When Mandates and Shaming Are Ethical
At least if you’re an NYU bioethicist…
By Aaron Siri | Injecting Freedom | May 6, 2026
Through an ICAN FOIA request, my firm recently acquired a 2019 presentation given to HHS’s National Vaccine Advisory Committee (NVAC) from an NYU “bioethicist” named Dr. Arthur Caplan.
Caplan indicates that parents who decline vaccines for their kids have “bogus values” and suggests methods such as guilting “hesitators and resistors” and calling them “selfish, bad neighbors, indifferent to the vulnerable.” He also recommends that all states follow the sterling example of California and remove all non-medical vaccine exemptions.
His presentation is an excellent example of how vaccine zealotry has infiltrated every level of academia. You can feel the outrage in his presentation as you read it. Caplan seemingly can’t imagine why any reasonable person would decline this manna from pharmaceutical heaven—so much so that he feels it is ethical to enforce vaccine mandates and shame people into taking a medical product they don’t want! All in the name of “bioethics.”
At one point, Caplan even implies that parents should be held liable for any harms that come to their children as a result of not vaccinating. And who is liable if they do choose to vaccinate and the vaccine harms their children? Of course, in that case, the answer is basically no one—not the manufacturer, not the government, certainly not the pediatrician who shamed the parent into vaccinating, nor the school that mandated the product for attendance.
This kind of autocratic illiberal thinking—where evidence-free, righteous, indignant “greater good” arguments are pushed to crush individual and civil rights—is one reason I felt compelled to write Vaccines, Amen. What makes this example so egregious is that these ideas and tactics are being pushed under the guise of “bioethics.” Sadly, Caplan himself and his kin, as reflected by his presentation, lack the objectivity, emotional stability, or ethics to opine on this topic.
I offered Caplan the opportunity to come on my podcast to defend his views. He declined. That offer remains open and if he had the courage of his convictions, and truly believed in them, I would imagine he would welcome the opportunity to defend them in an open forum. But alas…
Billionaires and Officials Are Just Blatantly Ignoring the Will of the People Now
Truthstream Media | May 7, 2026
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The FCC Wants Your ID Before You Get a Phone Number
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | May 6, 2026
The era of the anonymous phone number could be ending. On April 30, the Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved a proposal requiring telecom providers to verify customers’ identities before activating service.
Government-issued ID, physical address, legal name, and existing phone numbers would all be included. The stated goal is stopping robocalls. The result would be an identity-verification regime covering one of the last semi-anonymous communication tools available to ordinary Americans.
The proposal applies to nearly every voice provider in the country, from traditional carriers and mobile operators to VoIP services. The FCC is seeking public comment on specifics, but the direction is clear.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr framed it around negligent carriers. “As we have continued to investigate the problem of illegal robocalls over the last year, it has become clear that some originating providers are not doing enough to vet their customers, allowing bad actors to infiltrate our U.S. phone networks,” he said. Some providers, he added, “do the bare minimum (or worse) and have become complicit in illegal robocalling schemes.”
That language targets telecom companies and the surveillance targets everyone else.
The framework borrows from banking’s anti-money-laundering rules. The FCC is also asking whether carriers should retain identity documentation for at least four years after a customer leaves and whether they should check customers against law enforcement watchlists. Penalties would shift to a per-call basis, meaning fines of $1,000 to $15,000 for every illegal call a poorly verified customer places.
The real privacy stakes sit in the proposal’s section on prepaid service. Right now, you can pay cash for a prepaid phone and SIM card without showing identification. Journalists use prepaid phones to protect sources, domestic violence survivors use them to avoid being traced, and whistleblowers, activists, or anyone with a reason to separate phone activity from legal identity relies on this.
British journalist faces ‘anti-terror probe’ after Iran visit, reporting on US-Israeli crimes

Press TV – May 6, 2026
In a politically motivated move, a UK-based independent journalist and activist faces an “anti-terror probe” after her recent visit to Iran, where she reported on post-war developments, including massive rallies against the US-Israeli war coalition.
Observers say the move punishes legitimate political expression as the UK government seeks to silence dissenting voices critical of the unprovoked war against the Islamic Republic.
Bushra Shaikh, a British media personality who has been vocal about the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran as well as the ongoing genocide in Gaza, has been referred to the Metropolitan Police’s Counter-Terrorism Command over a speech she delivered at a rally in Iran during her recent visit.
The referral, which comes just days after her return from the Islamic Republic, has raised serious concerns about the UK government weaponizing “anti-terror” laws to target individuals whose political views diverge from its stance on West Asia developments.
In a video shared online, Shaikh was seen addressing a rally in Iran, in which she expressed her solidarity with the people of Iran and condemned the aggression against them.
During the rally, flags of regional resistance movements, including Hezbollah, were seen.
