Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Case of 14-Year-Old Vaccinated for COVID Against His Will Headed to North Carolina Supreme Court

By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | May 28, 2024

The North Carolina Supreme Court on May 23 agreed to hear the case of a Guilford County teenager who was given a COVID-19 vaccine against his will and without parental consent in August 2021, according to Carolina Journal.

The court’s decision to take up the case comes after a North Carolina appeals court ruled against the teen and his mother in March, upholding a lower court’s dismissal of their lawsuit.

Tanner Smith, then 14 years old, was instructed to get tested for COVID-19 at a Guilford County Schools vaccination site in order to continue playing football.

Despite Smith’s objections and the lack of parental consent, clinic workers administered a dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, which at the time was available only under  emergency use authorization (EUA).

In its unanimous ruling against Smith and his mother, Emily Happel, the appeals court found that the federal Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act shielded the defendants — Guilford County Board of Education and Old North State Medical Society — from liability in the lawsuit.

Commenting on the case, attorney Ray Flores, senior outside counsel for Children’s Health Defense, emphasized its significance for parental rights and the scope of the PREP Act’s liability shield.

“The North Carolina Supreme Court is the highest court so far to review parental rights vis-à-vis the PREP Act,” he told The Defender.

Flores argued that while the PREP Act is a “turbo-charged product liability immunity statute,” it should not shield “willful misconduct, fraud, breach of contract, undisclosed ingredients, false advertising — and certainly must not continue to abolish parental rights.”

Court recognized ‘egregious’ conduct but was ‘constrained’ by PREP Act

On August 19, 2021, Guilford County Schools sent a letter to Smith’s mother and stepfather about a “recent COVID-19 cluster” involving his football teammates. The letter recommended Smith report for a COVID-19 test to continue participating on the team.

The letter stated that testing would occur at Northwest Guilford High School on August 20, 2021, and that Old North State Medical Society would conduct the testing.

When Smith arrived at the testing site, workers gave him a form to fill out, which he believed to be related to the COVID-19 test.

Unbeknownst to Smith and his family, the site also operated as a COVID-19 vaccination clinic. Clinic workers attempted to contact Smith’s mother to obtain consent for administering the vaccine but were unsuccessful.

Despite the lack of parental consent and Tanner’s own objections, one of the clinic workers instructed another to “give it to him anyway,” and Tanner was injected with a dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

In August 2022, Emily Happel and Tanner Smith sued the Guilford County Board of Education and Old North State Medical Society, alleging battery and violations of their constitutional rights.

The plaintiffs argued that administering the COVID-19 vaccine without consent violated Tanner’s bodily autonomy rights and Emily’s parental rights under the North Carolina Constitution.

However, in February 2023, a lower court dismissed the case, citing the immunity provided by the federal PREP Act. The defendants argued that the PREP Act shielded them from liability for claims related to the administration of covered countermeasures, such as the COVID-19 vaccine, during a declared public health emergency.

The North Carolina Court of Appeals’ March decision affirmed the trial court’s dismissal of the lawsuit.

In its opinion, the court acknowledged the “egregious” nature of the conduct alleged in the case but found itself “constrained” by the broad immunity provided by the PREP Act.

The court held that both the Guilford County Board of Education and Old North State Medical Society were covered persons under the PREP Act and that the immunity applied to claims related to the administration of the COVID-19 vaccine.

The court noted that the PREP Act preempted state laws, including North Carolina’s statute requiring parental consent for EUA vaccines to minors.

‘We will win in the end’

Following the Court of Appeals decision, Emily Happel and Tanner Smith petitioned the North Carolina Supreme Court to hear their case.

The plaintiffs contended that the lower courts’ decisions have rendered North Carolina’s parental consent statute “totally useless” and “a law of aspiration, with no consequence for its blatant violation.”

David “Steven” Walker, attorney for the plaintiffs, wrote that the case:

“… involves legal principles of major significance to the jurisprudence of the State — the interplay between duty of the courts of North Carolina to remedy constitutional and other legal violations and a federal law that defendants purport forecloses that opportunity. …

“The trial court and the Court of Appeals interpreted the PREP Act so broadly as to shield nearly every act, no matter how egregious, from any legal consequence.”

On May 23, 2024, the North Carolina Supreme Court agreed to take up the case, focusing solely on the specific issue from Happel and Smith’s appeal concerning “Whether the trial court and the Court of Appeals erred when they determined that the PREP Act provided immunity to the defendants for constitutional violations and pre-empted all state law claims.”

The court’s decision to hear the case sets the stage for a potential landmark ruling on the scope of the PREP Act and its impact on state laws protecting parental rights.

Eight Republican members of the North Carolina House of Representatives filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs, urging the Supreme Court to hear the case.

The legislators, represented by attorney B. Tyler Brooks of the Thomas More Society, argued that they have a “special interest in protecting the fundamental rights of the parents they represent and for whom the General Assembly has recently enacted legislation on the very subject embraced by this appeal.”

The law in question, N.C. Gen. Stat. § 90-21.5(a1), specifically prohibits the conduct of the clinic workers in this case. It states:

“Notwithstanding any other provision of law to the contrary, a health care provider shall obtain written consent from a parent or legal guardian prior to administering any vaccine that has been granted emergency use authorization and is not yet fully approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration to an individual under 18 years of age.”

