The WHO lawyers are trying to play us, saying the nations are sovereign because they still make the laws. What the WHO omits saying is that under the Treaty and proposed IHR Amendments, nations will be forced to pass the laws that the WHO tells them to pass. Examples of this and other word games below.
First the treaty tells you that unhindered, timely access to information is a general principle. Then it adds the caveat that transparency means open access to “accurate” information.
Then a few pages later the treaty demands that nations perform “infodemic management”—which requires not only censorship, but also surveillance of everyone’s social media footprint, so the nation will know who and what to censor. This violates both the First and Fourth Amendments to the US Constitution.
Not only that, but the censorship should be performed with international collaboration—so all nations can target the same misinformation spreaders and there will be nowhere to hide. Finally, they want to make sure you Trust the(ir) Science.
Below, the treaty is forced to admit that the so-called sovereignty that Tedros claims we will retain— the ability to pass laws—will in fact be subject to the orders of the WHO.
The WHO treaty draft requires that every nation pass laws to legalize Emergency Use Authorizations, so that unlicensed vaccines can be given to populations during a WHO-declared pandemic. You know, like a Monkeypox pandemic. There are no standards required and the WHO Director-General can declare any pandemic whenever he wants. Then the needles come out.
The WHO also demands that nations pass the laws needed to remove all liability from these untested and potentially deadly vaccines. Who’s sovereign now?
So you see, the WHO has just played a bunch of word games and they intended for us to be the suckers and go along, ignorant. So long as the Treaty and IHR Amendments still let nations make laws, the WHO insists on calling us sovereign. But the real sovereign is the one ordering that laws be passed. That’s the real power. Why would anyone give that up to the WHO, especially when its Director-General is a puppet for Bill Gates, is not a real doctor, and has been accused of withholding food and hiding 3 cholera epidemics to kill members of competing tribes in his native Ethiopia, when he was the #3 top official there? Do you really think he cares about your health during a pandemic?
So you can wait idly by as these treaties move ahead, or you can say ‘Hell No!’ and put on your big girl panties and decide you have finally had enough. Which will it be?
Pakistan’s election lived up to some expectations, but didn’t live up to other expectations. What was predicted was that there would be vote rigging and outright fraud as a central feature of the Pakistani generals’ plan, and there was. What was not anticipated was that former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party, the PTI (Movement for Justice), would win the most parliamentary seats of any single party. It was a miraculous outcome, given the horrendous levels of repression of the PTI, and the efforts by the military establishment to prevent the party from even contesting in the election.
What we know now is that the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment, following its violence and terror campaign against the population after Khan was ousted in April 2022, is the proverbial emperor with no clothes. It stands exposed not only for its reign of terror, corruption and fraud, but also for its incompetence by failing to deliver the election results desired by domestic and foreign power centres.
In many ways, perhaps the most analogous relatively recent event was the victory of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council election. The Israelis, the Americans and the Gulf monarchies wanted to give legitimacy to their chosen occupation sub-contractor, the collaborationist and hopelessly corrupt Palestinian Authority (PA) largely controlled by Hamas rival Fatah. These forces believed that they had invested enough financial and political capital to enable Fatah candidates to win an “election under occupation”. To their great surprise — and to the surprise of Hamas, to be fair — the Islamic Resistance Movement won.
Similarly, the military and political elites in Pakistan had guaranteed themselves and their patrons in Washington that the election in Pakistan was a done deal.
This narrative claimed that the appeal of the PTI had diminished, and any remaining popularity of Khan and his political party would be offset by the investment of tens of millions of dollars to buy off the military high command, politicians in all of the provinces and, crucially, the judges of the provincial high courts, as well as the Supreme Court.
The generals said that they had a plan B, and if needed, a plan C, ready in case plan A did not work. Plan A was the simple ousting of Khan from power in April 2022. It was thought that this would eradicate the “Khan virus”. To the surprise of many, including Khan himself, a massive, unprecedented outpouring of support erupted spontaneously, with rallies taking place in cities and towns in every province of the country.
So, the military elites began the charge sheet against Khan to get him embroiled in one court case after another: plan B. That failed to work, and Khan’s popularity continued to soar. Incessant reassurances were meted out from former Chief of Army Staff General Bajwa to Washington and the House of Sharif, the family in control of one of the two dominant dynastic political parties, the PML(N). Bajwa claimed that the situation was under control and that his successor, General Asim Munir, would finish the job. Bajwa was lucky. All he agreed to was to remove Khan from power, and he delivered. He was detested, but he was able to leave the political scene after a few months. Munir was not so fortunate.
Plan C needed to be activated. Public sentiment was turning so antagonistic towards the military top brass for their unashamed targeting of Khan that the “final solution” had to be implemented: assassination. Two attempts, one of which injured Khan in the shin, were unsuccessful.
There really was no plan D, and so one was concocted quickly. Khan faced the most absurd but very serious charges of terrorism and treason, and was imprisoned in complete isolation. He was charged with leaking state secrets in the now infamous “cypher-gate” case, with the allegation that he spoke recklessly about a top-secret diplomatic cable sent to the foreign ministry by Pakistan’s ambassador to the US. The cable stated, in no uncertain terms, Washington’s desire that Khan be removed from power.
Both the military elite as well as, sadly, many in the intellectual class, mocked Khan and his supporters for over a year for this “conspiracy theory” and for inventing this “fictional” cypher. Only when the The Intercept confirmed the veracity of the contents of the diplomatic cable as Khan had described them, did Munir and other senior army officers not only concede that such a cypher does exist, but that Khan would now face charges of treason for revealing its contents. This leak by the former prime minister constituted a grave threat to “national security”. In reality, it presented a palpable unmasking of the collusion of the US foreign policy establishment, Pakistani generals and Pakistani kleptocrats of the two major political parties — the House of Sharif and the House of Bhutto-Zardari – in wanting to depose the democratically-elected Khan from power.
Once the hastily assembled plan D was put in motion, the idea was that it would lead seamlessly to plan E, the ruthless repression of the PTI, so that by the time of this election there would be nothing left of Khan and his party. What the election results last week demonstrated, however, is that even though Khan’s party members could not run on their party ticket and had to run as independents, there is huge popular support for the PTI.
There doesn’t seem to be a plan F, considering the frantic responses of the army chief and the head of the intelligence agencies, or the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Munir is no longer concerned with his big picture “obligations”. He has been reduced to trying to save himself. The only party that he is trying to please at this point is the one footing the bill: the House of Sharif. The general is now arguably the most hated Chief of Staff in Pakistan’s history, and there has been no shortage of competition for that title.
What about Washington’s planners? How are they reacting? One senior State Department official commented very bluntly: “These imbeciles can’t even crush a political novice like Khan. They command one of the largest armed forces in the world, nuclear armed. What is all that for?”
The US foreign policy establishment, after the ouster of Khan, had outsourced the job of managing the old “Af-Pak” (Afghanistan-Pakistan) theatre of the “Global War on Terror” to the Pentagon. Washington believed that its Cold War framework of dealing with the generals would produce a “stable” and pliant Pakistan. There is no entity as irate at the incompetence of the Pakistani military high command as the US Department of Defence, to which both Bajwa and Munir promised the moon. Actually, though, State Department officials are equally incensed since they were tasked to prevaricate for almost two years to conceal Washington’s role, as well as that of Pakistani generals, in this entire scenario.
