UK Government Minister Shuns Concerns About “Anti-Disinformation Unit”
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | February 25, 2024
Critics of the contentious, and some would say at times unlawful, work of UK’s Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU) are expectedly unimpressed by it getting a “rebrand” – that is, a new name.
It remains to be seen if the National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT – née CDU), will continue with activities of the kind that highly likely got the image of the CDU so tarnished that it needed a “rebrand.”
But government officials continue at the same time to deny there was any wrongdoing on the part of CDU to begin with – or that there will be any done by NSOIT.
The controversy over CDU goes back to the “heyday” of the pandemic and censorship of Covid-related content. The accusation – that continues to be rejected by the government – is that individuals, including senior figures from across the UK’s political spectrum, were targeted.
And, their online activity was first surveilled by CDU, which would then flag some posts for removal merely for criticizing the government, rather than “spreading disinformation.”
But, responding to questions about all this in the British Parliament’s House of Lords earlier in the week, an official from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology – NSOIT’s parent agency, said there was no merit to such claims, or fears, going forward.
“I can confirm not only that it is not the role of NSOIT or the CDU to go after any individuals, regardless of their political belief, but that it never has been,” junior minister Jonathan Berry told the lords, adding that the unit supposedly only looks for “threats from foreign states” – while the form of domestic political persecution it was accused of is something that is “categorically false.”
However, Liberal Democrat Paul Strasburger continues to press the matter, specifically seeking answers as to how NSOIT will be controlled in the future, particularly given what he says was CDU’s “worrying overreach.”
And – why the government “refuses to allow the Intelligence and Security Committee” to do that oversight.
Berry’s response essentially amounted to revealing that NSOIT will – oversee itself.
“As part of the civil service, NSOIT would have robust internal measures to verify and check its own work, and indeed it reports regularly across government and to ministers,” the junior minister is quoted as stating.
Other than that, Berry could offer “reassurances” to the House of Lords regarding the unit’s role, and he at the same time would not speak about either how NSOIT is staffed, nor how many people it employs, referring to it as “a national security institution.”
The EU Is Hotel California
An Unelected Body Of Ruling Class Elites, Indistinguishable From Feudal Leaders Of Europe’s Bloodstained Past
By Manorborn | The Truth Barrier | February 20, 2024
Two weeks ago, leaks emerged in The Financial Times revealing how the EU is setting out to destroy Hungary economically for its refusal to fund the war against Russia.
The irony is stunning. Viktor Orban, the president of Hungary, who was once arrested in his youth for protesting the brutality of the USSR toward his little nation, is now objecting to the EU’s strongarmed sabotage of the sovereignty of member states like his and by the EU’s unjustified, unreasonable treatment of the Russian Federation as an enemy instead of a beneficial economic partner.
Orban was forced to back down a few days later. But by backing down, he weakened Hungary vis a vis Ursula van der Leyen and her minions. Orban should have presented the EU’s unacceptable, coercive plan of economic warfare against the Hungarian people and their livelihoods before the UN.
Hungary has many allies around the world – it’s time to go to them for support now that he’s discovered what Greece discovered a decade or so ago – that the EU is Hotel California.
It was that “lovely face” of Western Europe that drew the love starved Easterners once free from the Soviets. Nimium non crede lepidi faciei. (Trust not too much to an enchanting face). – Virgil
Before the inception of the EU, Europe was a region of free, sovereign, more or less democratic nation-states with bright economic futures. After federalization under the EU and concurrent with the neocon capture of the US government, EU member states absent Germany, France, Italy and the Twisted Sisters of Benelux gradually found themselves inured in a 21st Century version of the Warsaw Pact with a grim future of belt tightening, war and downward mobility.
Now we are witnessing just how individual European nations are no longer free in all instances to make decisions that best serve their distinctive populations. Instead they’re tightly bound to EU governance – a commissariat administered by an unelected body of ruling class elites who’re indistinguishable in character and ambitions from the feudal leaders of Europe’s bloodstained past.
But whereas the Warsaw Pact was formed to protect the interests of the USSR, the EU exists to serve the interests of the US hegemon and the competing globalist vision of the WEF who groom and vet future EU leaders.
Fortunately, Orban, along with Fico in Slovakia, Vučić in Serbia and Matteo Salvini in Italy is one of the few European leaders who is not afraid to call out the authoritarian nature and mounting abuses of the EU. Surely he’s noted the EU’s subservience to US plans for escalating wars to target Iran and eventually directly target Russia for its refusal to lie down and allow the West to select its leaders and open up its resources to the kind of pillaging by the West that transpired under Boris Yeltsin.
Orban knows that what the EU is doing to Russia, it could and would do to Hungary. EU membership will not shield it. Western NGOs have been working round the clock to create regime change in Slovakia, Serbia and Hungary. In 2020 the EU ruled that national laws like the law in Hungary requiring NGOs to register as foreign agents are unlawful. That can only signify one thing: Room keys will always be held by the front desk at Hotel California.
Biden Admin Wants To Spend Around $1 Million on University “Disinformation” Monitoring Program
Despite legal scrutiny, the Biden administration continues its interest in speech monitoring.
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | February 23, 2024
The White House’s latest initiative to carry out its brand of combating misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (which is now referred to by the handy “MDM” initial) continues to co-opt the education sector.
The Department of Justice agency the National Institute for Justice (NIJ) is behind the funding effort that is said to be designed to study and research “effective technologies and tools for identification, moderation, and/or removal of extremist content.”