Within hours of the post going live, a formal complaint was lodged with Scotland Yard, as reported by British media, alleging that Shaikh may have breached the Terrorism Act, which criminalizes “inviting support” for a banned group.
The report further claimed a potential violation of the National Security Act’s new Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (FIRS), which requires individuals acting under the direction of a foreign power to register their political activities.
“Any allegations relating to possible terrorism or national security-related offences will be passed to officers within Counter Terrorism Policing, who will assess the details and take any further action as appropriate,” the Met Police was quoted as saying.
During her visit to Iran, as part of a foreign media delegation invited by the Sobh Media Center, Shaikh visited many cities and interacted with victims of the recent war.
She also interviewed government officials, including foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei and chairman of the parliament’s foreign policy and internal security commission Ebrahim Azizi, which she also shared on her social media platforms.
In the recent past, many British journalists, activists and academics have faced draconian charges in their country after visiting Iran to attend conferences or media festivals, including the Sobh International Media Festival, organized by the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) World Service.
Israeli telecom networks used for mass surveillance across countries
Al Mayadeen | May 4, 2026
A probe by the digital research group Citizen Lab has uncovered that telecommunications infrastructure owned by Israeli companies has been weaponized to track citizens in more than 10 countries over the past three years, exploiting decades-old network protocols and modern 5G systems to transform them into sophisticated tracking devices.
According to a report published by the Israeli news outlet Haaretz, the investigation revealed that infrastructure ranging from legacy networks built in the 1970s to the latest 5G systems has been repurposed into surveillance tools using advanced spyware programs. Since November 2022, over 15,700 attempts to pinpoint phone locations have been detected across numerous countries, including Thailand, South Africa, Norway, Bangladesh and Malaysia, all routed through the networks of “Israel”-based telecommunications firms.
The findings raise serious questions about “Israel’s” role in the global surveillance industry, as the very infrastructure designed to connect people has been turned into a mechanism for tracking them without their knowledge or consent.
Internal documents cited by Haaretz revealed that Verint, the parent company of Cognyte, sold an SS7-based location tracking system called SkyLock to a government client in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The SS7 protocol, originally developed to route calls and texts, support international roaming, and enable interoperability between mobile operators, has been systematically exploited for surveillance purposes.
The investigation also found that Fink, a Swiss telecommunications company, enabled Israeli surveillance firms such as Rayzone to impersonate legitimate cellular carriers and connect to older mobile networks. This allowed the firms to track users worldwide by abusing the SS7 signaling protocol.
The exploitation was not limited to legacy systems. Next-generation Diameter protocols, which manage 4G and 5G networks, were also compromised, according to the findings. One particularly notable method identified was SIMjacking, where a hidden text message sent to a target device forces the SIM card to reveal its location without the user ever seeing the message.
The phone-tracking operations were carried out through the networks of Israeli telecom companies 019Mobile and Partner Communications. 019Mobile responded by stating that it is a virtual operator and that its identity may have been impersonated, denying any involvement in tracking activities.
No immediate responses were received from Fink, Partner Communications, Exelera Telecom, Cognyte, or Verint.
The investigation exposes a disturbing reality: Israeli telecommunications technology, sold and deployed around the world, is not merely passive infrastructure but has been deliberately weaponized for mass surveillance.
The involvement of major Israeli firms in selling tracking systems to authoritarian governments, and the exploitation of global telecom networks by Israeli surveillance companies, points to a systematic pattern rather than isolated incidents.
As the US-Israeli war on Iran continues to dominate headlines, the international community has once again turned a blind eye to “Israel’s” role as a global leader in surveillance and cyber-weapons. From Pegasus spyware to SS7 exploits, Israeli technology has been used to track journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens across multiple continents.
House Resolution Calls for Tech Companies to Censor Speech
Legislation introduced by two AIPAC funded representatives
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | May 2, 2026
This one slipped under the wire. Tucker Carlson talked about it the other day, but beyond that, it is flying sans transponder. On February 29, New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer and New York Republican Mike Lawler introduced “a bipartisan resolution condemning the rise of antisemitic, hate-filled rhetoric disseminated by prominent online personalities, including Hasan Piker and Candace Owens, and calling on social media platforms and public leaders to take stronger action against hate,” according to Gottheimer’s taxpayer funded website.
Watch at Rumble
“The resolution highlights the growing influence of online personalities and the alarming surge in antisemitism driven, in part, by disinformation and extremist rhetoric… When influential voices spread conspiracy theories, promote terrorism, or dehumanize Jewish people, it fuels real-world violence and intimidation. We must stand up and speak out.”
Owens, Gottheimer’s post continues, “has trafficked in vile conspiracy theories, promoted blood libels, and platformed Holocaust deniers,” and Piker has “dehumanized Orthodox Jews” The post continues with debunked lies concerning the Hamas al-Aqsa Flood open-air prison breakout on October 7, 2023.