The State Department had denied any knowledge of the cypher, but that position began to change after the Intercept’s publication of the contents of that damning diplomatic cable. At that point, it was not so much about asserting the non-existence of the cypher, but underscoring how such communication between two governments was nothing abnormal. Washington was willing to give Islamabad a few more months to fix everything by holding faux elections that would quash Khan and his party once and for all.
And now, it seems clear that the US foreign policy establishment is looking for vengeance, and keen on punishing the generals who promised to produce an unashamedly subservient Pakistani political establishment. This is why there has been such an explosion of harsh criticism of the Pakistani army from the State Department and numerous members of Congress.
There were, undoubtedly, members of Congress, such as Representative Ilhan Omar, who wanted to express their displeasure much earlier. But they also acquiesced to their Democratic Party leadership in the White House and in Congress, who hung on by a thread to the idea that “stability” would be brought about by the traditional political and military elites. The White House maintained unceasingly that “our guys” in Islamabad would facilitate a smooth and relatively quiet transition to the post-Khan period, without ringing any international alarm bells.
Of course, now it’s become patently obvious that Washington is revising its stance radically, one that effectively tells Pakistan’s generals, “You had your chance, you failed, and now you’re making things worse.” America’s 180-degree turnaround is an attempt to salvage some respect, or at least some tolerance, from the people of Pakistan who know full well Washington’s role in the regime change operation. The generals have put Washington in a deeply embarrassing situation.
However, Washington apparatchiks may be unfair in their treatment of their clients in khaki in Pakistan. The former do not realise that it’s the political has-beens who the generals can control, not the relative new boys on the block like Khan. The old political bigwigs know the rules of the game — proper balance between the enrichment of both the political and military elites — and abide by them. The newbies are too recalcitrant to even learn those rules properly, let alone abide by them. In sum, Washington now considers General Munir a dreadful liability, after only his first year as Chief of Staff, unlike General Pervez Musharraf, who provided Washington with “stability in Pakistan” for eight years until he also became a liability in 2007.
In this entire saga, what’s been truly disappointing is the role of the Pakistani media. The country’s leading and, deservedly, most respected periodical, Dawn, suddenly began to churn out columns praising the democratic “defiance” of the people in this election. It’s a shame that the people’s defiance was not covered over the past twenty months, when apparently it was simply an expression of a cult-following, and the totalitarian and conspicuously undemocratic repression was not worth reporting. The resistance of the Pakistani people could have certainly benefited from some coverage then. Now, such voices in the media are commonplace. It’s rather sad how the Pakistani media seems to be taking its cues from the US State Department about when to cover/report, and when not to. Dawn columnists had many months to praise the democratic will of the people, but did not.
At this point, the divisions within the military officer corps have become evident. Munir and others in the top brass realise how dangerous it is to give the wrong orders to junior officers and soldiers. How many times will the Pakistani armed forces be commanded to open fire, imprison, torture and disappear their population on a massive scale? The crimes of the military establishment in the provinces of Balochistan and KPK have been bad enough.
For almost two years now, the brutal suppression by the army was meant to instil paralysing trepidation in the population. But just as the people of Gaza, of Palestine, of West Asia, have overcome a psychological sense of fear of Israel, so too have the people of Pakistan lost any fear of their national security state and its violent shenanigans. This is a major development.
Whatever political configuration emerges after the election, one thing is certain: this round has been a resounding victory for former Prime Minister Imran Khan, smiling in his wretched jail cell, as well as the people of Pakistan, regardless of their political affiliation.
Israel supporters have become a leading fascist force in Canada. They are pushing to restrict civil liberties, dismantle democratic organizations and increase policing.
Since I wrote about the phenomenon a month ago Zionist groups and journalists have deepened their ties to fascist groups and escalated their anti-democratic rhetoric in a bid to defend the genocide in Gaza. Israel lobby groups and commentators have repeatedly taken their cues from the former head of the thuggish and racist Jewish Defence League (JDL). They’ve repeatedly circulated long-time JDL head Meir Weinstein’s videos depicting anti-genocidal protesters as a threat and in a sign of this deepening alignment arch-Israeli nationalist reporter Joe Warmington recently quoted Weinstein in a story tarring protesters. In a Toronto Sun article spurred by the former JDL head’s X post headlined “Security threat against Trudeau all of Canada’s concern”, Warmington quotes Weinstein labelling Palestine solidarity protesters a “risk.”
As they deepen their ties to Khanist fascists, Zionist lobby groups have repeatedly called for marches to be banned, individuals to be fired and talks canceled. To suppress criticism of Canada’s contribution to Israel’s genocide Liberal MPs Anthony Housefather, Marco Mendicino and Ya’ara Saks have repeatedly taken up the call to suspend democratic rights. A month ago Saks posted, “As I stated last week, & will repeat again – protests within largely Jewish neighbourhoods like the ones in our riding of #YorkCentre is completely unacceptable. Targeting an overpass in an area that is known to be local Jewish community is a form of intimidation.”
In response to pressure from Saks, Weinstein, B’nai Brith, CIJA and others, the Toronto police barred protests on an overpass of Highway 401. They then arrested three people for asserting their right to assemble. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) condemned the police’s move and CCLA executive director Noa Mendelsohn Aviv pleaded in the Canadian Jewish News against the Zionists’ push to suppress civil liberties. (A B’nai Brith suit to expand the anti-protest zone was rejected.)
As part of this push to supress demonstrations, Israeli nationalist city councillor James Pasternak pushed Toronto representatives to develop a “policy and framework for the management and monitoring of rallies and protests.” In mid-January Pasternak declared, “It does not take much to see the [Palestinian] gatherings taking place downtown are not Charter-protected.”
In a similar bid to shut down basic democratic rights B’nai Brith called for suppressing the public’s rights to ask questions at city council meetings. Reportedly, on December 21 a handful of members of the public showed up at a meeting of the Agglomeration Council of Montreal in response to Hampstead mayor Jeremy Levi telling me he would support Israel even if they killed 100,000 Palestinian children since “good needs to prevail over evil”. Apparently, they asked about Levi’s genocidal apologia and a Hampstead law to send money raised from fines for ripping down posters of hostages to Israel, which led B’nai Brith to file a complaint with the Quebec Municipal Commission (The Commission rejected it). When members of the public asked questions at the January meeting B’nai Brith filed a second complaint (also rejected). The arch Zionist Suburban newspaper/website has published three stories on the matter and a week ago the Montreal Gazette put the Zionists complaints on its front page in a story headlined “Agglomeration council won’t act on antisemitism complaint, Montreal mayor says”.
CIJA and B’nai Brith recently succeeded in pressuring Concordia and Carleton universities to cancel their stops on a national speaking tour with British commentator Sami Hamdi, organized by the Canadian Muslim Political Affairs Council. A recent Zionist sponsored lawsuit also called for the Concordia administration to block students from funding their union. In a similar vein, Conrad Black penned a commentary last week headlined “SHUT CUPE DOWN” due to their Palestine solidarity and in the same National Post newspaper lawyer Howard Levitt called on Zionist members to decertify the Canadian Union Public Employees union.
