evolving narrative on Epstein from releasing the files, to calling them a hoax, to then attacking those who demand justice. Above all else, America under President Trump puts the needs of Israel before the needs of its own citizens. And should a single Congressman from rural Kentucky both say America First and mean it, then he is Public Enemy #1.

If only Thomas Massie were president and not exiting Congress.

May 20, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , | Comments Off on If Thomas Massie Was President…

France investigates possible Israeli company interference in local elections

MEMO | May 14, 2026

French authorities are investigating whether an obscure Israeli company called BlackCore played a role in a foreign interference campaign targeting the hard-left party La France Insoumise (France Unbowed – LFI) ahead of local elections held in March.

According to Reuters, citing two sources, French intelligence services are investigating who allegedly hired BlackCore to carry out a smear campaign against three party candidates through deceptive websites and social media accounts.

The campaign reportedly included false accusations of criminal behaviour and disparaging digital ads.

On its website, BlackCore describes itself as “an elite influence, cyber, and technology company built for the modern era of information warfare.”

According to French authorities and the candidates involved, the campaign targeted Marseille mayoral candidate Sebastien Delogu, Toulouse candidate François Piquemal and Roubaix candidate David Guiraud.

French newspaper Le Monde first revealed details of the operation in March, based on a report by the agency Viginum, which referred to a limited “foreign digital interference” scheme targeting a French political party and several of its candidates in Marseille, Toulouse and Roubaix.

May 14, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , | Comments Off on France investigates possible Israeli company interference in local elections

UAE launches Muslim Shia crackdown under cover of ‘Iran-linked terror’ claims

By Robert INLAKESH | MintPress News | April 22, 2026

The United Arab Emirates says it has dismantled an Iran-linked “terrorist organisation” targeting the Muslim Shia community of the UAE. But the evidence made public so far tells a different story — one that raises serious questions about whether these arrests are part of a widening crackdown on dissent against the US-Israeli backed war against Iran which the UAE is involved in, masked as counterterrorism.

Despite presenting itself on the international stage as a victim, the UAE is quietly participating and aiding the US and Israel in its war against Iran. Yet, Abu Dhabi has enforced draconian censorship laws that carry lengthy prison sentences for those posting or even privately forwarding videos of Iranians munitions impacting targets in the UAE.

This week, the UAE’s State Security Department announced the arrest of 27 individuals, described by state-run WAM media as members of a “Shia terrorist group” allegedly linked to Tehran. Yet despite the severity of those accusations, none of the detainees appear to be facing formal terrorism charges.

Instead, those arrested are accused of spreading “misleading ideas,” maintaining “foreign allegiances,” and forming a secret organization — vague allegations that critics say are often used to justify political repression. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, rejected the arrests outright, calling them “baseless and unfounded.”

Even Emirati state media reporting reveals inconsistencies. While headlines such as “UAE dismantles terrorist cell and arrests members” suggest a major security operation, the details within those same reports make no mention of terrorism-related charges, focusing instead on loosely defined political and ideological offenses.

However, within the article itself, there is no mention of any terror related charges, only that they were detained for spreading “misleading ideas”, have “foreign allegiances”, in addition to being accused of establishing a secret organisation and managing its activities.

The case has also raised concerns of a sectarian dimension. Among the 27 detained are prominent members of the UAE’s Muslim Shia community, including cleric Ghadeer Mirza Al-Rustam of the Jaafari Endowments in Dubai and as well as Seyed Sadiq Lari who had served as the Imam of the Grand Mosque in the Zayed area of ​​Abu Dhabi, fueling suspicions that the crackdown may be targeting religious identity.

Furthermore, those arrested were all Emiratis, Saudis or Bahraini, none were Iranians. The alleged link made to the Islamic Republic of Iran is through Velayat-e Faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist), a concept within Shia Islam of adherence to a qualified Islamic leader. Emirati Shia publicly follow Ayatollah Sistani as their religious authority, for whom the concept of Velayat-e Faqih does not apply.

There is yet to be evidence presented to prove the detainees are agents of Iran, opposed to them simply expressing popular political views amongst Shia Muslims including opposing the war against Iran.

The UAE is the only Arab State that has directly participated in the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran. This was exposed after two Emirati Wing Loong II UAVs were downed over Iranian airspace. Following the US President’s announcement of a two-week temporary ceasefire, Abu Dhabi allegedly lobbied Washington to continue its assault, even going as far as bombing Iran’s Lavan Oil Refinery.

In the past, Abu Dhabi has launched politicised arrests while engaging in war.

For example, in 2016, two US citizens of Libyan origin were acquitted after spending two years in prison, on charges of funding two groups fighting in Libya. They were originally arrested in Dubai as part of wider crackdown on Libyan nationals, as the UAE began launching airstrikes in the North African country in 2024. According to the UN and their family members, the two wrongfully detained American citizens were severely tortured.

Between March and April, the UAE was struck by more Iranian missiles and drones than any other nation, during which it arrested at least 375 for violating its strict “cybercrime laws”. The mass arrests, assumed to be much more than officially announced, were launched as reprisals against those sharing and even forwarding videos they had filmed of Iranian munitions striking locations in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. It got so bad, that even British media had picked up on how many UK citizens were being rounded up.

According to Radha Stirling, the CEO of Detained in Dubai, “Under national security frameworks, individuals may face: 5 to 15 years imprisonment, or potentially life sentences. Fines reaching approximately USD 500,000. Prolonged or indefinite pre-trial detention. Restricted access to lawyers, embassies, and evidence. Human rights violations and torture.”

“People are increasingly afraid to communicate, send messages, document events or share information or a news article, even privately. Many are choosing to remain silent, unsure whether even routine communication could expose them to criminal liability and unsure to what extent authorities are surveilling the population”, Stirling added.

The mass arrest campaigns came as a part of an ongoing information war waged between the UAE and Iran. An investigation into Emirati censorship, by Bellingcat, “identified several high-profile incidents where authorities in the United Arab Emirates have downplayed damage, mischaracterised interceptions and in some instances not acknowledged successful Iranian drone strikes on the country.”

Meanwhile, the UAE has not been the only Gulf country to have launched mass detention campaigns over alleged “cyber crimes” and charges related to publishing “misleading ideas” or having “foreign allegiances”. Kuwait even arrested well known US-Kuwaiti journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin on March 2, on cyber crime offenses related to posts shared during the war with Iran.

Arrest campaigns carried out against Shia Muslims across the region are also not a new feature to the US-Israel led war on Iran. The UAE’s media itself claimed without evidence that the Emirati authorities had dismantled another “terrorist network” last month, accusing both Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah of being behind it. In mid-March, Kuwait also claimed to have arrested members of a “Hezbollah network”, also failing to provide any evidence. Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia had even executed two Shia detainees, accusing them of “terrorism”, one of whom was charged for protesting and arrested while he was only 17 years old.

May 14, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Comments Off on UAE launches Muslim Shia crackdown under cover of ‘Iran-linked terror’ claims

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