A grant worth $1 million will be spent to come up with a dashboard featuring an MDM tracker, which is supposed to surveil the internet for both speech, and narratives, and do so in real time. The project’s official name is, “Networks and Pathways of Violent Extremism: Effectiveness of Mis/Disinformation Campaigns.”
And reports say that the targeted speech coincides with “contentious political events.” Critics say that the taxpayer dollars here are in reality going towards suppression of conservative and religious groups, rather than as declared, violent extremists.
The recipient of the grant is South Carolina-based Clemson University. Researchers there are expected to come up with computer models that will keep an eye on accounts singled out as MDM peddlers and identify people associated with allegedly spreading MDM.
Eventually, the effort should produce the real-time tracking dashboard.
Regular citizens may not benefit from this project – considering the “fluid” nature of the very definitions of misinformation and its companions (some reports mention the initial, and subsequent treatment of the Covid origin and Hunter Biden laptop stories as examples of this.)
But the grant does specify who will benefit: law enforcement and policymakers.
This is by no means the only initiative of the kind coming from the Biden administration – since the current US president came to power, $39 million went to “MDM research” from the National Science Foundation (NSF) alone, also in some cases involving prominent educational institutions, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
And while Clemson researchers are reassuring that their efforts are not politically or ideologically biased, the Internet Accountability Project and the Foundation for Freedom Online are voicing their fears that the end result will be yet another tool facilitating censorship, specifically by suppressing conservative voices.
German Vice Chancellor accuses journalist of doing Moscow’s bidding after probing question
RT | February 22, 2024
German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, who is also the country’s minister for economic affairs and climate action, accused “Russian journalists” of “discrediting liberal democracy” after a German reporter asked him about allegations that he had turned to unusual methods of dealing with dissent among his subordinates.
The Green politician was presenting a Federal Economy Report at a press conference on Wednesday when journalist Florian Warweg questioned him about allegations that he used Germany’s domestic security service – the BfV – to run checks on ministerial officials whose opinions were “far from the political course” of the government.
The reporter was referring to a case dating back to August 2022, when two high-ranking officials within the Economy Ministry were suspected of spying for Russia over internal documents that showed “understanding for the Russian point of view” and used arguments that “did not fit the official line of the federal government.”
According to the Die Zeit report, background checks on the two suspects revealed an “emotional closeness to Russia” but no solid evidence of espionage activity. The investigation itself was reportedly prompted by Habeck’s “confidants,” who allegedly alerted the domestic security agency.
“Was it an isolated case or do you still resort to the [services] of the [BfV] when encountering inconvenient opinions among your civil servants?” Warweg asked. Instead of answering the question, Habeck immediately struck back by questioning the reporter’s credentials. “Are you from Russia Today?” the minister asked, referring to RT.
When told that Warweg was working for the German political blog NachDenkSeiten, Habeck still maintained that the journalist’s question was “full of false allegations” the minister “rejects.” He then went on to say that “security checks” for employees working in sensitive areas were a new “normal standard” amid the current circumstances.
The journalist had worked as an editor for RT’s German-language branch, RT DE, but quit in mid-2022 and has been working at NachDenkSeiten since June of that year.
The NachDenkSeiten blog was co-founded and run by Albrecht Mueller, a former Social Democrat MP and aide to two German chancellors. The media outlet positions itself as a “critical website,” although some German media increasingly have sought to portray it as a “pro-Russian” news outlet that had supposedly fallen under Moscow’s influence.
When further pressed by Warweg about the internal climate in his ministry, which allegedly leaves little room for dissenting opinions, particularly if they are seen as favorable to Russia, Habeck alleged that Moscow was attempting to assault democracy in Germany.
“It is difficult to bear, just a few days after Navalny was murdered, that Russia’s reporters here… discredit Germany’s liberal democracy in such a way,” he said, referring to the death of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny in a Russian prison.
The cause of the 47-year-old’s death remains unclear, but the incident has sparked an uproar in the West and was immediately blamed on Moscow. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov earlier said it was “completely unacceptable” for Western politicians to make “outrageous statements” regarding Navalny’s death while the investigation into the case is still ongoing.
‘Conspiracy theorists’ threaten mainstream media, says Canadian PM
RT | February 21, 2024
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday blamed social media for preventing major news outlets from shaping public opinion the way they used to.
The Liberal Party leader took his message to the Conservative stronghold of Alberta, sitting down with radio host Ryan Jespersen for an exclusive 30-minute interview on his Real Talk podcast.
“There is out there a deliberate undermining of the mainstream media,” Trudeau said, answering a question towards the end of the interview. “There are the conspiracy theorists, there are the social media drivers who are trying to do everything they can to keep people in their little filter bubbles, to prevent people from actually agreeing on a common set of facts, the way CBC and CTV – when they were our only sources of news – used to project across the country, at least a common understanding of things.”
Earlier this month, Trudeau denounced the move by Bell Media to lay off many of its local journalists and sell 45 of its 103 regional radio stations, arguing that local journalism holds Canadian democracy together.
“There are massive changes that need to happen in our media landscape, and [the] government can try and create conditions and incentives for it to happen,” he told Jespersen on Wednesday.
“We’re putting money towards local independent media,” Trudeau added, having argued a moment earlier that such overt funding would compromise news outlets as mouthpieces of the government.
In June 2023, the Canadian parliament passed the Online News Act (ONA), under which search engines and social media platforms would have to compensate news outlets for posting their content. While Google has complied, Facebook is “choosing to be bad guys about this,” Trudeau told Jespersen. Meta has responded to ONA by blocking all news content by Canadian publishers on Facebook and Instagram.