Fascists have long targeted labour unions. Ditto for books. Montreal’s Jewish Public Library recently pulled the books of Quebec’s most prominent children’s author, Elise Gravel, from their displays because she posted against genocide. A councillor in Côte-St-Luc, Mike Cohen, called for his municipality to do the same.
On X Israel supporters regularly respond to videos of large numbers protesting Canadian complicity in genocide by calling for protesters to be deported. In a similar vein, JSpace board chair Joe Roberts recently called protesters “fifth columnists” whose “real enemy has always been the liberal democracies of the west.”
To supress the “fifth column”, the establishment Jewish groups are campaigning for increased police funding. On January 18 CIJA instigated a letter writing campaign demanding “Reverse the police cuts” in Toronto. Two weeks later, the advocacy agent for Canada’s Jewish Federations wrote, “We continue to urge Council to take action to prevent any shortfall in funding for the Toronto Police Service, so that our police have the tools they need to enforce the law and safeguard the Jewish community and all Torontonians from the threat of hate-motivated and all other types of crime.”
B’nai Brith recently called for increased funding to Montreal police and a slew of Zionist voices have called for the provincial government to allow security guards at schools to carry guns. City councillor Sonny Moroz, who previously worked for arch Zionist federal MP Anthony Housefather, submitted a motion calling for greater police presence in part of Montreal.
CIJA, B’nai Brith and Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center have extensive ties to police forces across the country. Recently it was reported that the RCMP’s controversial Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG), which has spied on indigenous and pipeline protests, has been targeting Palestine solidarity protests. In internal budgetary documents C-IRG labelled one protest a “Hamas Day of Action”.
Zionists have long sought to criminalize support for Palestinians. In a bid to promote the slaughter in Gaza, they’ve become cheerleaders for authoritarianism, cancel culture and other forms of intimidation historically associated with fascism.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has cranked up the heat on the “electrify everything” foolishness.
Last month, the Ninth Circuit denied the city of Berkeley’s petition to re-hear its case after the city’s ban on natural gas use in homes and businesses was ruled illegal last April. The January 2 ruling has national implications and is an enormous loss for the electrify everything movement, the lavishly funded campaign that seeks to ban natural gas stoves, water heaters, and other gas-fired appliances in the name of climate change.
Before I delve into the court ruling, it’s essential to understand the danger to our energy security posed by the electrify everything effort and the dark money groups that are pushing it.
As I have reported here, the electrify everything movement could result in enormous reductions in the affordability, reliability, and resilience of our electric grid. The campaigners want to add massive amounts of new load onto an energy network that is already cracking under existing demand. Indeed, the electrify everything jihadis are pushing for the electrification of heating, transportation, and industry at the very same time that numerous policymakers and regulators are warning about the declining reliability of the power grid.
To cite two recent examples, last May, members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission delivered stark warnings to the members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The agency’s acting chairman, Willie Phillips, told the senators, “We face unprecedented challenges to the reliability of our nation’s electric system.” FERC Commissioner Mark Christie echoed Phillips’ warning, saying the U.S. electric grid is “heading for a very catastrophic situation in terms of reliability.” His colleague, Commissioner James Danly, averred that there is a “looming reliability crisis in our electricity markets.”
Last August, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation named “changing resource mix” as a top reliability risk facing the electric grid. And for the first time, it named climate policy as one of the most significant risk factors. It said, “policy decisions can significantly affect the reliability and resilience of the [bulk power system]. Decarbonization, decentralization, and electrification have been active policy areas. Implementation of policies in these areas is accelerating, and, with changes in the resource mix, extreme weather events, and physical and cyber security challenges, reliability implications are emerging.” (Emphasis added.)
Further, the same NGOs pushing to electrify everything are also aggressively promoting policies that will make our electric grid even more reliant on weather-dependent sources like wind and solar. As the slide above shows, NERC is warning that our grid is increasingly vulnerable to “wind and solar droughts.” If climate change means we are facing more extreme weather of all types, the last thing we should do is make our grid more dependent on the weather.
The electrify everything movement is fueled by massive contributions from some of the world’s richest people, including Michael Bloomberg, John Doerr, and Laurene Powell Jobs. Numerous climate-focused NGOs, including the Sierra Club (2022 budget: $168 million) and Rocky Mountain Institute (2022 budget: $117 million), as well as dark-money entities like Climate Imperative and Rewiring America, are leading the attack against gas stoves and the direct use of gas. In 2022, Climate Imperative — headed by veteran climate activist Hal Harvey and two former Sierra Club employees, Bruce Nilles and Mary Anne Hitt — had revenue of $289 million. For comparison, the American Gas Association, which represents gas utilities, had revenue of about $37 million that year.
Jobs and Doerr were founding board members of Climate Imperative, which does not reveal the identities of its donors. Last March, in “The Dark Money Behind The Gas Bans,” I wrote about Rewiring America, which had recently hired Georgia politician Stacey Abrams. I explained that Rewiring America has about 40 employees and:
is among the most prominent members of this dark money network. The group doesn’t publish its budget or file a Form 990. Instead, it is a sponsored project of the Windward Fund, a 501c3 non-profit that does not disclose its donors. Nor does it reveal how much it is giving to Rewiring America. Although it is impossible to know exactly how much dark money is being shuffled among groups like the Windward Fund, Rewiring America, and others, my tally shows that just four of the dark money NGOs behind the gas bans have combined budgets of about $820 million.
Now, back to the Ninth Circuit. The court’s January 2 decision not to entertain a rehearing of the Berkeley case confirms that the gas bans enacted in California over the past several years are invalid. According to the Sierra Club, which has been gleefully tracking the bans, some 76 cities or counties in the state have enacted bans or restrictions on gas since Berkeley enacted its ban in 2019. On a website that tracks the restrictions, the Sierra Club makes no mention of the Ninth Circuit’s rulings. The group may want to ignore it, but the decision affects all of the states in the Ninth Circuit: Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. That means the recent bans on gas in Seattle and the statewide ban in Washington, which was adopted last year, are invalid. So, too, is the ban imposed by Eugene, Oregon, in early 2023.
The San Francisco Chronicle summarized the appeal, noting that “Berkeley, joined by the Biden administration, other cities and states, and conservation groups, then asked the full appeals court, which has 16 Democratic appointees among its 29 judges, to order a rehearing. But only 11 judges, all appointed by Democratic presidents, voted for a new hearing…the ruling will now become final unless the conservative-majority Supreme Court agrees to review it.” The article quoted Sarah Jorgensen, a lawyer for the California Restaurant Association, who said the court recognized that “energy policy was a matter of national concern and that there should be uniform national regulation.”
Berkeley’s gas ban was first ruled illegal last April, when the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of the restaurant association. The January 2 decision affirmed the court’s prior ruling and noted that Congress, when it passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) of 1975, “ensured that states and localities could not prevent consumers from using covered products in their homes, kitchens, and business. EPCA thus preempts Berkeley’s building code, which prohibits natural gas piping in new construction buildings from the point of delivery at the gas meter.”
expressly preempts State and local regulations concerning the energy use of many natural gas appliances, including those used in household and restaurant kitchens. Instead of directly banning those appliances in new buildings, Berkeley took a more circuitous route to the same result and enacted a building code that prohibits natural gas piping into those buildings, rendering the gas appliances useless… By its plain text and structure, EPCA’s preemption provision encompasses building codes that regulate natural gas use by covered products. And by preventing such appliances from using natural gas, the new Berkeley building code does exactly that.” (Emphasis in original.)