Lawler received $1,069,875 and Gottheimer $2,062,601 from the Israel lobby. Both are essentially paid operatives for the Likud government of Israel. Furthermore, both “representatives” are traitors to the the Bill of Rights and have violated their oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
The Democrat Gottheimer, sounding like a staunch MAGA Republican, declared the “relationship with Israel is key to our national security. Terrorists hate the United States more than they hate Israel.” Lawler voted for a budget “that cut Medicaid and raised the cost of healthcare for millions of Americans, while saying US taxpayer funding for Israel should be ‘unconditional’ and voted for over $18 billion in weapons to Israel in 2024,” thus revealing his priorities (and making sure AIPAC sweetens his pot for the next election).
Last August, Israeli PM Netanyahu directly inserted himself in domestic American politics by demanding “the algorithms and the social networks” be censored to eliminate criticism of Israel.
In April, Zionist podcaster and self-proclaimed constitutionalist Mark Levin denounced critics of Israeli apartheid and genocide as “Nazis” and “jihadis” and said they are “inciting” violence with their speech. He argued the freedom of speech, once considered god-given and natural in America, is “overprotected.” Carlson said “Mark Levin, the right wing MAGA guy, is saying those people [critics of Israel] should be silenced by the tech companies.”
Another podcaster, Ben Shapiro, told the Palm Beach Gardens Chabad synagogue that X is an “unusable” and “vile stream of trash.” He admitted reaching out “to Elon’s people about” the criticism of Zionism he considers contemptible. “The algorithms are destroying America,” he said.
“We will monitor social media, and check your bank accounts,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the leader of the ADL, threatened in January. He said the ADL “shares the information with the FBI” gathered on anti-Zionist “extremists.” In June, he demanded companies “knock the anti-Zionists off the platform once and for all.” Research from the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society posted to X “shows that five major platforms are still failing to enforce” the removal of content critical of Israel and Zionists.
Israel-born Chabadnik Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, Trump’s czar of antisemitism, announced in December the State Department will establish a “whole division” to combat criticism of Israel and is working to develop social media algorithms that exclude “misinformation.”
“From YouTube to X, Wikipedia, and TikTok, Zionists are capturing all means of communication to erase the evidence of its genocide, reshape the historical record, and censor those critical of it,” writes Robert Inlakesh for the Palestine Chronicle. “Those who are critical of Israel are being censored or arrested.”
Tucker Carlson warns full-blown censorship will soon arrive in America through legislation forcing technology corporations to remove content deemed antisemitic by Israel and Zionists in America. “Criticizing the behavior of a foreign government is a hate crime and can get you censored in your own country,” he said.
So what’s the takeaway from all this? Well, the first takeaway is censorship is coming, and it will work unless people exercise their God-given and First Amendment-guaranteed right to push back against it with words and do so at high volume without any shame at all. It’s going to need a refusal to be intimidated by false claims of, quote, hate.
COVID Conniving Receives First Federal Indictment
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | May 1, 2026
David Morens, a former top advisor to COVID Czar Tony Fauci was indicted this week and “charged with conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting,” according to the Justice Department press release.
Morens allegedly helped top federal health officials cover up the potential role of federal grants in spurring the COVID pandemic. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requires federal agencies to preserve and disclose federal records with some narrow exceptions. In early 2021, Morens emailed a colleague, “I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe.”
Morens added, “Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.” In a previous email, he assured his collaborators, “I have spoken to our FOIA folks” and “I should be safe from future FOIAs. Don’t ask how…”
Fauci doesn’t need to worry about getting indicted since President Joe Biden, on his last morning in office, pardoned any crimes that Fauci might have committed in the previous decade. Fauci justified COVID mandates because average citizens “don’t have the ability” to determine what is best for them. Congressional investigations revealed that Fauci was at the center of string-pulling to shirk responsibility on COVID.
Top federal officials scrambled to erase the federal role in bankrolling reckless gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, the most likely source of the COVID virus that killed more than seven million people around the world. That type of research seeks to genetically alter organisms to enable the spread of viruses into new species. As MIT professor Kevin Esvelt asked in 2021, “Why is anyone trying to teach the world how to make viruses that could kill millions of people?” The risks were compounded because the Wuhan Institute had a very poor safety rating. Two years earlier, the State Department confidentially “warned other federal agencies about safety issues at Wuhan labs studying bat COVID,” but the public disclosure of that alert was delayed until 2022—long after President Biden illegally mandated COVID vaccines for a hundred million American adults.