Ultimately, it’s up to Canadians to declare they don’t want to accept the “encrapification of news,” Trudeau said, borrowing the phrase from British Columbia Premier David Eby.
Trudeau’s comments on the podcast also echoed those made by former US President Barack Obama in a May 2023 interview to CBS. Obama named “a divided media” as one of the things he was worried about, noting that the US once had “three TV stations … and people were getting a similar sense of what is true and what isn’t, what was real and what was not.”
“How do we return to that common conversation? How can we have a common set of facts?” the 44th US president wondered at the time.
How The Courts Could Decide Who Controls Congress
By Attorney Bobbie Anne Cox | Knowledge is power! | February 6, 2024
Most voters don’t pay too much attention to the judicial candidates when they head to the polls to cast their vote. Honestly, I can understand their thought process. There’s nothing sexy about courts, judges, judicial panels, and so on. Most voters probably feel like they will never end up in a court of law. If they keep their nose clean, and live a life of lawfulness and piety, then they probably feel that they won’t ever be at the mercy of a judge, or a panel of judges, to decide their fate.
However, there is a grave danger in this method of thinking. Even if you personally never have the need or the occasion to sue someone, or be sued by someone, judges are rendering decisions in cases that affect your life, whether or not you are a direct party to a lawsuit. A golden example of that notion is my “quarantine camp” lawsuit against Governor Kathy Hochul and her Department of Health. Most New Yorkers are (unfortunately) blissfully unaware of this epic legal battle, and yet, five judges sitting in an appellate court in Rochester, New York may have sealed the fate of 19 million New Yorkers in determining whether or not unelected bureaucrats in the DOH can throw you into a quarantine detention center, with the force of police, for however long they like, without any proof that you are sick. (For more on that, you can read one of my many articles about that lawsuit, or other media content on it, here, or here, or here).
So, judges are every bit as powerful and noteworthy on the ballot as the vote you cast for your governor, or president, or senator, etc… My quarantine lawsuit is just one example. Another example which I’d like to delve into in more detail in this article is how judges may very well end up deciding who controls Congress.
With a very close margin in the House of Representatives, quite literally, every seat counts. (My standard disclaimer applies: I am not Republican. I am a Constitutionalist and believe the power of the people over the power of the political elites must prevail). So let’s set the stage… the Republicans control the House currently by only 4 seats. The Democrats control the US Senate, and the White House. If the Republicans lose control of the House, then Americans will be subjected to a very toxic one-party-rule. Remember my motto on this – I don’t care which party it is, when one party has total control, they go totally out of control! Here’s the article I wrote on that last year.
Most people think of New York as a “deep blue” state that is full of radical left-wing voters. That is terribly wrong. If you look at a map of New York state after the last couple of presidential elections, you’ll see that the vast majority of the state votes “red,” and it’s only a couple of our cities that vote “blue.” New York is the reason the Republicans took control of the House when the 2022 elections yielded a net gain of 5 seats for Republicans. In other words, in 2022, New Yorkers flipped 5 of our Congressional seats from Democrat to Republican, and that gave the Republicans the majority in the House.
So, it’s no surprise that many talking heads say New York is the pathway for the Democrats to regain control of the House next year after the elections this November. And here is where the courts come in. When one political party controls a state legislature, if they are empowered to draw the Congressional districts within their state, then this opens the door to gerrymandering. As a result, the party that is not in control will then usually bring a lawsuit to defend their right to have districts that are not gerrymandered. This happens in lots of states, and it is 100% happening here in New York. I am the spokeswoman for a non-partisan organization called Stop NY Corruption, and as such, I am fully familiar with the redistricting saga that has been taking place here since the 2022 election.
I wrote an article with the history and back story, which you can find here. If you prefer audio/visual, you can check out one of the number of press conferences or interviews I’ve done on this topic, some of which are posted on the Stop NY Corruption website. Most recently, I just spoke at a presser yesterday up in Albany together with former Congressman Lee Zeldin, State Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt, and Conservative Party Chairman Gerard Kassar. Check out the video of our press conference here or double click on the thumbnail below.
So when these lawsuits over Congressional lines are brought in the courts, no matter which state, it is the decision of the judges that determines whether or not We the People will decide our elected representatives in Congress, or whether the political party bosses will choose what districts we live in, and who our Congressional reps will be. In a recent poll of likely New York voters, 81% of voters believe that gerrymandering is a form of cheating. According to that same poll, 78% of voters believe that gerrymandering leads to more corruption. If you want to see the full poll results, you can find that on the Stop NY Corruption website here.
To add another layer of concern, citizens really need to understand where their judges are coming from. What I mean by that is, in some states (like here in New York), the voters elect our trial court judges, but our appellate court judges and our Court of Appeals judges (New York’s highest court) are all appointed… by our governors. Ugh! So you cannot vote off the bench any “higher court” judges here in New York, and any other state that has this same judicial structure. Remember that the next time you vote in a gubernatorial election. Depending on how your state courts are designed, you may not be voting for just a governor, you could also be voting for the person who appoints your state’s appeals court judges.
Same goes for federal courts… the president appoints all federal judges, no matter what level of court they preside over (trial court, appeals court, United State Supreme Court). So you aren’t just voting for a president this November, you’re voting for the person who will place judges in the federal courts throughout our entire country. Extremely powerful authority.
Pakistan: vote passed, what next?