A January 3 article published by Oakland-based KTVU, quoted Berkeley City Council member Kate Harrison, who authored the gas-ban ordinance, saying her city “will continue to do everything in its power to fight climate change and protect the health of its residents.”
The Ninth Circuit’s latest decision should also mean that bans on natural gas in other parts of the country should also be nullified. But the Ninth Circuit only covers part of the country. That means its decisions may set a precedent, but it doesn’t mean the precedent applies to other regions. That could change soon, however, because Jorgenson has filed a similar suit against the state of New York.
Last May, New York became the first state to ban gas stoves and furnaces in most new buildings. The law requires all-electric heating and cooking in new buildings shorter than seven stories by 2026, and for taller buildings by 2029. The city of New York has also passed a ban in the form of Local Law 97, which is even more destructive. That measure requires building owners to remove gas boilers over the next few years or face huge financial penalties. For more on Local Law 97, see the September 26, 2023 edition of the Power Hungry Podcast with my pal, Jane Menton, a lifelong New Yorker, who calls the measure an “electrification monster” that could result in a humanitarian nightmare in Gotham.
On October 12, Jorgenson filed suit on behalf of a group of plaintiffs, including propane dealers, homebuilders, and plumbers. In a press release, Jorgenson’s firm said the “The drastic step of requiring ‘all-electric’ new buildings despite an already-strained electric grid stands at odds with the public’s need for a reliable, resilient, and affordable energy supply. New York’s gas ban is preempted by federal law, is contrary to the public interest, and harms plaintiffs and the members they represent.”
If Jorgenson prevails in New York, and she should, the next stop on the litigation is the U.S. Supreme Court, which should weigh in and declare that the electrify everything effort, is, as Jorgenson says, “contrary to the public interest.”
Cracks are forming in the World Health Organisation’s plans to secure a vast expansion of its powers and resources. Presented as a necessarily urgent response to the empirically unsupported assertion that pandemics are increasing in frequency and severity, negotiations for a broad package of amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) and a new parallel Pandemic Treaty had been expected to be over by the end of 2023. Having missed that deadline, in late January the Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus pleaded for WHO member states to give ground so that the negotiations could be completed at all. In the same comments he sought to apportion blame for the unexpected headwinds on those who had misconstrued, or misrepresented, the benign intentions of the WHO and its key supporters (which include China and some wealthy private organisations).
Reading between the lines, it appears that Mr. Ghebreyesus and his supporters may finally have realised that the game could soon be up: the strength of opposition to the ambitions of this unelected technocratic administration has compounded rapidly in recent weeks. That opposition has become more evident not only in smaller less influential countries, but in countries which are major contributors to the WHO. Significantly this has included groups of politicians in the U.K. and the U.S. who are seriously alarmed by the vision of a WHO-centred ‘command and control’ public health system, and by the constitutional and public spending implications of these two proposed international agreements.
The Director-General has perhaps realised that his blind ambition has not only put at risk the negotiations that might have elevated his unelected advisory organisation to the status of a supra-national rule-making authority, but is also now starting to jeopardise the future status, funding and membership of the WHO.
Secrecy, opacity and delay
The original timeline presented by the WHO had envisaged a final text of the proposed IHR amendments – where many of the most contentious proposals reside – being published before January 27th 2024, with a view to their adoption taking place at the World Health Assembly meeting scheduled from May 27th to June 1st 2024, alongside adoption of the proposed new Pandemic Treaty. That timeline, although tight, would have allowed four months for negotiators to brief domestic stakeholders, for national legislatures to debate the combined proposals and for any necessary pre-adoption formalities (approvals, technical scrutiny, cost/benefit analyses, etc.) to be completed prior to a vote at the WHA meeting in May.
Yet, on its own initiative, in October 2023 the Working Group for the negotiation of the IHR amendments unilaterally moved its own goalposts so that in place of publishing a final draft text to be scrutinised well in advance of that WHA meeting, it instead committed to circulate by the end of January a copy of the original set of proposed amendments and an interim ‘working draft’ text showing the current state of play. Negotiations would then continue between February and April 2024. It was – and remains – ambiguous whether this move was compatible with the procedural legal requirements already enshrined in the International Health Regulations, but perhaps member states quietly agreed with the WHO secretariat not to look too hard at that issue.
Notwithstanding this commitment, no interim working draft of the IHR amendments appears yet to have been published, and the U.K. officials involved in the negotiations have been inexplicably reluctant to reveal the current position of the text. Indeed, to date all demands for transparency by U.K. parliamentarians have been ignored or deflected by the ministers responsible for the U.K.’s relationship with the WHO. Astonishingly the U.K. Government has refused even to confirm who is negotiating on the U.K.’s behalf.
We understand that the IHR Working Group anticipates a final text being settled only during April or possibly even into May, but there remains no official deadline for it to publish that final text. It refuses to confirm what the documents say, and it refuses to say when it will reveal those documents. If any further evidence were needed of the disregard and disrespect for democratic process and the sovereignty of national parliaments now alleged of the WHO, then surely this is it.
Out of time
That corrosive secrecy, opacity and delay has left a vanishingly narrow window for domestic public health organisations and parliamentarians to review or comment meaningfully on what may become generationally-significant changes to the U.K.’s relationship with the WHO, with other countries and with the public health business community. It means Parliament will have scant opportunity to scrutinise the IHR amendments and the new international funding and resource-sharing commitments enshrined in the parallel Pandemic Treaty. Yet these are documents with the potential to impact materially on the U.K.’s ability to act autonomously, on freedom of speech and opinion, on health security and on the nature of U.K. democracy itself. They also have the potential to commit future generations to very significant public spending obligations.
Given their significance, the IHR proposals and the parallel Pandemic Treaty require a commensurate degree of examination by Parliament. The current nature of the WHO’s funding, 85% of which now comes from private commercially-interested organisations, creates an additional imperative for rigorous, investigative scrutiny. In November 2023, Human Rights Watch wrote that:
The draft [treaty] reflects a process disproportionately guided by corporate demands and the policy positions of high-income governments seeking to protect the power of private actors in health including the pharmaceutical industry.
Without sight of any working drafts of the revised IHRs, nor of the current state of the draft treaty, scrutiny is completely frustrated. At this late stage in the process, after repetitive calls for transparency seemingly have been ignored, one is left to wonder whether this is precisely the intent of the officials involved.
Deferral is the rational solution
As the window for full, fair, candid appraisal by national democratically-elected legislatures is now all but shut, the logical and necessary solution is for member states to demand that any vote to adopt either of these two international accords is held over to the next WHA meeting in May 2025. This will allow ample time both for the conclusion of the negotiations and for member state-level scrutiny of the proposals served up by the negotiating teams.
If it is truly the case that the WHO and its member officials do not intend for national legislatures to cede rule-making sovereignty to an enlarged WHO technocracy, they will surely accept the need for state-level legislatures to control the timing of this process. Calls for deferral have begun, but more voices will be needed to press relevant political leaders and officials to accept that deferral is the only legitimate response to this situation.