If COVID-19 had been initially recognized as the result of one of the biggest government boondoggles in history, it would have been far more difficult for American politicians and government scientists to pirouette as saviors as they seized sway over daily life. Instead, politicians, bureaucrats, and the media stampeded most of the American public with the notion that total submission to boneheaded decrees was their only hope to survive.
Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a statement on the indictment of Morens:
“These allegations represent a profound abuse of trust at a time when the American people needed it most—during the height of a global pandemic.”
Luckily, there haven’t been any “profound abuses of trust” since Trump took office again—at least according to his Justice Department. Blanche added, “Government officials have a solemn duty to provide honest, well-grounded facts and advice in service of the public interest — not to advance their own personal or ideological agendas.”
Be still my beating heart. Is this a subtle signal that the Trump team will disclose the other three million documents on the Epstein scandal?
FBI chief Kash Patel announced at the indictment press conference, “Circumventing records protocols with the intention of avoiding transparency is something that will not be tolerated by this FBI.”
Has the FBI turned over a new leaf or what? The FBI is one of the most notorious FOIA violators in Washington. When FOIA was first passed in 1966, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover ordered his agency to totally refuse compliance with the law. A federal judge slammed the FBI in 2017 for claiming it needed seventeen years to fulfill a FOIA request on surveillance of antiwar activists in the 1960s. The FBI deleted the names of Clark Kent and Lois Lane from a letter that made reference to the famous Superman characters—because disclosing them in a FOIA response would “constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” Louis Freeh, director of the FBI from 1993-2001, repeatedly denounced my articles on Ruby Ridge; but when I filed a FOIA, the FBI claimed to have no records of those published letters to the editor. They sent their response to “Mr. Brovard” so maybe that helped them not find anything.
FBI FOIA trampling is par for the Bureau covering up its destruction of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. As federal judge Terry Doughty declared in a 2023 decision, “The FBI [acted] as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government—from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”
Morens may be the first federal official to ever be charged with a crime for actions to evade FOIA requests. Certainly, in more than fifty years, no federal FOIA official has ever been jailed for violating the law by refusing to disclose information. I’ve received so many BS responses from FOIA officers over the decades that I have lost count. When I filed a FOIA with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to see what information they had on me in their files, they replied in 2010, “We have no records on Kevin Bovard.” But I wasn’t asking about my cousin.
In 2015, I heard scuttlebutt that the Justice Department pressured USA Today to cease publishing my articles bashing Attorney General Eric Holder. I filed a FOIA to get the department’s official emails to my editors, but DOJ FOIA claimed it had nothing. I only got the damning emails after I filed a follow-up FOIA request and made a lucky guess on the exact day, hour and minute the emails were sent.
For too long, deceiving the American people has been treated like a victimless crime in Washington. If the Morens indictment can set a precedent leading to more such criminal investigations of bureaucratic cover-ups, that will be a booster shot for American democracy.
Congress Extends Section 702 Spy Program 45 Days
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | April 30, 2026
The surveillance program that scoops up Americans’ communications without warrants got another 45 days of life on Thursday, after Congress reauthorized a clean version of FISA Section 702 hours before it was set to expire.
The House voted 261-111 to push the program’s expiration to June 21, sending the legislation to President Trump’s desk before the midnight deadline.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said, “This will allow additional time to do that,” referring to ongoing work on a longer-term reauthorization that the upper chamber has been drafting separately.
What the procedural language obscures is what Section 702 actually does. The statute lets the NSA harvest communications from foreign targets without warrants, then stores those communications in a database that intelligence agencies can later search for information about Americans.
The agency calls this incidental collection but it functions as a workaround for the Fourth Amendment, allowing the government to access Americans’ messages, calls, and emails by claiming the foreigner on the other end of the conversation was the real target.
The renewal arrived only after a messy week of legislative whiplash. The House had originally passed a three-year extension on April 29, attaching an unrelated provision to ban the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency.
Senate leadership killed that version on arrival, then jammed the lower chamber with a stripped-down 45-day extension that contained no privacy reforms, no warrant requirement, and no concession to the lawmakers who have spent years documenting how the program gets misused.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion at the heart of Thursday’s fight is the closest thing to a smoking gun the public has seen on Section 702 in years.
The ruling addresses searches of Americans’ communications inside the NSA’s foreign intelligence database, the same backdoor query practice that has been flagged repeatedly by oversight bodies.
The court found problems with how the government has been running these searches.
What problems, specifically, remain classified.
That is the document Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who has spent over a decade trying to force daylight onto NSA programs, wanted Americans to read before Congress voted on a multi-year extension.
Wyden initially refused consent for the 45-day deal, holding out until Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton and ranking Democrat Mark Warner agreed to send a letter asking the executive branch to declassify the opinion within 15 days.
On the floor, Wyden made the case for why the secrecy is the problem. “That ruling found serious violations of Americans’ constitutional rights and how the Trump administration has used Section 702,” he said. “Congress should not vote — should not vote — to renew Section 702 when Americans are left in the dark about these troubling abuses,” Wyden said.