By Viktor Mikhin – New Eastern Outlook – 20.02.2024
Voting in Pakistan’s much-anticipated general election on 8 February began at 8 a.m., but in the meantime, mobile networks were shut down across the country for more than 26 hours. Pakistanis are not used to network blackouts. There is often no connectivity during bank holidays parades, Muslim Eid and Ashura, protests criticising the ruling establishment and political rallies. Last year alone, mobile networks were down for four days after protests erupted when former Prime Minister Imran Khan was arrested outside the Islamabad High Court despite being released on bail in May. Then, in December 2023 and twice in January 2024, all social media platforms were blocked for the duration of virtual rallies by the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) after their street protests were suppressed.
On the eve of the February 8 polls that elect the country’s parliament and provincial legislatures, Pakistan’s Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the election of Gohar Ali Khan as the new chairman of the Movement for Justice (PTI). The court also stripped the party of its symbol, a baseball bat, which is associated with the disgraced Imran Khan, the former captain of the national cricket team. Since then, the main opposition force, which has no official leader and no symbol (important for Pakistan), has been barred from contesting elections and its members have been urged by the party leadership to register as independent candidates. And even under such difficult circumstances, they achieved very impressive results.
In the National Assembly (lower house of parliament) elections, Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) won in 75 constituencies and the Pakistan People’s Party (PNP) in 54, according to the Election Commission. Independent candidates, the bulk of whom are affiliated with the Movement for Justice, won seats in 101 constituencies. In this context, it is worth considering the additional seats, about 50, that the PML-N and PNP, which are allowed to contest the elections, will gain through the distribution of statutory quotas for women and religious minority candidates. In the event of an alliance, they could become the ruling coalition in Parliament and form a federal government. According to reports, the two sides may agree that Muslim League-Nawaz Sharif (PML-N) leader Nawaz Sharif would become prime minister, while the PNP would become president.
For its part, Imran Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party said it had “absolutely no interest” in Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s offer to form a coalition government after the latter’s party failed to win enough seats to rule alone in the general elections. Speaking to a crowd of thousands of supporters from the balcony of his party’s office in the eastern city of Lahore, the centre of his political life, Nawaz Sharif, a three-time former prime minister, finally struck a conciliatory note. Acknowledging that his party did not win the required number of seats, he called on the rest of all parties, including independents, most of whom tend to support Imran Khan, to unite and govern on the basis of the coalition that has been formed.
The vote itself and Sharif’s personal statement were the culmination of a particularly contentious election season in which allegations of military interference took centre stage, casting a shadow over a historic event that marked only the third democratic transfer of power in the country’s history. The army, which has ruled Pakistan for more than three decades since independence in 1947, has categorically denied interfering in political affairs. But still, leaders of many parties are unhappy with the pressure the generals are putting on society and the voting process itself. On the eve of the vote, Sharif was considered the frontrunner in the election because of what was widely believed to be the army’s support for him. Army officers cleared the way for his return to Pakistan after four years of voluntary exile to lead the Pakistan Muslim League in the country’s national polls.
“We don’t have many seats to form the government alone, so we are asking other parties that have been successful in this election to join us and together we will form the government,” Sharif offered in his first post-election address. Showing unprecedented flexibility, he said the PML-N recognises the legitimacy of this election and respects the mandate of all elected parties. “Whoever gets the mandate, we respect them with all our heart, whether it is a party or an individual, an independent candidate, and we invite them to lead a wounded Pakistan out of difficulties… It is important that all other parties sit at the negotiating table and form a united government together,” he said. But PTI spokesman Rauf Hassan told Pakistani media that the party had “absolutely no interest” in Sharif’s coalition proposal, “We are not going to form any alliance or coalition with them. They are not trustworthy people.”
With no party having secured the required majority -133 seats (there are 265 seats in the National Assembly), the coming days are likely to see numerous political entreaties, negotiations and meetings. The PML-N and PNP parties – in their struggle for dominance in parliament, where a two-thirds majority is required to make the most important decisions – will struggle to forge alliances with other independents and smaller parties. In his speech, Sharif said he had instructed his brother Shehbaz Sharif, also a former prime minister, to meet leaders of other parties, including the PNP, Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-F, to discuss a coalition government. However, he did not mention PTI. While the temptation to leave the coalition with Imran Khan’s party and join another party forming the government will be great, PTI-backed independent candidates have repeatedly said they will not join other parties and will return to Khan’s party as soon as he asks them to do so.
“We don’t expect such a government to last very long,” Zulfi Bukhari, a close aide to Khan, told the media, referring to a possible future PML-N-led coalition government. “Whatever [government] they are going to form, there will be disputes and bickering between them… So, its credibility will be zero with zero public support, which means they will not be able to take any meaningful decisions for the betterment of the country.”
Meanwhile, the delay in releasing full official election results even 24 hours after polling stations closed has led to widespread fears of rigging and raised questions about the credibility of the polls. The government attributed the delay to the suspension of mobile phone services imposed as a security measure ahead of the elections, but opponents, especially from PTI, say it was done to manipulate vote counting. In the run-up to the elections, PTI complained of increasing repression against the party, including that it was not allowed to campaign freely. Imran Khan himself did not participate in the polls as he has been in jail since August last year and has also been barred from running for public office for ten years. The former prime minister, already jailed in one corruption case, was found guilty in three consecutive cases a week before the election and faces dozens of other trials, including one in which he is accused of ordering violent attacks on military installations on 9 May 2023, which could carry the death penalty. Imran Khan, of course, denies all this and claims that all the cases were politically motivated to remove him and his party from the elections.