A turning point
Even now, in the face of a chorus of rational legally-grounded concerns raised by U.K. parliamentarians about the substance of the proposed amendments and the opacity of the negotiations, the Government has remained steadfastly unwilling to comment on its negotiating intent and objectives, beyond vague platitudes. Efforts by members of the public, legal experts and parliamentarians to understand the current state of negotiations, and even just the arrangements within the U.K. Government to conduct the negotiations, have been stonewalled. The WHO equally has remained virtually mute and offered no meaningful evidence to support claims that its ambitions have been misunderstood.
This has served only to fuel distrust in this process, in the Government and its senior officials, in the U.K.’s relationship with the WHO, and in the WHO’s relationship with its influential funding providers.
Behaviour of this overtly undemocratic nature indicates that the WHO project has long since lost sight of its noble foundations in post-war benevolent multilateralism, and indeed of its reason for being: health for all in pursuit of global peace and security. Unfortunately, the WHO is now a symbol of all that is wrong with what has become a system of global public health patronage. This shamelessly undemocratic and chaotic power grab is also indicative of an organisation which has reached the end of its useful life, at least in its current guise. We suggest that this sorry episode should become the impetus for the U.K. to revisit its relationship with the WHO, and the relationship of the WHO with its funding providers.
The U.K. will not be an outlier if it does so, but rather a role model and – judging by the breadth and strength of international expressions of antipathy for the WHO’s ambitions – a leader of fast followers. This may well be the U.K.’s best post-Brexit opportunity to be an actor of global significance on the international stage.
Molly Kingsley is a founder and Ben Kingsley is the Head of Legal Affairs at children’s rights campaign group UsForThem. Find UsForThem on Substack. Ben and Molly’s new book (co-authored with Arabella Skinner) The Accountability Deficitis available now at Amazon and other book stores.
Mail-in ballot fraud “significantly” impacted the 2020 US presidential election, handing President Joe Biden his victory, according to a study published by conservative think tank the Heartland Institute on Friday.
“Had the 2020 election been conducted like every national election has been over the past two centuries, wherein the vast majority of voters cast ballots in-person rather than by mail, Donald Trump would have almost certainly been re-elected,” the report stated, citing survey data collected in December.
As many as 28.2% of mail-in voters potentially committed some form of fraud, acting in ways that were “under most circumstances, illegal,” the institute’s data suggested.
With over 43% of 2020’s votes cast by mail – the highest percentage in US history – this alleged fraud “significantly” impacted the election results.
The group’s December survey of 1085 likely voters found that about one in five mail-in voters may have acted fraudulently. Over a fifth (21%) of respondents admitted to filling out ballots for others or voting in a state where they were no longer a permanent resident, while 17% said they signed ballots for family members without their approval. Another 19% said a friend or family member had filled out their own ballot.
After subjecting the data to further statistical analysis, however, Heartland upped the percentage of potentially fraudulent mail-in ballots to 28.2%, adding that mail-in voters disproportionately favored Biden, further skewing the results.
Even if the percentage of fraudulent mail-in ballots was as low as 3%,Trump would have won, the think tank, which is known for opposing government regulation, argued, laying out 29 different scenarios with varying degrees of fraud to bolster its case that the Republican incumbent would have triumphed in the absence of fraudulent ballots.
The report urged lawmakers to crack down on mail-in voter fraud by requiring in-person voting or, in cases where that was impossible, requiring mail-in vote signatures be notarized or otherwise authenticated by a trusted third party.
“If state lawmakers fail to solve this problem, Americans’ confidence in the legitimacy of elections in 2024 and beyond will likely decrease, paving the way for chaos and civil unrest,” the report stated.
Mail-in voting, previously restricted to a small segment of the US population, was opened up to all during the 2020 presidential election due to the Covid-19 pandemic, despite bipartisan concerns about the potential for voter fraud.
While the Department of Homeland Security insisted the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history,” Trump and many of his supporters blamed voter fraud for his loss. Thousands descended on Washington DC on January 6, 2021 to protest the certification of Biden’s victory in the Electoral College. Clashes between Capitol police and protesters attempting to enter the Capitol building subsequently triggered the infamous riot for which thousands – including the former president – have been charged.
The Daily Wire hit piece targets Gustavo Espada, the financial and systems coordinator for Harvard’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. According to the Wire, Espada “has been active in pushing 9/11 conspiracy theories for 18 years, according to a 2006 piece in The Lowell Sun which reported he spends 10 hours a week ‘handing out literature,’ Web logging and talking with people on the street about his views on 9/11.”
The thrust of the Wire hit piece is that Espada should be fired from his university job because he wants to debate 9/11. Reading the story brought back memories of a my own experience in 2006. While teaching subjects including Folklore, African Studies, and Islamic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I had begun doing 9/11 teach-ins on campus in 2004, and then gotten involved in the national and global 9/11 truth movements. In 2006 I became the focus of a concerted pushback campaign sparked by Lynn Cheney’s group ACTA and its acolytes in the Wisconsin Republican Party.
Like Espada, I repeatedly challenged my detractors to meet me in a formal debate. In September 2006, while I was under fire from the State Legislature, the UW-Madison Debate Club sponsored what was supposed to be a debate on 9/11. They arranged for me and Jim Fetzer to argue against the 9/11 Commission’s official story, and told us that a history professor and a political science professor (Donald Downs, as I recall) had agreed to defend it. But at the last minute, the two pro-official-story professors backed out. So Jim Fetzer and I were left “debating” two empty chairs.
I reiterated my debate challenge. The university Provost, Patrick Farrell, told me that he would try to have the university set up some sort of formal panel discussion or debate after the media furor died down. Student newspapers at UW-Madison and UW-Oshkosh published op-eds plaintively begging for some knowledgable professor to debate and refute me. But nobody stepped forward to defend the 9/11 Commission.
Six months of media hoopla (July through December 2006) made me unemployable at the University of Wisconsin. I was denied a tenure-track Islam-Humanities job at U.W.-Whitewater purely due to my views of 9/11, according to whistleblowing then-Dean of Humanities Howard Ross. And I was told by the late Professor Muhammad Umar Memon, then a member of the UW-Madison hiring committee for its Islam classes, that the committee was informed by the University administration that I must not be rehired for my Islam 101 teaching job for the same reason.
Rendered unemployable due to my views of 9/11, but with nobody willing to debate me and explain why my views were wrong (privately most of my colleagues I knew personally thought my views were likely right or at least plausible) I offered a $1000 honorarium to any University of Wisconsin instructor, whether professor or TA, who was willing to defend the 9/11 Commission in a formal debate. There were no takers. Years later, the offer was raised to $2000. Still no takers.
Similar debate challenges were issued at other universities. A 9/11 truth group at the University of Michigan sent letters to every professor in the Engineering department seeking someone to defend the FEMA and NIST positions on the destruction of the World Trade Center in a debate with me and Underwriters Labs whistleblower Kevin Ryan. Most didn’t respond. The few who did told the organizers, off the record, that Ryan and I were right.
Could a 9/11 Debate Have Prevented Genocide?
According to the tenets of liberal democracy, all important matters are supposed to be debated on the basis of logic and evidence, and the truth that emerges becomes the touchstone of public policy. Had a real debate on 9/11 ever transpired, the truth that would have emerged—9/11 was orchestrated not by al-Qaeda, but by the state of Israel and its American neoconservative allies—would have prevented the series of wars that has devastated the Middle East, including the ongoing Israeli genocide of Gaza.