Flores said the legislators’ “expertly drafted” brief “dismantles the lower courts’ finding that PREP extinguishes applicable state law” and that its “mere filing … reaffirms my conviction that we will win in the end.”

Flores is no stranger to challenging the PREP Act’s liability shield. In May 2023, he sued the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) on behalf of George Watts, Jr., a 24-year-old who died from myocarditis complications after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

Flores argued the DOD engaged in willful misconduct by continuing to distribute the EUA version of the vaccine after the FDA granted full approval to Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine.

EUA vaccines have a lower bar for safety and effectiveness. Watts delayed taking the vaccine until after FDA approval of Comirnaty, but the DOD did not make the approved vaccine available.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

May 30, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

Global Elections Face Growing Censorship Threat: The Rise of “Prebunking”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | May 28, 2024

The feverish search for the next “disinformation” silver bullet continues as several elections are being held worldwide.

Censorship enthusiasts, who habitually use the terms “dis/misinformation” to go after lawful online speech that happens to not suit their political or ideological agenda, now feel that debunking has failed them.

(That can be yet another euphemism for censorship – when “debunking” political speech means removing information those directly or indirectly in control of platforms don’t like.)

Enter “prebuking” – and regardless of how risky, especially when applied in a democracy, this is, those who support the method are not swayed even by the possibility it may not work.

Prebunking is a distinctly dystopian notion that the audiences and social media users can be “programmed” (proponents use the term, “inoculated”) to reject information as untrustworthy.

To achieve that, speech must be discredited and suppressed as “misinformation” (via warnings from censors) before, not after it is seen by people.

“A radical playbook” is what some legacy media reports call this, at the same time implicitly justifying it as a necessity in a year that has been systematically hyped up as particularly dangerous because of elections taking place around the globe.

The Washington Post disturbingly sums up prebunking as exposing people to “weakened doses of misinformation paired with explanations (…) aimed at helping the public develop ‘mental antibodies’.”

This type of manipulation is supposed to steer the “unwashed masses” toward making the right (aka, desired by the “prebunkers”) conclusions, as they decide who to vote for.

Even as this is seen by opponents as a threat to democracy, it is being adopted widely – “from Arizona to Taiwan (with the EU in between)” – under the pretext of actually protecting democracy.

Where there are governments and censorship these days, there’s inevitably Big Tech, and Google and Meta are mentioned as particularly involved in carrying out prebunking campaigns, notably in the EU.

Apparently Google will not be developing Americans’ “mental antibodies” ahead of the US vote in November – that might prove too controversial, at least at this point in time.

The risk-reward ratio here is also unappealing.

“There aren’t really any actual field experiments showing that it (prebunking) can change people’s behavior in an enduring way,” said Cornell University psychology professor Gordon Pennycook.

May 30, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Former Biden Homeland Security Official Criticizes Free Speech, Cites “Disinformation” Impact on Election Security

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | May 28, 2024

A former Biden administration official has declared that disinformation around elections is “becoming the norm rather than the exception.”

Samantha Vinograd, until recently of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), also asserted that these days, because of what she considers to be election disinformation, “there is an unprecedented level of physical threats” while the US information ecosystem is “incredibly vulnerable.”

Dramatic and alarmist statements like this may be necessary to justify the rest of Vinograd’s message, which in effect attacks free speech, as it is legally protected in the US.

Appearing on CBS, Vinograd – who was until last December Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention – warned that the First Amendment might protect free speech, but that engaging in free speech is apparently not “cost-free.”

The Face the Nation hosts framed the problem as, essentially, federal laws (the Constitution) protecting speech, but the damage being done at the state level – and then what states, who organize elections, can do to fix that “problem.”

Spreading lies about candidates, as they put it, was given as an example of legal, protected speech becoming an issue by having the ability to create “a threat at the state level” – and asked Vinograd who she thought was supposed to correct the situation.

Vinograd – who has been bouncing between various administrations (including those of Bush and Obama, and private companies like Goldman Sachs and Stripe before landing at Biden’s DHS) – seemed to suggest that Big Tech (i.e., social media companies) should be assisting the government.

The federal government said Vinograd, “should not be the omnipresent fact checker for the American people.”

And even though, according to her, the government is debunking information about elections that is deemed to be inaccurate, social media companies “should be thinking about what kinds of election disinformation violate their terms of service.”

It’s difficult not to take this as a not-so-veiled added pressure on social platforms to not only continue with censoring content but perhaps expand it in terms of what qualifies as election disinformation.

Either way, Vinograd is in favor of enlisting “every American” to help out as well (although it is not clear in what specific way), invoking even the concept of patriotic duty.

And Vinograd did not miss the opportunity to assert that election misinformation threats are now of such magnitude as to present a national security issue.

May 28, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

The Drive for War

By Craig Murray | May 18, 2024

The collective shrug with which the Western media and political class noted the attempted assassination of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico has been telling.

Can you imagine the outrage and emotion that would have been expressed by Western powers if not Fico but a pro-Ukraine, anti-Russian leader within the EU had been attacked? The new orders for weapons that would have been presented to the arms manufacturers, the troops that would have been deployed, the sabres that would have been rattled?

Instead we have the media telling us that Fico opposed sending arms to Ukraine and opposed threatening Russia. We are told he did not accept the mainstream narrative on Covid vaccinations. The media do not quite say he deserved to be shot, but they come very, very close.