Cotton, an unwavering supporter of the program, took the framing personally. “I am ducking nothing. I am pointing out the senator from Oregon’s long-standing practice of distorting highly classified material in public,” Cotton said. “One of these days there are going to be some consequences, and it may be while I’m the chairman of this committee.”
Cotton runs the committee that controls intelligence community oversight, and the speech or debate clause of the Constitution is the only thing protecting senators from prosecution for what they say on the floor.
Stripped of theatrics, the message from the chairman of the body that supposedly checks the surveillance state was that pointing out documented abuses is itself a punishable act.
The result of all this is also that a surveillance program with documented constitutional problems gets six additional weeks of operation while the ruling describing those problems stays buried.
Current law already requires the FISC opinion to be released to the public eventually. Wyden wants that timeline accelerated to before Congress votes on a multi-year reauthorization, on the reasonable theory that lawmakers should know what they are voting to renew.
“Congress must use a short-term extension to openly debate the critical issues in front of the American people. I am disappointed that, instead, it sure feels like the other side of the aisle is covering the abuses up,” Wyden said.
What happens next depends on whether the executive branch honors the declassification request, and whether the Senate’s three-year reauthorization includes anything resembling meaningful reform.
The version that has been moving through committee does not require warrants for searches of Americans’ communications. It does not narrow the categories of foreign intelligence that can justify surveillance or impose meaningful limits on how long the NSA can retain the communications it collects.
The program scheduled for renewal on June 21 is not the program Congress originally approved.
Zionists Are Gunning for Your Freedom of Speech
By Jack Hunter | The Libertarian Institute | May 1, 2026
The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the United States guarantees the right to free speech. This right has long differentiated the United States from other Western nations like the United Kingdom and Canada where laws against so-called “hate speech” laws exist and are enforced.
Thankfully, America is different. In our country, even alleged hate speech is protected speech to ensure democratic principles and debate.
In a 1929 dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the Constitution secured “freedom for the thought that we hate.” In 2011, Chief Justice John Roberts said in a ruling that the First Amendment serves “to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”
This constitutional protection has been increasingly threatened recently, particularly by pro-Israeli forces that have tried to frame any criticism of that government as “anti-Semitism” and thus hate speech punishable by law. This has included everything from arrests, to squashing campus debate to buying TikTok to an attempt to cover up human rights absuses in Gaza. President Donald Trump has even issued executive orders that use vague definitions of what constitutes “anti-Semitism” that comes with criminal penalties.
Mark Levin is an American-born Zionist radio host who is an outspoken advocate for Israel’s government, regularly calling anyone who criticizes the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and conflict in Gaza “Nazis.”
Toward this agenda, Levin recently appeared to not agree with his own country’s free speech rights. On his latest Sunday Fox News program, unironically called Life, Liberty and Levin, the neoconservative pundit explained why free speech liberties in the U.S. have gone too far.
Seemingly worried that certain speech is protected in the United States, Levin said in the wake of the Secret Service taking down a shooter at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Friday, “First time things like this have happened, but it really is problematic because so much of it is protected.”
“And you hear people say, don’t you believe in the First Amendment?” Levin said. “They don’t even know what the First Amendment believes.”
Certain “speech” is “problematic” because “so much of it is protected.” You could see where this was headed.
Levin then explained what he believes “the First Amendment believes.” “Do you want to de-platform people?” he ranted. “You know, the libs do that. I don’t have any problem with de-platforming Nazis or jihadis.”
“Nazis,” Levin says. Levin uses this term loosely, all the time, and that’s putting it mildly.
Prominent libertarian personality Josie Glabach, known most popularly as “The Libertarian Redhead,” made a telling list of the many people and groups Levin has called Nazis since 2024:
- The Democrats
- The Democrat media
- An Australian bakery
- The Pakistani defense minister
- Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton
- The entire Libertarian Party
- College students
- MMA fighter Jake Shields
- Nick Fuentes
- Putin’s buddies
- Influencer Dan Bilzarian
- The Houthis
- Comedian and libertarian personality Dave Smith
- Anyone who associates with Dave Smith
- Tucker Carlson
- Beirut
- Hezbollah
- A veteran who asked Mark to be more tolerant
- Influencer Myron Gaines
- The city of London
- Hamas
- The New York Times
- New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
- A New York Times correspondent
- Terrorists;
- The “woke reich”
- Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner
- The United Nations
- Harvard University
- The city of Amsterdam
- Columbia University students
- Iterations of the “Iranian Nazi regime,” the “Islamic Nazi regime,” the “Islamo Nazi regime,” the “Islamist Nazi regime,” and “All of Iran (the new Nazis)”
- The Ayatollah (presumably of Iran)
- Former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi
- A protestor on a subway
- Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)
- President Joe Biden’s entire State Department
- Turkish Preisdent Recep Erdoğan
- College basketball analyst Bruce Pearl
- Certain Arab, liberals and journalists
- Reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro
- ISIS
- Seventeen random Twitter users
This eclectic group of entities great and small, many of whom are regular critics of Israel’s government, are “Nazis” in Levin’s view. As Libertarian Institute Senior Fellow Tom Woods succinctly put it, “Nazis’ includes everyone who mocks Levin.”