People resist debate when they know that logic and facts are not on their side. When would-be debaters like Espada are smeared, and their livelihoods threatened, it’s obvious that those doing the smearing know that their victims are right.
Can We Debate the Ukraine War?
Another topic that’s off-limits to debate is the US war on Russia through Ukraine. As with 9/11, the neoconservative propaganda talking points—the enemy is pure evil, “they” attacked “us” for no reason, and so on—are inflated to the status of sacred public myths, and anyone who wants to debate them is a damnable heretic. Merely for exposing us to Putin’s point of view, Tucker Carlson has been attacked by the whole mainstream media. As with 9/11, the neocon Establishment’s refusal to debate on logic and evidence, and its preference for shrill vituperation and ad-hominem attacks, suggests that it knows it couldn’t win a real debate with the likes of Putin.
Cancelled Candidates
Elections are a form of public policy debate. When the side with power knows that it can’t win a fair debate—as with the Pakistani military’s stand-off with Imran Khan—it may try to cancel the candidacy…or the candidate. Khan, who was very nearly assassinated by the Pakistani establishment, currently languishes in prison despite his overwhelming popularity among the vast majority of his countrymen. The Pakistani junta’s attempt to rig last week’s elections failed, because it’s impossible to convincingly rig an election when your opponent has such high levels of support. So the man who is the people’s choice and the rightful Prime Minister, targeted by ludicrous legal assaults including an attack on the legitimacy of his marriage, remains in prison… for now.
Imran Khan’s plight, we might imagine, is typical of tinpot third world military dictatorships, but irrelevant to the affairs of advanced Western democracies. But in both the US and Germany, pro-immigration Establishments are working overtime to keep anti-immigration parties and personalities off the ballot. Like the Pakistani Establishment vis-a-vis Imran Khan, the US and German Establishments don’t want to have to debate anti-immigration populist movements. So the Democrats in the US, and the ruling elites in Germany, are using various underhanded means to try to keep Trump and the MAGA movement, and the anti-immigration party AFD, off the two nations’ respective ballots.
Donald Trump, like Imran Khan, might very well end up winning an election from a prison cell. Like Khan, Trump has been targeted by a lawfare campaign expressly designed to torpedo his political chances. And Trump’s party, like Khan’s, views itself as the victim of widespread election fraud, and those who try to raise and debate the issue are deplatformed. Though the two cases aren’t fully comparable—Khan is overwhelmingly popular while Trump is controversial, Khan’s complaints are fully justified while Trump’s are only partly so, and Khan is completely honest and ethical while Trump is not—there are enough similarities to raise questions about whether American “democracy” is any healthier than Pakistan’s.
Undebatable COVID
The notion that the truth emerges through free and fair debate took a huge hit during COVID. We were told to “trust the science” and wear masks everywhere, even though the science suggests that there is no convincing evidence that masks significantly slow the spread of respiratory viruses. The debate about COVID origins was unceremoniously quashed, and people were deplatformed for even mentioning the issue. And arguments about whether highly experimental vaccines should be mass-tested on entire populations were likewise suppressed. Only one position—the Establishment’s—was allowed.
One More Question for Debate
So in light of all the signs that liberal democracy is dead and free and fair debate no longer effectively exists, I propose one last subject for debate: Should debate itself be legal? Or to rephrase that in debate-ese: “Resolved: Debate should be criminalized, and would-be debaters should be imprisoned or executed.”
Here is the text of the expert report on Mann v. Simberg/Steyn in 2020 that I prepared at the request of Mark Steyn’s counsel.
My report, along with all other expert reports from both sides except for Abraham Wyner, were not admitted into evidence.
In my opinion, my report provides some much needed context for the trial. Here is a formatted pdf of my complete expert report [Curry Steyn Mann]
Report of Judith Curry, Ph. D.
I submit this report under D.C. Superior Court Civil Rule 26(a)(2)(B) & (C) as both fact and expert witness to address the subject matter on which I expect to present evidence and to summarize the facts and opinions on which I expect to testify. This report includes my observations and opinions as a lay and expert witness concerning three principal topics: (I) the nature of the scientific and public controversy concerning the Hockey Stick graph; (II) whether the Hockey Stick graph can be regarded as ‘fraudulent’; and (III) Michael Mann’s role in the downward spiral of climate science discourse. I present sections (I) and (III) mostly in my capacity as a fact/lay opinion witness and section (II) in my capacity as an expert witness.
SUMMARY
This report addresses the issue of whether it is reasonable to refer to the Hockey Stick graph as ‘fraudulent’ in the course of the public debate on climate change.
What is the nature of the scientific and public controversy concerning the Hockey Stick?
It is my opinion that the Hockey Stick has generated a dynamic and heated debate about its significance and its flaws. Since its publication, Mann’s Hockey Stick has been the subject of intense and often polemical comment and argument in: (a) peer-reviewed, scientific publications critical of the Hockey Stick; (b) analyses of the science behind the Hockey Stick on technical climate blogs; (c) published books on the Hockey Stick controversy; (d) articles by leading science journalists in the mainstream media; (e) online encyclopedia entries on the ‘Hockey Stick Controversy’; (f) Congressional hearings and investigations related to the Hockey Stick; and (e) the personal controversy surrounding Michael Mann in his efforts to defend the Hockey Stick and to thwart his critics.
2. Is it reasonable to regard the Hockey Stick as ‘fraudulent’?
It is my opinion that it is reasonable to have referred to the Hockey Stick in 2012 as ‘fraudulent,’ in the sense that aspects of it are deceptive and misleading:
Image falsification: Mann’s efforts to conceal the so-called “divergence problem” by deleting downward-trending post-1960 data and also by splicing earlier proxy data with later instrumental data is consistent with most standards of image fraud.
Cherry picking: Evidence shows that Mann engaged in selective data cherry picking to create the Hockey Stick, and that this cherry picking contributes to the perception of a “fraudulent” Hockey Stick by journalists, the public and scientists from other fields.
Data falsification (the ‘upside-down’ Tiljander proxy): Substantial evidence shows that Mann inverted data from the Tiljander proxies in a version of the Hockey Stick published in 2008. Mann did not acknowledge his mistaken interpretation of data. Even after published identification of the mistake, this mistake has propagated through subsequent literature including the IPCC 4th Assessment Report.
3. What is Mann’s role in the downward spiral of climate science discourse?
It is my opinion that the scientific discourse surrounding climate change in general, and the Hockey Stick in particular, has deteriorated in civility and professionalism, and that Mann has played a significant and active role in this corrosion and unprofessional degradation of tone. Mann’s approach to public discourse about his work and broader topics in climate change has contributed much to the hostility and animosity that characterize and mark these exchanges. My opinionis based on: (a) the norms of science and scientific discourse; (b) Mann’s withholding of data from his peers; (c) Mann’s efforts to stifle skepticism; and (d) Mann’s attacks on scientists who disagree with him.
THE SCIENTIFIC AND PUBLIC CONTROVERSY SURROUNDING THE HOCKEY STICK
The Hockey Stick is a graph of global temperatures for the last 600 to 1000 years, reconstructed from tree rings and other so-called proxy data. Its name comes from its shape – a long flat ‘handle’ representing comparatively stable temperatures in earlier centuries, followed by a dramatic uptick – the ‘blade’. The Hockey Stick graph was originally published in two papers co-authored by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes (MBH98, MBH99)[1]. MBH98 included a 600-year reconstruction and MBH99 included a 1000-year reconstruction.