Fellow EU leaders followed correct form in making statements of shock and disgust at the attack on Fico, but they were formal and perfunctory. The “not actually one of us” message was very clear.

There are now an ordered set of neoliberal beliefs to which anybody in a Western nation participating in public affairs must subscribe, or they are beyond the pale.

Not to subscribe to all of these beliefs makes you a “populist”, a “conspiracy theorist”, a “Putin puppet” or a “useful idiot”.

These are some of the “key beliefs”:

No. 1) Wealth is only created by a small number of ultra-wealthy capitalists on whom the employment of everybody else ultimately depends.
No. 2) The laws governing financial structures must therefore tend to concentrate wealth to these individuals, so that they may deploy it as they choose.
No. 3) State-created currency must only be concentrated in and distributed to private financial institutions.
No. 4) Public spending is always less efficient than private spending.
No. 5) Russia, China and Iran pose an existential threat to the West. That comprises both an economic threat and a physical, military threat.
No. 6) Colonialism was a boon to the world, bringing economic development, trade and education to people of inferior cultures.
No. 7) Islam is a threat to Western values and to world development.
No. 8) Israel is a necessary project for spreading Western values to the uncivilised Middle East.
No. 9) Security necessitates devoting very substantial resources to arms production and the waging of continual war.
No. 10) Nothing must threaten the military and arms industry interest. No battle against corruption or crime can override the need for the security military industrial complex to be completely unchallenged and internally supreme.

Dependent Orthodoxies

Within this architecture of belief, other orthodoxies hang dependent, such as the correct way to respond to a complex pandemic, or support for NATO and impunity for the security services. (Support for Israel is probably better portrayed as a dependent point, but with the subject of Gaza so prominent at the moment I have figuratively moved it into the main structure.)

Any deviation on any point of belief is a challenge to the entire system, and thus must be eradicated. You will note there is no room whatsoever, within this architecture of thought, for values like freedom of speech or freedom of assembly. They simply do not fit. Nor is it possible within this architecture to incorporate actual democracy, which would give people a choice of what to believe.

If you accept this architecture of thought, then you must argue that the genocide in Gaza is a good thing, and it threatens the entire structure if you state that it is not a good thing. That is why we have witnessed the spectacle of politicians defying and then repressing their own people, willing to place all of their political capital at the service of genocidal Zionism.

Words struggle to convey the horrors we have all seen from Gaza, and in no way does it lessen the terrible suffering nor the extent of the crime to observe that it has caused a major rift in the neoliberal belief system which cannot be hidden from the people.

Gaza has ramifications leading to questioning throughout the system. Why is Tik Tok being banned, to stop people getting information on Gaza? Why is it a problem that the platform is owned by China?

What has China done that makes it an enemy? China has no military designs on the West. Of recent purchases most of us have made of physical goods, a high proportion have come from China. Why is an important trade partner an “enemy”?

Why is Russia our enemy? The notion that the Russian army is going to land on the Wash is utterly implausible. The Russian state, over centuries and wildly differing regimes, has never had the slightest desire to invade the British Isles. In the U.K., under various governments, for almost three centuries charlatans have been claiming a threat of Russian invasion to justify higher defence expenditure.

Why the need to have “enemies” at all?

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. His coverage is entirely dependent on reader support.

May 28, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

Remembering Those Who Died for Our Government

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | May 28, 2024

Each Memorial Day, countless Americans recite the standard mantra that has been inculcated within their minds from the first grade of the public (i.e., government) schools to which their parents were forced to send them: American soldiers who died in America’s wars died to protect our freedoms and defend our country.

Each Memorial Day, it is worth reminding ourselves that such is simply not the case. American soldiers who died in those wars died for our government, not to protect our freedoms or our country.

And, yes, our government and our country are two separate and distinct entities, a phenomenon reflected by the Bill of Rights, which expressly protects our country from our government.

Afghanistan. The Taliban government never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. The reason that the U.S. government went to war against Afghanistan was that the Taliban regime refused to comply with President Bush’s unconditional extradition demand, which the Taliban regime had the right to do given that there was no extradition treaty between the United States and Afghanistan. Thus, U.S. soldiers who died in Afghanistan died for our government, not to protect our freedoms or our country.

Iraq. Iraq never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. Thus, U.S. soldiers died for our government, not to protect our freedoms or our country.

Vietnam. North Vietnam and the Vietcong never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. U.S. soldiers died for our government, not to protect our freedoms or our country.

Korea. North Korea never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. U.S. soldiers died for our government, not to protect our freedoms or our country.

World War II. While Japan did attack the United States, it was not with the intent of invading and conquering the United States. Japan’s aim was simply to knock out the U.S. Pacific Fleet to secure oil from the Dutch East Indies. The attack was a response to President Roosevelt’s oil embargo, whose aim was to provoke Japan into attacking the United States, as a “back door” to getting the U.S. embroiled in the European War against Germany, which the vast majority of Americans opposed. While a German victory over the United States in Europe combined with a Japanese victory in the Pacific might well have threatened people’s freedom here at home, it is worth reminding ourselves that American soldiers died as a result of FDR’s success in securing U.S. intervention into the war.