Many analysts question the legitimacy of the current election, in which Khan, arguably the country’s current most popular politician, was not allowed to participate. And after the election, they fear that the lack of a clear winner could mean more uncertainty for a country where political temperatures have been very high since Khan was ousted in a parliamentary vote of no confidence in April 2022. The country has also struggled for months with a seemingly intractable economic crisis that millions of Pakistanis have experienced. Pakistan’s economy is currently suffering from record high inflation, dwindling foreign exchange reserves, currency depreciation, low consumer confidence and slow growth caused by tough reforms undertaken to fulfil the terms of the latest $3 billion financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved last year.
One of the key tasks for any new government will be to negotiate a new financial assistance programme with the IMF after the current deal expires. Another challenge will be dealing with the growing militancy of residents. The election season itself has been particularly bloody, with several attacks on rallies, polling stations and candidates over the past few weeks, while 16 people were killed in violence on polling day itself. So, the new government, which has yet to be formed, faces very difficult challenges in resolving many domestic problems, boosting the country’s economy and increasing the incomes of ordinary Pakistanis.
Victor MIKHIN is a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.
Trampling on a Symbol of Liberty
By James Bovard | Future of Freedom | February 21, 2024
Last August, 12-year-old Jaiden Rodriguez was kicked out of a public-school classroom in Colorado Springs after school officials decreed that the Gadsden flag patch on his backpack was “disruptive to the classroom environment.” Those Colorado officials didn’t know the meaning of “disruptive.”
Thanks to savvy, thoughtful retorts by Jaiden’s mother in a video showdown at the school, the incident spurred a fierce backlash around America. Less than a week later, the school district raised the white flag on its assault on the Gadsden flag.
The flag’s real history
That flag, with its yellow background and coiled rattlesnake, helped rally Americans to vanquish the British Army and Navy almost 250 years ago. As the Encyclopedia Brittanica noted, “The rattlesnake symbol originated in the 1754 political cartoon “Join, or Die” published in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. The cartoon, which depicted the colonies divided as segments of a cut-up snake, exhorted the colonists to unite in the face of the French and Indian War (1754–63). The symbol was later used to represent unity during the Revolutionary War.” The flag became one of the most iconic symbols of the American Revolution, venerated far and wide until recent years.
Where did the Gadsden flag go wrong? Tea Party activists waved the “Don’t Tread on Me” banner during anti-Obama protests. According to the liberal media, regardless of Obama’s oppressive, intrusive policies, any opposition to his presidency was automatically racist. Thus, the Gadsden flag was irrevocably tainted by association.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission added fuel to this fire:
On January 8, 2014, a U.S. Postal Service maintenance mechanic in Denver, Colorado filed a complaint of discrimination based on race (African American) and reprisal for prior EEO activity when: (1) beginning in the fall of 2013, a coworker repeatedly wore a cap to work with an insignia of a flag with a rattlesnake ready to strike and slogan “Don’t Tread on Me,” (2) the coworker continued to wear the cap after management had assured Complainant that they would tell the coworker not to, and (3) on September 2, 2013, a coworker photographed him on the work room floor without Complainant’s consent. According to the federal sector process, that complaint was filed with the employing agency — the U.S. Postal Service.
On January 29, 2014, the U.S. Postal Service dismissed the complaint for failure to state a cognizable claim of discrimination. On June 20, 2014, the EEOC Office of Federal Operations reversed the agency’s dismissal, determining that Complainant had raised a cognizable claim of harassment, and ordered the agency to investigate the claim…. The U.S. Postal Service argued that the previous decision clearly erred because the Gadsden Flag and its slogan do not have any racial connotations.
But the EEOC insisted that the flag could justify a harassment complaint. The EEOC decreed that
while the Gadsden Flag originated in a non-racial context, it has since been “interpreted to convey racially-tinged messages in some contexts,”… Importantly, the Commission did not find that the Gadsden Flag in fact is a racist symbol. Rather, the Commission found only that the complaint met the legal standard to state a claim under Title VII, and therefore should have been investigated by the agency rather than dismissed.
The EEOC has a long history of knuckle-headed decrees, including its 2012 ruling that made it a federal crime not to hire ex-convicts. (The chief of the EEOC repeatedly publicly denounced my articles in the 1990s, but I don’t hold a grudge.)
The EEOC’s prattle was “close enough for government work” for commentators to howl that the Gadsden flag had been condemned by federal civil-rights watchdogs.
The flag ain’t woke
The Gadsden flag was further vilified by the New York Times–spurred 1619 campaign to paint the American Revolution as a vast conspiracy to perpetuate slavery. This notion is popular with journalists who have never read a book that was published before 2010. Denouncing the Founders as racists absolves wokesters from having to learn anything about the “slavery by Parliament” that Britain sought to impose — the mass confiscation of firearms and other private property, the sweeping censorship, the total destruction of privacy, and the suppression of jury trials.
The Colorado Springs school district declared that the flag was an “unacceptable symbol” linked to “white-supremacy.” It further claimed that the Gadsden flag had its “origins with slavery” because it was designed in 1775 by a South Carolinian who owned slaves. By the same standard, the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights could all be condemned since Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason were slaveowners. Do the wokesters want to condemn and expunge all of American history prior to the creation of the LGBT rainbow flag?
The Colorado hubbub occurred because many school officials and students are even more ignorant of American history than freshmen members of Congress. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor groused in 2014 that fewer than 20 percent of high-school seniors “can say what the Declaration of Independence is, and it’s right there in the title.” Americans’ ignorance of history helps explain their docility nowadays.