Levin continued his Sunday rant against “Nazis”:
“I don’t have any problem with de-platforming them. What does that mean, de-platforming them? A government law? No. It means that X or Twitter or Facebook or Amazon with Twitch and someone says you know what? You’re a low life we’re not paying, you know, get off our platform. What’s wrong with that?”
The neocon pundit appeared to say that private platforms should police speech according to the political views of Mark Levin. He is right that this is no violation of the First Amendment. Private companies can allow or restrict speech as they please. “It’s called private enterprise,” he said. “I got no problem with that.”
Then Levin basically said such speech was no different than pornography, which is not protected under the First Amendment. Levin continued, “I mean, what if they have this horrific pornography on? Is that okay? No, it’s not okay.”
“Because our kids have access to it,” he said. “People who are impressionable have access to it. “What if they had people screaming at the top of the lungs saying, assassinate this guy and assassinate that guy? Well, they shouldn’t do that.”
“Why? What’s the standard?” Levin went on. “You need to have a standard. What should the law be? What does the Constitution say?”
The Constitution says that all speech is protected, but “true threats” and obscenity are not.
But political opinions about Israel that go against Levin’s views are protected, whether he likes it or not.
That’s when Levin basically outright said that speech that criticizes Israel should be forbidden just like pornography. “I just think we’ve taken this too far because we’re not even talking about political speech, which is the most protected of all speech,” Levin said.
“We do limit speech,” he insisted. “We limit speech, pornography. We limit speech.”
What Levin, like so many other Zionists, truly want is for the First Amendment to be amended itself. They believe, whether they say it forthright or not (and Levin appears to be doing just that), that this legal provision designed by the Founders precisely to protect political speech should no longer protect speech that is critical of Israel’s government.
Americans have historically valued their free speech. American Zionists like Levin now want a carve out.
But the free speech guarantee enshrined in the United States’s governing charter is so integral to the American experience, to gut it for any reason would be to drastically alter the DNA of the soon to be 250-year-old country.
As an American, Mark Levin doesn’t seem to have a problem with doing just that—all in the service of a foreign country.
It might be better for Americans to instead wish other nations well, yet solely concentrate on our own affairs at home, and perhaps just as important, to stop listening to American pundits whose primary allegiance seems to be countries other than their own.
Court Forces German Chancellor Merz to Open Files on 300 “Insult the Chancellor” Cases
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | April 25, 2026
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has used the German state to pursue around 300 criminal investigations against people accused of insulting him, and his Chancellery spent months trying to keep the public from finding out which prosecutors were handling the cases. That wall has now come down.
The Higher Administrative Court of Berlin-Brandenburg has ordered the Bundeskanzleramt to identify every prosecutor’s office running a Merz-insult investigation, along with the file number for each one.
The ruling, which rejected the Chancellery’s appeal against an earlier decision of the Berlin Administrative Court, came after a legal challenge by Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel. Until the judgment, roughly 300 criminal proceedings over alleged slights against the sitting head of government had been shielded from any journalistic scrutiny.
The legal hook for all of it is Section 188 of Germany’s criminal code, a special provision that gives people in political life reinforced protection against insult. The official English translation of the statute states that anyone who “insults a person who exercises a political office in relation to their office or in connection with their office shall be punished with imprisonment from three months to five years.”
A politician gets to sit at the center of a prosecution aimed at a citizen who said something unpleasant about them, and the punishment on the table is years in prison.
How cases enter the pipeline is itself revealing. Citizens are encouraged by NGOs and state-run reporting portals to flag supposed insults, sometimes anonymously.
Those reports travel to the Federal Criminal Police Office, which routes them to the relevant regional prosecutor’s office. The targeted politician is then notified and decides whether to file a formal criminal complaint or whether to leave the prosecution to run without objection. The Chancellery alone receives between 20 and 30 such files every month.
Merz has said he does not sign complaints himself, but also does not block the prosecutions that have been opened in his name. Whether that account holds up against the actual paperwork is precisely what the Chancellery was trying to prevent anyone from checking.
The Chancellery’s argument in court was that no heightened public interest justified handing the information over, and that merely naming the prosecutor’s offices and file numbers could violate the rights of accused individuals. The court did not accept it. The judges held that the Chancellor’s distinctive role in these proceedings made disclosure necessary, and that neither jurisdictional objections nor the absence of urgency stood in the way.