World War I. Germany never attacked or invaded the United States and had no interest in a war against the United States. President Wilson intervened in the European conflict with two war aims: make this the war to end all wars and to make the world safe for democracy. Thus, U.S. soldiers died for our government, not to protect our freedoms or our country.

Spanish-American War. The Spanish Empire never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. Thus, U.S. soldiers died for their government, not to protect our freedoms or our country.

It’s also worth reminding ourselves that the government for which U.S. soldiers have died conscripted many of them to fight in the war in which they died. When a government has to force people to fight its wars, that’s a pretty good sign that soldiers have actually died for nothing.

May 28, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

As Ukrainian casualties soar, EU will move to conscript European youth to fight, warns Hungarian FM

Remix News | May 27, 2024

Ukraine’s high causality rates combined with its struggle to conscript its own population means the EU will increasingly move to conscript European youth, mostly in the geographical proximity of Ukraine, to fight against Russia, said Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó following a meeting with EU foreign ministers.

“Ukrainian casualties are becoming more and more unbearable, Ukrainian men are not being allowed out of Ukraine, and now they want to conscript European youth into the war. And obviously, as the escalation hits this neighborhood first, one can almost clearly hear the argument that the soldiers should be sent from the geographical proximity first. All this means that they want to send Central European youth, including Hungarian youth, to the war with mandatory European conscription,” said Szijjártó during an interview with Hungarian media.

The Hungarian foreign minister said he would be firmly opposed to any efforts to institute a European mandatory conscription effort, stating: “Hands off Central Europeans, hands off Hungarian youth, we will not allow Hungarian youth to be involved in the war, because this is not our war.”

Szijjártó did not disclose which foreign ministers or member states are exploring the possibility of a European conscription effort, but recently, several countries have said they would consider sending their own troops to Ukraine if Russia had a breakthrough on the Ukrainian front, including France and more recently, the Baltic states.

However, a long-term goal of the left-liberal establishment in Brussels is the creation of an EU military force, including removing the decision-making process about defense from member states and centralizing it in Brussels. Under such a proposal, a potential conscription effort could arise that applies to all EU member states.

Szijjártó described an extremely intense atmosphere at the Council of Foreign Ministers in Brussels before the European Parliament elections. He stated that the mood turned sour when those present began to talk about the release of €6.5 billion for Ukraine, which the Hungarian foreign minister rejected, saying it would only escalate the war. However, his position came under extreme pressure from a number of other countries.

“And there was a big mess here. The German, Lithuanian, Irish, Polish and other colleagues fell against me in this matter, but this could not shake our position, despite the shouting of Europe’s pro-war politicians,” he said.

“They think that if they shout from many directions, then I will say that it is good, it is fine. However, they should already know us well enough to know this won’t happen,” he added.

May 27, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Record numbers of ‘external and internal enemies’ threaten EU – Macron

RT | May 26, 2024

The EU is facing a record number of “external and internal enemies,” who pose an existential threat to the bloc, French President Emmanuel Macron has said, doubling down on a warning he’d given earlier, that “our Europe” could end up dying.

Macron made the remarks while speaking alongside Germany’s head of state, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, on the first of his three-day state visit. The two attended the Festival of Democracy, held in Berlin’s government quarter, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the country’s constitution.

“I think that we are experiencing a moment in our Europe which is existential because I really believe that our Europe can die,” Macron stated, referring to a keynote speech he’d delivered in April.

The French president urged a vote for pro-EU forces in the upcoming European elections, warning the bloc has “never had so many enemies inside and outside” as it has now. The purported internal enemies are apparently European nationalists, with their rise raising questions about democracy itself, Macron asserted.

“There is a form of fascination with authoritarianism which is born in our own democracies … which also feeds nationalism and other extremes on our continent,” he claimed.

Macron painted a grim picture of “nationalists” entering government, alleging that they would have failed to tackle Covid-19 and shown “no capacity to respond to migration challenges,” climate change issues, and so on.

“We would have abandoned backing Ukraine against Russia, which all the nationalists in our countries support. And, therefore, history would have not been the same,” the president alleged.

“For all these reasons, it is important to vote in the Europeans,” he concluded.

The call was backed by Steinmeier, who said that the mere fact that Macron had shown up at the Festival of Democracy was somehow “a signal that we need an alliance of democrats in Europe.”

May 26, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Russophobia, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Massie Taunts AIPAC After Demolishing Primary Challengers

By Tyler Durden | Zerohedge | May 22, 2024

Despite having been targeted by the most powerful, pro-Israel political organization operating in America, libertarian-minded Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie stomped his two Republican primary challengers on Tuesday — and then used social media to mock his Israel-first detractors.

Massie cruised to victory, amassing 76% of the vote, while his two would-be vanquishers roughly split the difference, with Michael McGinnis edging Eric Deters by about 1%. With no Democratic opponent even bothering to take on Massie in November, he’s set up for a sixth term representing Kentucky’s 4th congressional district, which stretches all along the northernmost part of the state.

“Tonight’s victory is a referendum on thousands of independent votes I have cast in Washington DC on behalf of Kentucky’s 4th District,” said Massie.

“I’ve consistently upheld the Constitution by voting for and sponsoring legislation to support the right to keep and bear arms, the right to free speech, freedom of religion and the right to privacy. I’ve also fought against endless foreign wars, foreign aid and inflationary policies, regardless of who is in the White House.