Although Mann had only recently received his Ph.D., he was named as a lead author for a chapter in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report (TAR), published in 2001. The Hockey Stick graph appeared seven times in the IPCC TAR, and appeared as the backdrop in the IPCC press conference announcing the findings of the report. Rather than displaying all of the long-term temperature reconstructions considered by the IPCC TAR, the opening figure of the Working Group 1 Summary for Policymakers highlighted a graph of temperature reconstructions based only on the MBH99 paper.
Following the public release of the IPCC TAR, the Hockey Stick was regarded as central to the IPCC’s case for global warming. The Hockey Stick was, for a time, arguably the most important graph in the world. Its message of unprecedented warmth at the end of the twentieth century was a vital part of the campaign to persuade the public that mankind had changed the world’s climate.
Since publication of the Hockey Stick in Mann’s paleoclimate reconstructions of temperatures (MBH98/99) and its prominence in the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR; 2001)[2], there has been substantial scientific controversy over the methods that Mann and his co-authors used in this research. The controversy extends to the results of their analysis, which contradicted existing geological and historical knowledge of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.
Of particular note are two papers published by McIntyre and McKitrick in 2005 that challenged the MBH98/99 analyses (section IIA). These papers motivated two Congressional investigations and hearings in 2006 (section IIE).
In November 2009, the unauthorized release of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UK) (“Climategate”) revealed that several scientists (including Mann) had evaded Freedom of Information Act requests for data, manipulated the peer review process, downplayed uncertainty about their research and attempted to squash disagreement and dissent from ‘skeptics.’ The publicity surrounding Climategate (Sections IIB, IIC) brought the Hockey Stick controversy back into the public debate on climate change, largely vindicating a range of concerns that had been raised by McIntyre and McKitrick.
The analysis presented in this section documents the controversy surrounding the Hockey Stick, without passing judgment on the merits (or not) of the original research or the criticisms.
As an active participant in the debate over climate change and the Hockey Stick, I recall the development of this debate.
I summarize this controversy by considering the following sources:
Scientific journal publications critical of the Hockey Stick
Critical analyses in technical climate blogs
Published books on the Hockey Stick controversy
Articles by leading science journalists in the mainstream media
Online encyclopedia entries on the ‘Hockey Stick Controversy’
Congressional Hearings and investigations related to the Hockey Stick
Yesterday, a jury in Washington, DC awarded renowned climate scientist Michael E. Mann more than $1,000,000 in damages in a defamation lawsuit he brought against two bloggers.1 I was a witness in the case and testified on Tuesday.2 Here, I’ll offer my thoughts on the case and some personal reflections on my experience.
Mann’s case alleged that he was defamed by statements made the bloggers more than a decade ago, which harmed his reputation and career (I won’t rehash the details here, but you can get a full accounting of the trial at this comprehensive podcast).3
The defense built their case around making three points to the jury.
One was to bring in experts to testify that Mann’s methods in producing the so-called “Hockey Stick” graph were manipulative, and thus critics of the Hockey Stick were factually correct in saying so. The second point was to demonstrate that the debate over climate during the time that the blog posts were written was intense and vitriolic, with Mann saying things about others that were worse than what the defendants said about him.4 Finally, the defense argued that Mann hardly put on a case — he provided no evidence or witnesses supporting his claims of damage to reputation or career.
In contrast, the prosecution was — in the words of the court, “disjointed” — and was reprimanded on multiple occasions by the judge, most notably for knowingly providing false information to the jury on alleged damages suffered by Mann.5 When I was cross-examined, Mann’s lawyer had considerable trouble getting basic facts right like timelines and who said what.6
Even so, in a trial that most neutral observers would surely see as favoring the arguments of the defense, Mann walked away with a resounding, comprehensive victory.7 How did that happen?
In my view, there were two absolutely pivotal moments in the trial.
One occurred when Mann was testifying and he explained that he felt that the bloggers were not just criticizing him, but they were attacking all of climate science, and he could not let that stand. As the world’s most accomplished and famous climate scientist, Mann intimated that he was simply the embodiment of all of climate science.
For the jury, this set up the notion that this trial was not really about Mann, but about attacks on all of climate science from climate deniers.
The second pivotal moment occurred when in closing arguments Mann’s lawyer asked the jury to send a message to right-wing science deniers and Trump supporters with a large punitive damage award.
Here is how an advocacy group called “DeSmog” accurately reported these dynamics:
Mann sued Simberg and Steyn for defamation, but the trial proved to be about much more than statements that harmed the scientist’s reputation — the entire field and validity of climate science was under scrutiny.
In closing arguments, Mann’s lawyer John Williams compared the climate deniers in this case to election deniers overall. “Why do Trumpers continue to deny that he won the election?” he asked the jury. “Because they truly believe what they say or because they want to further their agenda?”
He asked the jury to consider the same question about Steyn and Simberg: Did they believe what they wrote was the truth, or did they just want to push their agenda? . . .
“Michael Mann is tired of being attacked,” Williams told the jury. “You have the opportunity to serve as an example to prevent others from acting in a similar way” to Simberg and Steyn.
An underlying current throughout this trial has been that climate denialism, like what the two defendants practice, isn’t really about the science. It’s more about politics and policy that drives organizations and individuals to “attack the science and confuse the public . . .
This framing — climate deniers versus climate science — has also characterized mainstream media coverage. For instance, The Washington Post announced, on the day that the case went to the jury, that this case was part of a “mounting campaign” against “right-wing trolls” (below).
Prominent climate scientist or right-wing trolls? Which side are you on?
The case was formally about defamation, but in reality it was not at all about defamation.
As Michael Mann stated after the verdict, the case was really about politics and ideology:
Take a victory lap, Dr. Mann
This is about the defense of science against scurrilous attacks, and dishonest efforts to undermine scientists who are just trying to do our job … whose findings might prove inconvenient to certain ideologically driven individuals and outlets. It’s about the integrity of the science and making sure that bad actors aren’t allowed to make false and defamatory statements about scientists in their effort to advance an agenda.
The defense made a big mistake in thinking that it would be sufficient to win by proving their case while Mann chose not to put one on. That was wrong.
There is no equivalence here between the “renowned” Michael Mann and the “right-wing trolls” who deny climate science and support Donald Trump. The case, at least in this particular venue, was simply unwinnable no matter what cases were put on by the prosecution and the defense. Mann simply had to show up.
The fact that the jury awarded him only $2 in actual damages and $1,001,000 in punitive damages (send a message!) supports this interpretation — The defense won on merits, and Mann won on the framing and the politics.
What does the case mean for discourse about politically contentious issues that involve science? Science magazine reports that it means that we now need to be circumspect in how we engage these issues:
In a statement, Mann said, “I hope this verdict sends a message that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech.”8
At the same time, the ruling could end up having a chilling effect on necessary public criticism of science, says Gene Policinski, a senior fellow at the Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan foundation focused on First Amendment protections. People will need “to be more judicious in commentary. They might be more vague or circumspect.” And that could be to the detriment of the public, he says. “It’s important in today’s world for people to be aware of research that’s going on and having people both praise and criticize it openly.”