The Massachusetts colonists rebelled after the British agents received “writs of assistance” that allowed them to search any colonist’s property. Modern Americans submit passively to endless government intrusions at the airport, online, and on the nation’s highways and sidewalks. Virginia revolted in part because King George imposed a two-pence tax on the sale of a pound of tea; Americans today are complacent while Congress imposes billions of dollars of retroactive taxes — even on people who have already died. Connecticut rebelled in part because the British were undermining the independence of judges; nowadays, federal agencies have the power to act as prosecutor, judge, and jury in suits against private citizens. New Hampshire revolted in part because King George claimed that he automatically owned every Pine Tree in the Colonies; modern Americans are largely complacent when the federal government asserts a right to control every acre of private land that is wet for more a few weeks each year.
Many astute Americans are mystified at the retroactive demonization of this cherished symbol of liberty. Olivia Rondeau, co-host of a Foundation for Economic Education online program, scoffed, “No one ever told my black family that the Gadsden flag was racist. I grew up seeing it around the house all the time. 2023 is something else.”
The Colorado ruckus was popular with pundits who know only enough history to hiss and boo on cue. Two months before the Colorado uproar, the Washington Post published a piece headlined: “The disgraced Confederate history of the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag.” Since a Confederate ship had hoisted that flag in 1861, that meant that the flag was forever damned. And anyone who showed or countenanced that flag was collectively guilty for all the crimes of American history.
But the Gadsden flag became increasingly vilified even before the Tea Party protests. The real objection by officialdom is to the flag’s message: “Don’t Tread on Me.”
That flag got swept up in the vilification of dissent after the 9/11 attacks. The Department of Homeland Security warned local law-enforcement agencies in 2003 to keep an eye on anyone who “expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government.” DHS pushed to treat the Gadsen flag practically as a terrorist warning signal. DHS-funded Fusion Centers attached the “extremist” or potential terrorist tag to the individuals and groups displaying the Gadsden flag — as well as to individuals who assert a “right to keep and bear arms,” individuals “rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority” (like many Founding Fathers did), people who were “reverent of individual liberty,” and anyone with a “Know Your Rights or Lose Them” bumper sticker.
Law-enforcement agencies have come a long way since targeting Deadhead stickers on Cadillacs in the 1970s. The FBI Domestic Terrorism Symbols Guide included the Gadsden flag as one of the “commonly referenced historical imagery or quotes” used by violent militia extremists. Maybe the feds should formally announce that “distrust of government” is now a hate crime?
Jaiden, an honor roll student, watched wide-eyed as his mother lured the school official to become a nationwide laughingstock. The mother justified Jaiden’s patch: “The Founding Fathers stood up for what they believed against unjust laws, and this is unjust.”
The school official glowered: “I am here to enforce the policy that was provided by the district” after repeating the vexing phrase: “Don’t tread on me.” Did Jaiden threaten the public-school system’s divine right to tread on students and scorn parents’ values?
A victory for free speech
Connor Boyack, president of the Libertas Institute in Utah, helped publicize the case. After the school conceded, he declared on Twitter: “Let this be a lesson — document your encounters w/ government employees. Had Jaiden’s mom not recorded the video, this wouldn’t have got nearly the attention that it did.” Jaiden was a reader of the Tuttle Twins — the pro-freedom series written by Boyack.
Permitting wokesters to turn the Gadsden flag into the moral equivalent of the Nazi swastika will only encourage more demolitions of American heritage. Will a Babylon Bee headline prove prophetic?: “FBI Seizes Jaiden’s Backpack in Predawn Raid.” Colorado’s liberal governor Jared Polis sought to end the lunacy when he endorsed the Gadsden flag for providing an “iconic warning to Britain or any government not to violate the liberties of Americans.”
The school board backed down but with a huge caveat: Jaiden could express his values only as long as no school staffer or student caterwauled. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) objected, “So long as the school district maintains that Jaiden may wear the Gadsden flag patch only if no student or staff member complains, this controversy is not over.” FIRE warned the school district: “The First Amendment does not allow the ‘heckler’s veto’ as envisioned by the district’s assistant superintendent, where anybody can suppress a student’s speech or viewpoint simply by objecting to it.” The heckler’s veto is especially perilous when domineering government officials are seeking any pretext to suppress whom they please.
Ironically, students would face no official pushback if they came to school wearing t-shirts and backpacks decorated with the logo of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (despite its crimes at Ruby Ridge and Waco), the Drug Enforcement Administration (despite DEA’s persecution of peaceful citizens), the National Security Agency (despite its preemptive destruction of privacy online and beyond), the Centers for Disease Control (despite their falsehoods and fear-mongering during the Covid pandemic), the Food and Drug Administration (despite the shenanigans it used to give full approval to dubious Covid vaccines), the Transportation Security Administration (despite their endless molesting of hapless travelers), the Department of Homeland Security (despite its secret censorship regimes seeking to suppress dissent), and even the Internal Revenue Service — which has wrongfully pilfered legions of Americans.
The Gadsden flag will be needed as long as government officials keep trying to trample Americans’ rights and liberties. None of the pundits who condemned that flag have offered any evidence that politicians nowadays are less perfidious than they were 250 years ago.
Google To Start Running “Prebunk” Ads and Quizzing YouTube Viewers To Fight So-Called “Misinformation”
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | February 20, 2024
Prebunking – until relatively recently it was just one of the fringe concepts in the relentless “war on misinformation industrial complex.”