Earlier this month, the independent campaign-spending arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) announced that it was pouring $300,000 into advertisements on Fox television affiliates across the Bluegrass State. The over-the-top ads said, “Israel, the Holy Land [are] under attack by Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah… and Congressman Tom Massie.”

Massie has repeatedly stood out as one of the very few Republicans willing to defy the wishes of the potent pro-Israel lobby. In recent months, he voted against the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would make universities tolerating unacceptable statements about Israel targets of federal civil rights-based punishments. He also voted against the latest, $14.3 billion aid package, noting that “Israel has a lower debt-to-GDP ratio than the United States.”

After Massie’s lopsided win was apparent, AIPAC tried to downplay the outcome, saying that, rather than trying to oust him in the primary, the group wanted to damage him statewide — clearly in anticipation of a possible Massie 2026 Senate run to take the seat of retiring Senate Majority Leader and quintessential establishment swamp creature Mitch McConnell.

Massie said AIPAC was guilty of “election campaign malpractice.” Referring to the $400,000 total that AIPAC had spent against him recently, he told McClatchy DC, “I’m laughing because it has the same effect as lighting it on fire and burning it… What it could do is up my name ID statewide, but two years from now nobody’s going to remember what the ad was about.”

He also deftly turned AIPAC’s announcement of its attack-blitz into a fundraising opportunity. As word of AIPAC’s  campaign spread on social media and via ZeroHedge and other outlets, more than 1,200 people contributed $101,000 to his coffers in just four days.

On Tuesday evening, Massie seized on AIPAC’s defensive tweet, drawing attention to the fact that it had been “ratio’d” by the Twitterverse.

See also:

System Update | December 2023

May 24, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Video, Wars for Israel | , | Leave a comment

The Closing of the Internet Mind

The definition of online freedom has been depressingly constricted over the last thirty years

By Aaron Kheriaty, Debbie Lerman, Andrew Lowenthal, and Jeffrey Tucker | The American Mind | May 22, 2024

You have surely heard that your search results on Google (with 92 percent share of the search market) reflect not your curiosities and needs but someone or something else’s views on what you need to know. That’s hardly a secret.

And on Facebook, you are likely inundated by links to official sources to correct any errors you might carry in your head, as well as links to corrections to posts as made by any number of fact-checking organizations.

You have likely also heard of YouTube videos being taken down, apps deleted from stores, and accounts being canceled across a variety of platforms.

You might have even adjusted your behavior in light of all of this. It is part of the new culture of Internet engagement. The line you cannot cross is invisible. You are like a dog with an electric shock collar. You have to figure it out on your own, which means exercising caution when you post, pulling back on hard claims that might shock, paying attention to media culture to discern what is sayable and what is not, and generally trying to avoid controversy as best you can in order to earn the privilege of not being canceled.

Despite all the revelations regarding the Censorship Industrial Complex, and the wide involvement of government in these efforts, plus the resulting lawsuits that claim that this is all censorship, the walls are clearly closing in further by the day.

Users are growing accustomed to it, for fear of losing their accounts. For example, YouTube (which feeds 55 percent of all video content online) allows three strikes before your account is deleted permanently. One strike is devastating and two existential. You are frozen in place and forced to relinquish everything–including your ability to earn a living if your content is monetized–if you make one or two wrong moves.

No one needs to censor you at that point. You censor yourself.

It was not always this way. It was not even supposed to be this way.

It’s possible to trace the dramatic change from the past to present by following the trajectory of various Declarations that have been issued over the years. The tone was set at the dawn of the World Wide Web in 1996 by digital guru, Grateful Dead lyricist, and Harvard University fellow John Perry Barlow, who died in 2018.

Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, somewhat ironically written in Davos, Switzerland, is still hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that he founded. The manifesto waxes lyrical about the liberatory, open future of internet freedom:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

And so on it went with a heady, expansive vision–tinged perhaps with a dash of sixties utopian anarchism–that shaped the ethos which drove the building of the Internet in the early days. It appeared to a whole generation of coders and content providers that a new world of freedom had been born that would shepherd in a new era of freedom more generally, with growing knowledge, human rights, creative freedom, and borderless connection of everyone to literature, facts, and truth emerging organically from a crowd-sourced process of engagement.

Nearly a decade and a half later, by 2012, that idea was fully embraced by the main architects of the emergent app economy and the explosion of smartphone use across the world. The result was the Declaration of Internet Freedom that went live in July of 2012 and garnered a great deal of press attention at the time. Signed by the EFF, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, and other liberty-focused organizations, it read:

To be sure, it was not quite as sweeping and visionary as the Barlow original but maintained the essence, putting free expression as the first principle with the lapidary phrase: “Don’t censor the Internet.” It might have stopped there, but given the existing threats coming from growing industrial cartels and the stored-data marketplace, it also pushed openness, innovation, and privacy as first principles.

Again, this outlook defined an era and elicited broad agreement. “Information freedom supports the peace and security that provides a foundation for global progress,” said Hillary Clinton in an endorsement of the freedom principle in 2010. The 2012 Declaration was neither right-wing nor left-wing. It encapsulated the core of what it meant to favor freedom on the Internet, exactly as the title suggests.