The scale alone deserves attention. A head of government who has triggered roughly 300 criminal investigations over things people said about him is using the machinery of the state against ordinary speech at a volume that does not look like an occasional recourse to legal remedy. It looks like a policy. And the instinct, once the numbers started circulating, was to hide the details rather than defend them.
The chilling effect of a regime like this does not depend on convictions. It depends on the knowledge that a critical Facebook post, a rude placard, or a sharp comment can summon the Bundeskriminalamt, a prosecutor, and potentially a house search. A Stuttgart man who called Merz a “Suffkopf,” roughly a drunkard, saw his home searched after Merz signed a complaint against him.
The lesson lands well beyond the individuals actually charged. Self-censorship becomes the rational response, which is the real product of the law.
Section 188’s defenders describe it as protection for democratic institutions against targeted harassment of officials. The practical architecture of the provision tells a different story.
The category of “insult” is elastic. German courts have struggled for years with where sharp political commentary ends and punishable disrespect begins, and individual judges have reached wildly different conclusions on facts that look almost identical. Into that vagueness steps a provision that hands the sitting Chancellor and his office a direct line to prosecutors considering whether to put a citizen through a criminal process.
The deeper question sits where it has always sat. A democracy that lets its head of government send police to the homes of citizens who call him names has already made a choice about which it values more, the dignity of the office or the tongue of the citizen. The court has forced some sunlight into the process. The provision that makes the process possible in the first place is still waiting for someone to deal with it.
The Surveillance Accountability Act Demands Warrants for Data

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | April 23, 2026
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) have introduced the Surveillance Accountability Act, a bill that feels like someone took the Fourth Amendment and actually meant it.
The legislation aims “to ensure that all searches that significantly impinge on the privacy or security of a person require a warrant based on probable cause” and to create “a right of action for violations of Fourth Amendment rights.” That covers the kinds of searches federal agencies currently conduct without judicial oversight: pulling your financial records from banks, requesting your browsing history from ISPs, buying your location data from brokers, and harvesting your biometric information from surveillance cameras.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
The bill lands in the middle of a brutal Congressional fight over FISA Section 702, the surveillance authority that currently lets the FBI search Americans’ communications.
The new legislation goes much further than the various reform bills circulating around that debate. Where the SAFE Act and the Government Surveillance Reform Act target specific loopholes in FISA, the Surveillance Accountability Act tries to close all of them at once by rewriting the baseline rule: if the government wants your data, it needs a judge’s permission.
The main part of the bill adds a new Section 3119 to Title 18 of the US Code with a simple default: “no search may be conducted without a warrant issued by a neutral and detached magistrate upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.”
The bill defines “search” broadly enough to actually matter, covering “any government-initiated act that intrudes upon an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy,” whether through “human, digital, or automated means.” It explicitly lists what falls under warrant protection: “communications,” “associations,” “employment,” “social media usage,” “internet usage,” “financial transactions,” and “travel.”
The bill goes further, extending protection to “the acquisition and analysis of any data, metadata, or information pertaining to a person’s digital or physical life,” including “geolocation,” “personal device activity,” “biometric identifiers,” and “behavioral signals data.”
The government is already collecting and analyzing patterns of how you act online, and Massie and Boebert’s bill is the first piece of legislation to name it directly and bring it under warrant protection.
The Third-Party Doctrine Problem
The most significant provision attacks the legal fiction that has allowed warrantless government surveillance to flourish for nearly fifty years. The third-party doctrine, established by the Supreme Court in Smith v. Maryland (1979), holds that you lose your Fourth Amendment protection over any information you voluntarily share with a third party, like a phone company or a bank.
The logic made a certain kind of sense when it meant the government could see which phone numbers you dialed. It makes no sense at all when every aspect of modern life generates data that passes through corporate servers.
The Supreme Court acknowledged as much in Carpenter v. United States (2018), ruling that cell phone location data requires a warrant even though it’s held by wireless carriers. But Carpenter was deliberately narrow. The Court didn’t overturn the third-party doctrine. It just said that this particular type of data, cell site location information, was too revealing to leave unprotected.
The new bill does what Carpenter didn’t. It creates a blanket presumption of privacy for all data held by third parties. The bill states that “the government shall not access any data, metadata, or personal information held by a third party, including financial services providers, telecommunication service providers, internet service providers, cloud storage companies, or data brokers, without a valid warrant, regardless of whether the third party consents or cooperates.”
Your bank can’t waive your constitutional rights for you. Your phone company can’t either.