A short way to describe it is as a dystopian version of debunking false or incorrect information. But here the idea is to stop users (“help them identify”) unwanted content, before they can even see it.
A short way to describe what’s wrong with the “war on misinformation” is that it all too easily turns into a smokescreen for plain censorship of lawful and factually correct speech.
And now, prebunking is moving from ideations pushed by murky “fact-checking” and similar outfits, to the very top of the mainstream – Google.
The company that in effect controls the search market and some of the largest social platforms in the world (outside China) has announced that its latest anti-misinformation campaign will incorporate prebunking.
No doubt with an eye on the US election later in the year, Google’s attention is now on Europe, specifically the EU ahead of the European Parliament vote in June.
Google is acting in unison with the EU and its Digital Services Act which require tech giants to act on whatever is chosen to be considered “misinformation” and suppress it. Much of this is (at least they say so) driven by “Russia Scare,” and so both Google’s Jigsaw unit and the EU are talking about “democracy at risk.”
As for Google’s version of “prebunking,” it, at least in Europe, comes in the form of animated ads, reports say. They will play not only on YouTube but also other platforms like TikTok, and target Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland – the EU countries with the largest number of voters.
Jigsaw says prebunking bypasses “polarized debates” and “works equally effectively across the political spectrum.”
User experience may suffer at the expense of this “pre-reeducation.”
“Viewers watching the ads on YouTube will be asked to fill in a short multiple-choice questionnaire, designed to gauge what they have learned about misinformation,” Reuters describes Google’s prebunking technique.
These days, agencies like Reuters describe Jigsaw as an internal Google unit “which operates to tackle threats to societies.”
How noble of Jigsaw, and obliging towards Google of Reuters – but in 2016, reports were still talking about Jigsaw as rather what it really is – a rebrand of Google Ideas.
And, The Guardian explained at the time, this was “the web giant’s controversial diplomatic arm, founded in 2010 and headed by ex-US State Department policy wonk Jared Cohen,” adding – “Jigsaw’s stated mission is to use technology to tackle geopolitics.”
(Geo)politics may these days have been rebranded as “misinformation.”
But otherwise, little has changed.
Protect the First Amendment: Impeach Joe Biden!
By Ron Paul | The Libertarian Institute | February 20, 2024
Protecting democracy and the Constitution from Donald Trump and the “MAGA extremists” is a major theme of President [Joe] Biden’s reelection campaign. As is often the case in American politics, President Biden is just as, if not more, guilty of posing an “existential threat” to the Constitution as those he smears as “extremists.” For example, President Biden and members of his administration have waged a campaign to undermine the First Amendment by “encouraging” companies to suppress the expression of “unapproved” views online.
The latest example of the administration trying to get a private internet company to censor Americans may be the most outrageous of all. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan recently released a series of emails between Biden administration officials and Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer. The government officials wanted Amazon to remove from its online catalog books containing “misinformation” regarding the safety and effectiveness of covid vaccines, meaning anything questioning the government’s pro-vaccine propaganda.
While Amazon did try to push back some against the administration, it did remove at least one “anti-vaccine” book from its online catalog. Amazon also manipulated its search results to make sure books expressing skepticism of vaccines were buried under books touting the pro-vaccine line. The company probably hoped that by “burying” these “dissident” books Amazon could make the administration happy without actually removing all books that question the covid vaccines. The company also promised the administration that it would expand use of a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) warning for books promoting “anti-vaccine” narratives.
Some libertarians say that Amazon should not be criticized for its decisions. These libertarians point out that, as a private company, Amazon has the right to decide what books to sell and also has the right to decide to make it difficult to find books expressing viewpoints the company finds dangerous or distasteful. This is true but ignores one important fact: Amazon’s decision to suppress books critical of covid vaccines was not done to attract consumers who would not shop at a site that sells “anti-vaccine propaganda” or “conspiracy theories.” Instead, Amazon acted at the behest of government officials who were seeking to prohibit Americans from accessing alternative views.
Amazon may have been eager to cooperate with the government to avoid being subjected to antitrust litigation. At the very time the administration was demanding Amazon suppress covid dissidents, President Biden was preparing to appoint Lina Khan, an advocate for antitrust litigation against Amazon, to lead the Federal Trade Commission.
It is clear that the U.S. government has been a major spreader of covid disinformation, while those challenging the government’s pro-mask, pro-vax, and pro-lockdown propaganda have been the truth-tellers. Covid is an example of why protecting the First Amendment is vital to protecting not just liberty, but also our prosperity and health.
Congress should prioritize its investigation into the Biden administration’s efforts to silence Americans because of their views. Congress should then impeach all high-level federal officials, including President Biden, who took action to violate Americans’ First Amendment rights.
US democracy in crisis as election looms
By Uriel Araujo | February 19, 2024
American doctor Marty Makary, a John Hopkins University surgeon and professor, has claimed Joe Biden is undergoing “cognitive decline right in front of our eyes”, during an interview with conservative TV channel Fox News. Dr. Makary is not the only one to have noticed – as he says: “it’s not really a medical diagnosis as much as it is obvious to even a lawyer who essentially made the diagnosis in this report of age-related dementia… It’s very obvious how he’s performing today versus, say, five years ago, and it’s sad, really.”