If you go to the site internetdeclaration.org now, your browser will not reveal any of its contents. The secure certificate is dead. If you bypass the warning, you will find yourself forbidden from accessing any of the contents. The tour through Archive.org shows that the last living presentation of the site was February 2018.

This occurred three years after Donald Trump publicly advocated that “in some places” we have to talk about “closing up the Internet.” He got his wish, but it came after him personally following his election in 2016. The very free speech about which he made fun turned out to be rather important to him and his cause.

Two years into the Trump presidency, precisely as the censorship industry started coalescing into full operation, the site of the Declaration site broke down and eventually disappeared.

Fast forward a decade from the writing of the Internet Declaration of Freedom. The year is 2022 and we had been through a rough two years of account takedowns, particularly against those who doubted the wisdom of lockdowns or vaccine mandates. The White House revealed on April 22, 2022 a Declaration for the Future of the Internet. It comes complete with a parchment-style presentation and a large capital letter in old-fashioned script. The word “freedom” is removed from the title and added only as a part of the word salad that follows in the text.

Signed by 60 nations, the new Declaration was released to great fanfare, including a White House press release. The signatory nations were all NATO-aligned while excluding others. The signatories are: Albania, Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cabo Verde, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Estonia, the European Commission, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Maldives, Malta, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Moldova, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger, North Macedonia, Palau, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and Uruguay.

The core of the new declaration is very clear and represents a good encapsulation of the essence of the structures that govern content today: “The Internet should operate as a single, decentralized network of networks – with global reach and governed through the multistakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.”

The term “stakeholder” (as in “stakeholder capitalism”) became popular in the nineties as distinct from “shareholder” meaning a partial owner. A stakeholder is not an owner or even a consumer but a party or institution with a strong interest in the outcome of the decision-making by the owners, whose rights might need to be overridden in the broader interests of everyone. In this way, the term came to describe an amorphous group of influential third parties that deserve a say in the management of institutions and systems. A “multistakeholder” approach is how civil society is brought inside the tent, with financing and seeming influence, and told that they matter as an incentive to woke-wash their outlooks and operations.

Using that linguistic fulcrum, part of the goal of the new Declaration is explicitly political: “Refrain from using the Internet to undermine the electoral infrastructure, elections and political processes, including through covert information manipulation campaigns.” From this admonition we can conclude that the new Internet is structured to discourage “manipulation campaigns” and even goes so far as to “foster greater social and digital inclusion within society, bolster resilience to disinformation and misinformation, and increase participation in democratic processes.”

Following the latest in censorship language, every form of top-down blockage and suppression is now justified in the name of fostering inclusion (that is, “DEI,” as in Diversity [three mentions], Equity [two mentions], and Inclusion [five mentions]) and stopping dis- and mis-information, language identical to that invoked by the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the rest of the industrial complex that operates to stop information spread.

This agency was created in the waning days of the Obama administration and approved by Congress in 2018, supposedly to protect our digital infrastructure against cyberattacks from computer viruses and nefarious foreign actors. But less than one year into its existence, CISA decided that our election infrastructure was part of our critical infrastructure (thereby asserting Federal control over elections, which are typically handled by the states). Furthermore, part of protecting our election infrastructure included protecting what CISA director Jen Easterly called our “cognitive infrastructure.”

Easterly, who formerly worked at Tailored Access Operations, a top secret cyber warfare unit at the National Security Agency, coined the queen of all Orwellian euphemisms: “cognitive infrastructure,” which refers to the thoughts inside your head. This is precisely what the government’s counter-disinformation apparatus, headed by people like Easterly, are attempting to control. True to this stated aim, CISA pivoted by 2020 to become the nerve center of the government’s censorship apparatus–the agency through which all government and “stakeholder” censorship demands are funneled to social media companies.

Now consider what we’ve learned about Wikipedia, which is owned by Wikimedia, the former CEO of which was Katherine Maher, now slated to be the head CEO of National Public Radio. She has been a consistent and public defender of censorship, even suggesting that the First Amendment is “the number one challenge.”

The co-founder of Wikipedia, Joseph Sanger, has said he suspects that she turned Wikipedia into an intelligence-operated platform. “We know that there is a lot of backchannel communication,” he said in an interview. “I think it has to be the case that the Wikimedia Foundation now, probably governments, probably the CIA, have accounts that they control, in which they actually exert their influence. And it’s fantastic, in a bad way, that she actually comes out against the system for being ‘free and open.’ When she says that she’s worked with government to shut down what they consider ‘misinformation,’ that, in itself, means that it’s no longer free and open.”

What happened to Wikipedia, which all search engines privilege among all results, has befallen nearly every prominent venue on the Internet. The Elon Musk takeover of Twitter has proven to be aberrant and highly costly in terms of advertising dollars, and hence elicits vast opposition from the venues that are on the other side. That his renamed platform X even exists at all seems to run contrary to every wish of the controlled and controlling establishment today.

We have traveled a very long way from the vision of John Perry Barlow in 1996, who imagined a cyberworld in which governments were not involved to one in which governments and their “multi stakeholder partners” are in charge of “a rules-based global digital economy.” In the course of this complete reversal, the Declaration of Internet Freedom became the Declaration for the Future of the Internet, with the word freedom consigned to little more than a passing reference.