For Mann’s part, he signals that he is just getting started in his legal campaign against his opponents:
Asked about Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Review, [Mann’s lawyer] John Williams said, “They’re next.”
I would not be surprised to now see a flurry of lawsuits against people who have been critical of climate science or climate scientists. Such legal action may not be limited to climate — debate over Covid-19 also presents a target-rich environment for unwanted speech to silence. Watch this space.
Finally, let me offer some personal reflections on my experiences.
Form the start, my view was that this entire lawsuit was unnecessary and a waste of everyone’s time. People who I still would not recognize on the street said some mean things about Michael Mann on the internet. Welcome to public discourse in the 21st century. People say mean, false things about me on the internet every day — it goes with the many privileges of having outsized impact and voice. The case was never about the integrity of science or the political impact of right-wing trolls — it was always about Michael Mann.
As I stood in line with dozens of other people on Tuesday waiting to go through security to enter the courthouse, I wondered how we got here — how leading scientists and institutions of climate science became totally consumed with a battle against minor bloggers and political boogeymen.
When I entered the courtroom, I had a profound sense of sadness for Mann. He was alone with his lawyer — no family, no friends, no university officials, no adoring fans, no mainstream media. Totally alone. There were just a handful of observers in the room. As I said at the trial, Mann has not been the best colleague to me, but I am fine even so. Who knows what demons haunt him and why he behaves the way that he does. I do hope he can find peace at some point.
The larger issues here are not about Mann, but rather the continued failures within the climate science community to uphold fundamental norms of conduct among its own ranks. For instance, in the trial we learned that Penn State’s committee looking into Mann’s conduct following Climategate wanted to censure him for his behavior — apparently that was overturned upon the intervention of the Penn State president. There have been so many similar opportunities for leaders to take the off-ramp from escalated conflict and politicization, and the community instead chose to further conflict.
Like I said, it is just sad. And it is not over yet.
The elections in Pakistan today were much freer and fairer than I had expected. Hence, the preliminary results simply reflected the obvious for most of us: former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s political party, PTI (the movement for justice) – facing ruthless repression over the past year – have swept the elections in every single province of the country.
Khan, surviving two assasination attempts and languishing in a supermax dungeon since last August, is more popular than ever. Among the youth, Gallup Pakistan surveys have consistently reported around 80-90 percent support for Khan and his party.
The tyranny of the generals in the military high command along with the kleptocratic and dynastic political parties entailed even the suppression of PTI’s symbol (a cricket bat) and virtually a ban, with horrific consequences if violated, on candidates running on a PTI ticket. Thus, all of these candidates ran as independents.
Of course, we have now become used to one criminal travesty after the next by Pakistan’s military-intelligence apparatus. So, we are cautious about any temporary victory for people’s democracy, triumphing over the Washington-backed totalitarian military and political elite. The latter are in full-blown panic mode, and are trying their best at tampering and rigging before announcing the final results.
The preliminary results, regardless of the fraudulent shenanigans of the national security state expected in the next few days, already represents a resounding defeat of the neo-colonial comprador oligarchy in Pakistan. One just needs to see how highly strung the spokesperson of the State Department was in addressing questions related to these elections.
There is one sign of both hope and danger. For the first time in Pakistan’s history, the normally unified and disciplined armed forces are now experiencing deep divisions. The majority of military officers and and 95 percent of soldiers are repulsed by the behavior of Wasington’s minions in the top brass. To the surprise of many of us, these divisions also exist within the intelligence agencies. We are witnessing in an unprecedented way a refusenik impulse within the military. Not to sound like the bogus alarmism we’re used to from Washington think tanks, it’s still worth remembering that Pakistan is a country of 240 million, nuclear-armed.
The Pakistani people badly need international solidarity at this point.
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches religion, law, and global politics and is the Director of the Center for Islam and Decoloniality, Islamabad, Pakistan.
Representative Jim Jordan, along with 44 other Congressional members, joined forces with America First Legal (AFL) to submit a crucial brief to the US Supreme Court. This brief supports Missouri, Louisiana, and private plaintiffs in the significant case of Murthy v. Missouri. The case centers on allegations of the federal government’s unconstitutional suppression of free speech on social media platforms.
The AFL, in collaboration with co-counsel Christopher Mills, has been actively combating what they perceive as a growing censorship crisis. The brief presented to the Supreme Court contends that the federal government has been exerting undue influence on private tech companies. This influence, the brief argues, has led to the suppression of First Amendment-protected speech concerning COVID-19, the Biden family’s alleged influence peddling, and various election-related issues.
These arguments were previously raised in the Fifth Circuit, where AFL represented Representative Jordan and other members of the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
The involvement of these bodies stemmed from their investigative work, which unearthed the extent of federal pressure on private entities, compelling them to censor speech. This was notably highlighted through disclosures in The Facebook Files and The Twitter Files.
“The First Amendment is first for a reason,” Rep. Jim Jordan said in a statement. “Through our constitutional oversight, we have uncovered evidence that the Biden Administration directed and coerced Big Tech companies to censor content online and even books. With the Supreme Court set to hear one of the most important free speech cases in years, 45 Senators and Representatives filed this brief to share Congress’s findings and urge the Court to uphold the free speech rights of American citizens.”
Israeli lawmakers are moving forward with a bill to punish those accused of “denying” or “downplaying” Israel’s narrative of October 7th with five years in prison.
“Israel’s Knesset approves a bill, which punishes the denial or ‘downplaying’ of the Israeli narrative of Oct 7 by up to 5 years in prison,” the Palestinian Quds News Network reported.
“The approved bill is one out of three bills that included the expulsion of families of Palestinians who resist, imprisonment for those who deny Israel’s narrative on October 7, and compensation for notorious ZAKA organization.”
From The Jerusalem Post, “Israeli Ministerial Committee approves imprisonment for denying Oct. 7, ZAKA compensation”:
The bill approved by Yisrael Beytenu MK Oded Forer prohibits the denial of the October 7 massacre. According to the proposal, anyone who publishes, in writing or orally, things that deny the massacre or downplays it or publishes praise, sympathy, or identification with the actions committed by Hamas in the events of that day – will be sentenced to five years in prison.
The explanation for the bill reads: “The denial of the massacre constitutes an attempt to rewrite history already at this stage, in an attempt to hide, minimize, and facilitate the crimes committed against the Jewish people and the State of Israel.”
The proposal by Likud MK Moshe Passal gives financial compensation to ZAKA volunteers who volunteered for endeavors carried out by the organization during Operation Swords of Iron.
“There is no doubt that the volunteers took a significant part and did hard work, both physically and mentally. They were a significant part of the holy work for the people of Israel and worked together with the IDF, so they deserve to be rewarded for their important work,” Passal said.
No doubt they want to use this law to jail journalists from Haaretz and other Israeli news organizations which debunked much of the atrocity propaganda Israel put out after Oct 7.
The Times of Israel last week ran a piece arguing that questioning Israel’s narratives on Oct 7 is a form of “Holocaust denial” and insisting that Big Tech should do more to censor such “unacceptable” speech.
With Israel’s atrocity propaganda getting debunked in real-time and their excuses for genocide being rejected by the overwhelming majority of the world, they’re now demanding overt censorship and moving to jail whoever they can for exposing their lies.
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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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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