More importantly, Makary is not the only voice saying that out loud, the said lawyer being attorney Robert Hur, who, on February 5, published a report on Biden’s controversial case (while he was Barack Obama’s vice president) of illegal storage and disclosure of US classified documents pertaining to American military and foreign policy in Afghanistan and other national security issues – the documents were recovered by FBI agents from Biden’s home in Delaware and private offices of his. Hur oversaw the 2023/2024 investigation into this alleged mishandling of classified documents, and, in his aforementioned report, he famously justified his decision to not recommend prosecution of Biden thusly: “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory… It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him – by then a former president well into his eighties – of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
According to the same document, the US president could not remember when exactly his one son died. Ronny Jackson, Biden’s former personal physician, has also stated the president should pass a battery of cognitive health exams before running in the next presidential election.
In what appeared to be a collective case of “pluralistic ignorance”, also known in social psychology as collective illusion, for a while, everyone could in fact notice that the emperor is senile, while mistakenly believing that (almost) no one else did – even though this has been the subject of memes and tweets for years in face of Biden’s lapses and often incoherent speech visible in widely shared clips. Such was the case until now, when the topic is making national headlines almost everyday.
According to a NBC poll, 76% of US voters now have concerns about Biden being physically and mentally fit for the presidency. Less than half of voters had similar concerns about Trump’s mental and physical health, which, in any case, is still a quite large number. Unlike the incumbent president, Trump does not display obvious signs of senility but the man is 77 years old nonetheless (Biden being 81 years old). Again, it is quite remarkable that the political system of a “thriving” democratic superpower, in both the Republican and Democrat parties, simply cannot find viable alternatives to such over-aged politicians. The Democrats have to go with Biden, no matter how senile he is or how much his family is tangled up in Ukrainian controversies and, likewise, Trump remains the Republican favorite, even with all the coup attempt accusations and the several legal problems he currently faces. His recent arrests (on March 2023 in New York and on August 24 in Georgia) are, in any case, largely seen as politically motivated. All of that certainly undermines the credibility of the US institutions. Things will likely get worse, as the election looms.
US journalist Lee Fang writes that, by persisting on the ballot, Biden has in fact “effectively preempted the possibility of a credible Democratic challenger mounting a traditional bid for the nomination.” Moreover, should he abruptly exit the race for whatever reason within the next eight months, Fang speculates, then, voters arguably will have no direct say in his replacement because, in this scenario, Democratic National Committee (DNC) officials, “including lobbyists for companies like Google and UnitedHealth,” could “ultimately determine the party’s nominee.” Far from being a “solution” to a possible crisis, such a scenario could bring about further complications. This happened in 1968, when convention delegates (not voters) selected the Democratic presidential nominee, who was then-vice president Hubert Humphrey. The convention faced protests and riots while Humphrey won the nomination “without running as a candidate in a single primary.”
The overall US political crisis is also a crisis of its federalism: there is no unified national legislation on election procedures, there being different rules for each state. This brought chaos and uncertainty in the aftermath of the 2000 elections, when several Representatives filed objections to the Florida electoral votes. At the time, George W. Bush, like Donald Trump in 2016 (and like 3 other US presidents before them) won the election even though he actually lost the popular vote, due to the complexities of the US Electoral College.
As I wrote, Biden’s own inauguration, in January 2020, was not free from concerns about a major political crisis or even a coup, taking place, with Washington DC on high alert in the aftermath of the January 6 pro-Trump riot at the Capitol. Back then, there was a large nationwide political “conspiracy” to prevent Trump from being re-elected, as a 2021 Time magazine article detailed, with “shadow campaigners” getting states “to change voting systems and laws”, and recruiting “millions of people to vote by mail for the first time” (actually “half the electors”, in a “revolution in how people vote”). It is no wonder, then, that by June 2023 a third of US Americans had doubts about the 2020 election result itself.
The 2020 US presidential election was a peculiar one – and one should not expect the 2024 to be any different. Considering the unprecedented ongoing Texas border crisis, yet another instance of the federalist “contract” being questioned, with calls for secession on the rise, this year’s elections should in fact be even more “interesting” than the previous ones. Washington views itself as the champion of democracy worldwide. Domestically, however, things are not going smoothly.
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What is the Israeli Lobby in Australia Doing in Interfaith Dialogue?
By Ali Kazak | Dissident Voice | October 11, 2015
For years Israel and its lobby around the world have been trying to normalise their relations with Arabs and Muslims without solving the Palestine Question.
One of the methods they resorted to in the last few years is using human rights and community organizations such as interfaith dialogue and Multiculturalism to achieve this objective and to: isolate the Palestinians, marginalise the Palestine question, end Israel’s isolation, and prevent criticism of Israel, knowing that these organisations will be the first to stand against Israel’s violations, racial and religious discrimination.
The group responsible for this task in Australia is The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC); its Director of International & Community Affairs, Jeremy Jones is in charge of lobbying religious community organizations, specifically Muslims and Christians. Consequently he convened the Faith Communities for Reconciliation, founding participant in the Australian Partnership of Religious Organisations and the Australian National Dialogue of Christians, Muslims & Jews.
AIJAC is a private political propaganda group. It is recognised as the main Israeli lobby in Australia. It coordinates its activities and works intimately with the Israeli embassy in Canberra and different institutions in Israel. It is privately funded by some Jewish businessmen. It monitors closely Australian politicians, the media, ethnic and religious groups, (especially Arabs and Muslims), unions and academics on their stands towards Israel and the Palestine question. … continue
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- New Research: South Australia’s Mid-Holocene Sea Surface Temperatures Were 4°C Warmer Than Today
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- Destructive Green New Deal: German Energy And Metal Group Warns Of Drastic Crisis
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