The transition from one to the other was–like bankruptcy–gradual at first and then all at once. We’ve traveled rather quickly from “you [governments and corporate interests] are not welcome among us” to a “single, decentralized network of networks” managed by “governments and relevant authorities” including “academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others” to create a “rules-based digital economy.”

And that is the core of the Great Reset affecting the main tool by which today’s information channels have been colonized by the corporatist complex.

May 23, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

From COVID-19 to Campus Protests: How the Police State Muzzles Free Speech

By John & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | May 21, 2024

The police state does not want citizens who know their rights.

Nor does the police state want citizens prepared to exercise those rights.

This year’s graduates are a prime example of this master class in compliance. Their time in college has been set against a backdrop of crackdowns, lockdowns and permacrises ranging from the government’s authoritarian COVID-19 tactics to its more recent militant response to campus protests.

Born in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, these young people have been raised without any expectation of privacy in a technologically-driven, mass surveillance state; educated in schools that teach conformity and compliance; saddled with a debt-ridden economy on the brink of implosion; made vulnerable by the blowback from a military empire constantly waging war against shadowy enemies; policed by government agents armed to the teeth ready and able to lock down the country at a moment’s notice; and forced to march in lockstep with a government that no longer exists to serve the people but which demands they be obedient slaves or suffer the consequences.

And now, when they should be empowered to take their rightful place in society as citizens who fully understand and exercise their right to speak truth to power, they are being censored, silenced and shut down.

Consider what happened recently in Charlottesville, Va., when riot police were called in to shut down campus protests at the University of Virginia staged by students and members of the community to express their opposition to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Palestine.

As the local newspaper reported, “State police sporting tactical gear and riot shields moved in on the demonstrators, using pepper spray and sheer force to disperse the group and arrest the roughly 15 or so at the camp, where for days students, faculty and community members had sang songs, read poetry and painted signs in protest of Israel’s ongoing war in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.”

What a sad turn-about for an institution which was founded as an experiment in cultivating an informed citizenry by Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, champion of the Bill of Rights, and the nation’s third president.

Unfortunately, the University of Virginia is not unique in its heavy-handed response to what have been largely peaceful anti-war protests. According to the Washington Post, more than 2300 people have been arrested for taking part in similar campus protests across the country.

These lessons in compliance, while expected, are what comes of challenging the police state.

Free speech can certainly not be considered “free” when expressive activities across the nation are being increasingly limited, restricted to so-called free speech zones, or altogether blocked.

Remember, the First Amendment gives every American the right to “petition his government for a redress of grievances.”

Along with the constitutional right to peacefully (and that means non-violently) assemble, the right to free speech allows us to challenge the government through protests and demonstrations and to attempt to change the world around us—for the better or the worse—through protests and counterprotests.

If citizens cannot stand out in the open and voice their disapproval of their government, its representatives and its policies without fearing prosecution, then the First Amendment with all its robust protections for free speech, assembly and the right to petition one’s government for a redress of grievances is little more than window-dressing on a store window—pretty to look at but serving little real purpose.

After all, living in a representative republic means that each person has the right to take a stand for what they think is right, whether that means marching outside the halls of government, wearing clothing with provocative statements, or simply holding up a sign.

That’s what the First Amendment is supposed to be about: it assures the citizenry of the right to express their concerns about their government to their government, in a time, place and manner best suited to ensuring that those concerns are heard.

Unfortunately, through a series of carefully crafted legislative steps and politically expedient court rulings, government officials have managed to disembowel this fundamental freedom, rendering it with little more meaning than the right to file a lawsuit against government officials.

In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, extremist speech, etc.

Clearly, the government has no interest in hearing what “we the people” have to say.

Yet if Americans are not able to peacefully assemble for expressive activity outside of the halls of government or on public roads on which government officials must pass, or on college campuses, the First Amendment has lost all meaning.

If we cannot stand peacefully outside of the Supreme Court or the Capitol or the White House, our ability to hold the government accountable for its actions is threatened, and so are the rights and liberties that we cherish as Americans.

And if we cannot proclaim our feelings about the government, no matter how controversial, on our clothing, or to passersby, or to the users of the world wide web, then the First Amendment really has become an exercise in futility.

The source of the protest shouldn’t matter. The politics of the protesters are immaterial.

To play politics with the First Amendment encourages a double standard that will see us all muzzled in the end.

The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the final link in the police state chain.

If ever there were a time for us to stand up for the right to speak freely, even if it’s freedom for speech we hate, the time is now.

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

May 23, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

America’s Constitutional State of Emergency

Perpetual Presidential Emergency Powers and the Undermining of the Constitutional Balance of Power

By Dennis Kucinich | The Kucinich Report | May 23, 2024

More than 23 years ago, George W. Bush, Jr. signed  Presidential Proclamation 7463 declaring that a “national emergency exists by reason of the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, New York, New York, and the Pentagon, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.”

The White House has demonstrated, in several administrations, both Democrat and Republican, “threat inflation” for the sake of spending endless money on wars, and manipulating fears to hold on to power to continue to spend endless money on even more wars in the ultimate protection racket.

As a result, the constitutional system of checks and balances is being obliterated in favor of an Imperial Presidency, and, as the Constitution is eroded, so too, are our liberties.

The recent chipping away at our First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights can be traced directly to the psychology of a “State of Emergency,” which licenses shredding of freedom.