The bill goes further still: “No contractual agreement between a user and a third party may be interpreted as waiving the government’s warrant requirement for access to the data of that user, unless such waiver is knowing, voluntary, and explicit.” This kills the argument that by agreeing to a terms of service, you’ve somehow consented to government surveillance. That argument has always been absurd, and the bill finally says so in statute.
Facial Recognition and License Plate Readers
The bill’s limitations section targets two surveillance technologies that have spread across American cities with almost no legal oversight: facial recognition systems and automated license plate readers.
The bill prohibits the “warrantless collection, retention, querying, or analysis” of data gathered from people simply going about their lives in public. That prohibition covers “biometric data, including facial images, faceprints, gait, voice recognition, or other unique physical identifiers, obtained through facial recognition systems or comparable surveillance technologies.”
It also covers “license plate images, vehicle metadata, or vehicle movement patterns obtained through automated license plate readers or similar systems.”
Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies have been building vast databases of facial recognition and license plate data for years, treating the fact that you walked down a public street or drove on a public road as blanket permission to track your movements indefinitely. The bill says that’s not how it works. Being in public doesn’t mean consenting to biometric surveillance.
Suing the Government When It Violates Your Rights
The second half of the bill creates something that currently doesn’t exist in federal law: a clear right of action for Fourth Amendment violations by federal employees. The bill’s language is direct: “Every person, including a Federal employee, who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of the United States, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or any person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Fourth Amendment, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress.”
Courts can award attorney’s fees to the prevailing party, which means the threat of litigation carries financial weight.
This is significant because of the Supreme Court’s steady erosion of Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971), the case that originally allowed citizens to sue federal officials for constitutional violations. The Court has spent the last decade and a half narrowing Bivens to the point where it barely functions. Massie’s bill creates a statutory alternative that doesn’t depend on judicial willingness to recognize new causes of action.
The right of action covers every federal employee except the President and Vice President. That’s a wide net. An NSA analyst who runs a warrantless query on your communications, an FBI agent who buys your location data from a broker, an ICE officer who accesses your records through a Section 702 backdoor search, all of them could face personal liability.
The Political Context
Massie has been fighting this battle for over a decade. He sponsored an amendment in 2014 to stop warrantless backdoor searches of Americans’ online data, which passed the House 293 to 123. He introduced the Surveillance State Repeal Act in 2015, seeking to repeal the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act entirely. He’s called for Edward Snowden to be pardoned and for former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to be prosecuted for lying to Congress about the NSA’s phone metadata program.
The Surveillance Accountability Act arrives at a moment when the politics of surveillance are stranger than they’ve been in years. Massie has publicly demanded “No FISA reauthorization without a warrant requirement for US citizens!” on social media, attaching screenshots of past statements from President Trump, Vice President Vance, and House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan warning about FISA abuses.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus, 98 House Democrats, has formally voted to oppose any Section 702 reauthorization without dramatic reforms. Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton is pushing an 18-month clean extension with no reforms at all, arguing that the war with Iran makes this the wrong time to weaken intelligence capabilities.
The warrant amendment that would have required court approval for FBI searches of Section 702 data lost by a single vote in 2024, a 212-212 tie in the House. Speaker Mike Johnson cast the tiebreaker against it.
“The Bill of Rights is not a suggestion, and Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless searches conducted by the government are not optional,” said Massie. “The Surveillance Accountability Act requires government employees to first obtain a warrant based on probable cause before searching Americans’ personal information even if the information sought is stored on a phone, in the cloud, or held by a third party. Warrantless searches are unconstitutional, and this does not change when the data the government seeks is in digital formats or held by a third party.”
“For years, the federal government has treated the Fourth Amendment like a suggestion. They’ve built a massive surveillance machine that tracks, scans, and spies on law-abiding Americans without a warrant, without probable cause, and without any accountability. Enough is enough,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert. “The Surveillance Accountability Act puts the Constitution back in charge. It protects every American from an out-of-control federal government that thinks it owns your data, your movements, and your life. This is a true bipartisan issue for anyone who still believes in limited government and individual liberty.”
Massie’s bill goes beyond Section 702. It rewrites the entire framework, or tries to. The chances of the Surveillance Accountability Act passing in its current form are, being realistic, very low. The intelligence community will fight it. The national security establishment will call it dangerous. The administration has already signaled it wants a clean FISA extension with no conditions.
But the bill is a marker. It describes what actual Fourth Amendment compliance would look like if Congress took the text of the Constitution at face value. Warrants for searches. Probable cause. Judicial oversight. No exceptions for data that happens to sit on a corporate server. No loopholes for biometric surveillance conducted in plain view. And real consequences, financial ones, for agents who ignore the rules.
The gap between what the Surveillance Accountability Act proposes and what Congress is actually likely to pass tells you everything about how far the federal government has drifted from the privacy protections Americans were supposedly guaranteed 235 years ago.