Presidents no longer ask Congress for explicit permission to go to war, as the Constitution requires, under Article 1, Section 8.  Courts have held that once Congress appropriates money for wars, that is  tantamount to congressional approval.

The increased spending for war has militarized our culture, proliferates enemies, creates violence at home and abroad.

We must break this cycle of fear, the endless wars and the emergency powers for Presidents who are not accountable to the Congress, which is directly elected by the people.

Those of us who witnessed the events of 9/11, up close, or from a distance, will never forget the imminent danger, the fear, the grief, the loss, the uncertainty that gripped us in those days. Nor will we forget those whose lives were sacrificed, or those who gave their lives in service to humanity on that day, or those who died following long-term illnesses which began during and after the attacks 23 years ago.

That is why it may surprise some that on September 7, 2023, President Joe Biden proclaimed, “I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency previously declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.”  

23 years later and trillions upon trillions of dollars spent to “make us safer” and we are still in a “State of Emergency,”  facing the same terror threats?  

America has been in and continues to be in a State of Emergency which has endowed the Presidency with broad powers and undermined the Constitutional role of Congress, while placing presidential emergency declarations on par with congressional declarations of war, under Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.  Presidents from Bush, Jr., to Biden have all capitalized on declarations of a state of emergency.

Congress is a co-equal branch of government. America’s Founders did not design the Congress to be subordinate to the Presidency, but strong presidents and weak Congresses have created that condition.

According to Congressional Research Service (CRS), there are 106 laws which further empower the executive branch following a presidential declaration of a “National Emergency.”  The Brennan Center for Justice has identified a total of 136 expanded executive powers.  

The emergency powers may not have been used explicitly but their use is authorized once a “National Emergency” is declared.  Among the emergency powers of the President, (as cited by CRS) without a need for congressional permission:

  • Executive ability to detail members of the armed forces to foreign countries, without congressional approval.
  • Undertake military construction.
  • Carry out military construction with NATO funds.
  • Order “Ready Reserve” to active duty for two years, without their consent.
  • Additional penalties for “gathering, transmitting or losing defense information.”
  • Lift prohibition on infectious medical waste being dumped in the ocean.
  • Seize, shutdown or appropriate broadcast stations.
  • Suspend laws concerning production and transportation of chemical, biological  and “warfare agents.”

We live in a forever state of emergency, with forever wars, forever fears, forever siphoning off our tax dollars.

Remember:

–    The Bush Administration lied when it claimed that Iraq was behind 9/11,  but proceeded to characterize Iraqis as terrorists in an attempt to justify killing one million Iraqi citizens.

–    Since 9/11, over $8 trillion dollars of our $34 trillion dollar national debt is attributable to wars which never had to be fought, wars which put the lives of America’s brave sons and daughters on the line.

–    The United States shelved diplomacy in favor of weaponry as a means of international relations.

–    At present the USA spends close to one trillion dollars a year for supporting a war machine and that nearly 60% of all discretionary spending goes for preparation for war.

–    The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, (NIE) which was the (closely held) product of all US intelligence agencies, did not identify Iraq as a major threat, because it was not. The publicly available 2024 Annual Threat Assessment (ATA) of the U.S. Intelligence Community brings forth two paragraphs, out of a 41 page report, regarding “global terrorism.”

There was no discussion in the ATA of the basis for President Biden’s most recent declaration of a national emergency and the “continuing and immediate threats” even though the ATA report was being drafted at about the time that the President  continued the “National Emergency” in the name of a 23-year fight against “terrorism.”

The CATO Institute, whose pocket Constitution I carried with me during my years in Congress, suggests amending the National Emergencies Act to rein in Executive power by requiring congressional approval, and putting expiration dates on emergency powers.

Does the US have enemies?  Yes.  Should we be on our guard?  Yes.

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

We should also be vigilant against government manipulating our love of country, playing with our fears, in order to control us, or to use us to support the continued erosion of our US Constitution and advance the malevolent ambitions of the military industrial complex, of which President Eisenhower warned in 1961.

May 23, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism | | Leave a comment

Georgian PM accuses EU of ‘blackmailing’ him with assassination threat

Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze. © Tobias SCHWARZ / AFP
RT | May 23, 2024

Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has claimed that a European commissioner told him he could end up suffering the same fate as Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who survived an assassination attempt last week.

In a Facebook post on Thursday, Kobakhidze said that the unnamed commissioner warned him during a recent phone call that the West would take “a number of measures” against him if his government pressed ahead with a law requiring foreign NGOs in Georgia to disclose their funding.

“While listing these measures, he mentioned: ‘you see what happened to Fico, and you should be very careful’,” he wrote.

Fico was shot multiple times as he met with supporters outside a government meeting in the town of Handlova on May 15. He was rushed to hospital, underwent emergency surgery, and is currently recuperating from his injuries. His would-be assassin – a 71-year-old poet who allegedly disagreed with Fico’s suspension of military aid to Ukraine – has been charged with attempted murder.

Georgia’s parliament passed the ‘Transparency of Foreign Influence Act’ last week. The law requires NGOs, media outlets, and individuals receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as entities “promoting the interests of a foreign power” and disclose their donors.

While the act has been vetoed by Georgia’s pro-Western president, Salome Zourabichvili, parliament is expected to override the veto.

May 23, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »