During an interview with CNBC, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray lauded his agency’s partnerships with the private sector to target “misinformation” and “disinformation,” despite growing scrutiny over the way these types of partnerships have been used to censor the speech of Americans.
Wray complained that social media has escalated misinformation and disinformation and that AI is “taking it to the next level.” He then lauded private sector partnerships as a way to defend against the proliferation of AI misinformation and disinformation.
“I come back to the importance of partnerships to guard against it,” Wray said. “Not just our partnerships, but there’s an important role for the private sector. For example, AI companies, which many of which are very actively engaged in this fight to help detect deepfakes. You know, in some ways, AI is quite good at detecting AI, and so seeing the private sector invest its own time and money into trying to help detect some of the things that you’re describing I think is an important piece of it. Obviously, government partners, research community, etc., is another piece of it.”
After praising these private sector partnerships that target misinformation and disinformation, Wray attempted to downplay censorship concerns and insisted that these efforts only target foreign actors.
“To be clear, our role at the FBI is focused on the role of the foreign actors, as in the source of the information, not the content,” Wray said. “We’re not the truth police. We don’t aspire to be.”
While Wray asserted that these efforts target foreign actors, lawmakers have previously challenged this assertion and pointed to a federal court ruling that stated the FBI had flagged domestic speech as potential misinformation. This federal court ruling is part of a legal case that’s headed to the Supreme Court and alleges several federal agencies, including the FBI, violated the First Amendment by pressuring Big Tech companies to censor the speech of Americans.
Numerous reports have also detailed how the FBI has flagged the speech of Americans to Big Tech companies for censorship.
January 14, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | FBI, Human rights, United States |
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The Israeli regime has held a history teacher in solitary confinement and fired him for raising concerns on social media about the Zionist forces killing of Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip and criticizing the military.
Meir Baruchin was kept in solitary confinement in a high-security jail in early November, over a series of Facebook posts he’d made, mourning the civilians killed in Gaza, criticizing the Israeli military, and warning against wars of revenge.
“Horrific images are pouring in from Gaza. Entire families were wiped out. I don’t usually upload pictures like this, but look what we do in revenge,” said his message on 8 October, a day after the Israeli regime started a genocidal war in Gaza in response to Hamas’ October 7 Operation Al-Aqsa Strom.
“Anyone who thinks this is justified because of what happened yesterday should unfriend themselves. I ask everyone else to do everything possible to stop this madness. Stop it now. Not later, Now!!!” he wrote below a picture of the family of Abu Daqqa, killed in one of the first airstrikes on Gaza.
Ten days after that Facebook message, he was fired from his teaching job in Petach Tikvah municipality. Less than a month later he was in the solitary confinement wing of al-Qud’s notorious “Russian Compound” prison, detained to give police more time to investigate critical views he had never tried to hide.
Baruchin was initially told to come to a police station for questioning over charges of sedition. When he pointed out to police that they needed a warrant from the attorney general to charge an Israeli citizen with that offense, treason charges were duly drawn up.
When he arrived at the police station, his arms and ankles were cuffed, and he was shown a warrant to search his home. Five detectives escorted him there, turned his apartment upside down, and eventually confiscated two laptops and six hard drives. The police then asked for more time to investigate, and a judge ordered that he be detained.
“I wasn’t allowed to take anything with me to the cell,” he told the Observer. “I walked in with my clothes on and stayed with the same clothes for four days. There were cold-water showers, a tiny piece of soap, two blankets stinking from cigarette smoke, and a tiny towel,” he said.
He was interrogated again before a second judge ordered his release.
But he is living on savings while he waits for the verdict and even if he wins the treason charges have not been dropped: he could live in their shadow for five years, the limit for the police to prosecute.
He is not the only teacher to be targeted. Authorities also summoned Yael Ayalon, head of a Tel Aviv high school, after she shared a Haaretz article warning that Israeli media was hiding the suffering of Gaza’s civilians. “Israeli citizens need to be aware of this reality,” the piece said.
“This story is much bigger than my personal story, or Yael’s personal story. It is a time of witch hunts in Israel, of political persecution,” he said. “I became a ‘Hamas supporter’ because I expressed my opposition to targeting innocent civilians.”
He said he’d received hundreds of private messages of support from fellow teachers and students who were too frightened to go public, and showed several to the Observer.
“The message is crystal clear: keep silent, watch out,” he says, adding that they strengthened his conviction about speaking out. “I thought to myself, when I retire, I might conclude this is the most significant lesson I ever gave in civics.”
He still follows what is happening in Gaza closely, and flicks on his phone through images of the recent dead, a journalist, a violinist, a baby.
His latest post before the interview with the Observer was an image of an improvised grave marker, that looks like part of a broken piece of furniture. “Unknown martyr, green jacket and trainers,” the inscription reads.
“The whole story in one picture,” he says. “The Israeli mainstream media don’t broadcast this picture. They don’t get this picture, and don’t want to get this picture.”
January 14, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Without considering the possibility that there were perhaps too many of them to begin with – Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is complaining in a new report that X, since the Musk takeover, has fired too many “safety and public policy personnel.”
Another complaint from the commissioner’s “transparency report” is about previously censored accounts getting reinstated on the platform.
The sum of the new policy, according to this Australian office – a government agency that’s “independent (but) supported by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA)” – is that X is now less capable of “tackling online hate.”
It is no wonder that these accusations are made by eSafety, considering that it has been given powers to deal with what’s described as “cyberbullying, image-based abuse, and illegal and harmful online content.”
Basing the report on information obtained from X, eSafety writes that 80 percent of “safety engineers” have been let go since October 2022 (the same figure applies to global public policy staff). Moderators working for X have fared somewhat better – still, over 50 percent of them have been fired.
Considering that these employees were doing more than simply moderating – there have been many confirmed and very controversial cases on clear censorship against content and accounts – free speech supporters are likely fine to learn these precise numbers for the first time.
However, the Australian eSafety is not, taking a negative stance toward the developments and warning that they have “implications for Australian users.”
Commissioner Julie Inman Grant is quoted in the report as saying that, “It’s almost inevitable that any social media platform will become more toxic and less safe for users if you combine significant reductions to safety and local public policy personnel with thousands of account reinstatements of previously banned users.”
About that last point – we now know that the number of banned accounts that have been allowed back on X is at this point in excess of 6,100. But, the Australian office is not even sure if these figures concern X’s operations globally or just in Australia – although eSafety “understands” the latter to be the case, and draws this understanding from media saying earlier that a total of more than 62,000 accounts have been reinstated.
The commissioner is also displeased with the fact that X did not find it necessary to place “additional scrutiny” on these accounts – banned under previous ownership, and its policies.
January 13, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Australia, Human rights |
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The agency ignored requests to hand over documents
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan has issued a subpoena to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. This action is part of a wider investigation by the committee into allegations that the federal government has been working in concert with Big Tech companies to suppress certain viewpoints on social media platforms. These allegations raise serious concerns about violations of First Amendment rights.
Chairman Jordan, in his communication to Haines, underscored the gravity of the situation. He cited evidence gathered by the Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, along with other publicly available information, highlighting the federal government’s involvement in pressuring and collaborating with Big Tech and other intermediaries. This collaboration, as Jordan pointed out, has led to the censorship of specific viewpoints online, in direct opposition to the principles enshrined in the First Amendment.
We obtained a copy of the subpoena cover letter for you here.
He emphasized that the First Amendment explicitly forbids government officials from imposing restrictions on speech based on viewpoint. Moreover, he mentioned the state action doctrine, which prohibits government officials from bypassing constitutional limits by engaging private actors to do what the government itself cannot lawfully do.
“The investigative work performed by the Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, along with other publicly available information, have revealed how the federal government has pressured and colluded with Big Tech and other intermediaries to censor certain viewpoints on social media in ways that undermine First Amendment principles,” the subpoena reads. “The First Amendment prohibits government officials from imposing viewpoint-based restrictions on speech. State action doctrine prohibits government officials from circumventing constitutional strictures by using private actors—whether through coercion, encouragement, entwinement, or joint participation—to accomplish what the government cannot directly.”
According to a press release from Chairman Jordan, in an ongoing investigation, the ODNI has come under scrutiny for not providing documents requested by the Committee, despite repeated efforts for voluntary cooperation. This is what has sparked the need for a subpoena.
The Committee’s request encompasses records concerning the activities of the ODNI’s Foreign Malign Influence Center, which, according to publicly available information, should be within the scope of their inquiry.
Additionally, the Committee has acquired documents indicating that ODNI personnel were participants in meetings with major social media companies and various federal government agencies. These gatherings, commonly referred to as “USG-Industry Sync” meetings, are of particular interest to the Committee. Despite these revelations, the ODNI has not yet submitted any records related to these meetings or any other related sessions, raising questions about their responsiveness and transparency in this matter.
January 12, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Human rights, United States |
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The authorities in the UK are “thinking of the children” – but really, of online censorship, say critics – and in doing so, thanks to Online Safety Act, are dipping their toes into the long since established in the US “revolving door” policy.
In the UK there is evidence of this flow going in one direction – from private Big Tech corporations to government jobs.
Reports say that in order to implement the controversial law that considerably restricts online speech, the regulator tasked with this, Ofcom, has employed as many as some 350 new staff – those from tech giants among them.
Former senior Microsoft, Google, and Meta employees are now working for Ofcom – and a further 100 jobs will be created in order to make sure the Online Safety Act is enforced.
Those who pushed its adoption for a long time and continue to justify it, as well as the new, ex Big Tech hires, like to frame and sell the legislation as necessary in order to protect children’s well-being online.
However, this is also the easiest way to protect themselves from criticism, as few people are willing to argue against a case positioned in this way.
However, many still have and do, and the gist of their opposition to the act and nebulous terms like “legal but harmful content” that must be suppressed is that one of the provisions – forcing messaging apps to scan user content (with child sexual abuse always first mentioned as a target – but not the only one) means a serious threat to encryption and therefore, online safety of everyone, including children.
But when big legacy media outlets are now reporting about the law, and the Ofcom hiring policy that has just come to light, they too like to focus on just the part of the Online Safety Act that its creators say is there for the sake of the children.
If they mention any “critics” – it’s to, bizarrely, like the FT has done, say that despite the move to bring in hundreds of new people, Ofcom will still be “stretched” – in, that is, its effort to control and censor at such a large scale.
January 12, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, UK |
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GOP Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has accused Big Tech of engineering electoral outcomes through censorship measures. This comes following YouTube’s banning of a popular conservative online personality who had just conducted an interview with Ramaswamy.
GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy and video creator shaneyyricch have both vociferously criticized YouTube.
As per shaneyyricch, his channel had racked up a substantial 150,000 followers and had garnered over 185 million views in merely three months.
Despite this, it was terminated without any warning or given justification by YouTube. A ban slapped on him for violating community rules, he insists, had not been preceded by any strikes against his account.
Undeterred, he promised to keep generating content on X and Rumble.
In the wake of his unexpected ban, shaneyyricch shared the video he recorded with Ramaswarmy on X, soliciting opinions on why it could’ve possibly led to the termination of his YouTube channel.
As part of the content in consideration, Ramaswamy elaborates on several proposed changes for the electoral process, including one-day-only voting, making the Election Day a national holiday, mandating voter IDs, and sticking to paper ballots.
In a public denunciation of YouTube, Ramaswamy declared, “Big Tech censorship to rig an election…who would have ever imagined.”
He then threw an open challenge to Google, stating, “If Google is going to rig this election, just end the charade & say so. That seems to be the message they’re sending.”
January 11, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | United States |
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Parents in Scotland could soon be sentenced to seven years in prison if they refuse to allow their children to change their gender under plans proposed by the Scottish government.
A public consultation was launched on Tuesday on legislation designed to end conversion practices for both sexual orientation and gender identity and includes widespread measures to criminalize parents who refuse to engage in their children’s desire to not just undergo gender transitions but to identify as another gender by, for example, dressing as the opposite gender.
The consultation proposed by Equalities Minister Emma Roddick would criminalize “coercive” behavior by parents that intends to “change or suppress” a child’s gender identity and consequently causes “harm” to the child.
“Coercive” behavior is broadly defined in the plans and ranges from “violent, threatening, or intimidating” behavior towards the victim to “controlling the victim’s day-to-day activities” or “pressuring the victim to act in a particular way.”
It states the behavior needs to be sustained but subsequently explains that such behavior need only happen “on at least two occasions” to meet this criteria.
Harm is also defined loosely as either “physical or psychological,” and the latter must be shown to have caused the child “fear, alarm, and distress.”
The draft legislation includes a defense if the parent can prove their actions were objectively reasonable.
For Women Scotland, a campaign seeking to protect women’s and children’s rights in the country, expressed their concerns about the draft legislation.
“We have grave concerns that these plans will criminalize loving parents, who could face years in jail simply for refusing to sign up to the gender ideology cult,” spokesperson Marion Calder said.
“They will also hand activists and social workers unprecedented powers to meddle in family life, while having a chilling impact on therapists and counselors.
“If the SNP and Greens insist on pushing this through, it is likely to go the same way as the toxic self-ID and named person laws and be blocked in the courts,” she added.
The left-wing Scottish National Party (SNP) has come under fire for pushing through several controversial progressive policies relating to transgender issues, the most recent being last year’s decision to remove the requirement for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria in order to apply for a gender recognition certificate to legally change one’s gender.
The reforms also slashed the time an applicant must live in their preferred gender before legally changing it from two years to three months and lowered the minimum age at which a person can apply for a gender recognition certificate from 18 to 16 years.
January 10, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, Scotland, UK |
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Dr. Mary Kelly Sutton (who goes by “Kelly”) on Oct. 30 lost her license to practice medicine in New York for writing eight vaccine exemptions in California between 2016 and 2018. New York was the third state to enforce this penalty, after Massachusetts and California. Sutton is now no longer able to practice medicine anywhere in the U.S.
Both the New York and Massachusetts medical boards adjudicated Sutton’s case on the basis of “reciprocal discipline,” rubber-stamping the Medical Board of California’s 2021 decision without allowing her to challenge the validity of the original findings.
Reciprocal discipline avoids the time and costs of relitigating. Therefore, like the Massachusetts Board of Medicine hearing last July, the October hearing in New York was just theater and the board never intended to allow Sutton to defend herself.
Instead, the New York board maintained that the purpose of the hearing was limited to determining what penalty should apply to Sutton’s state license in light of the findings already established in California.
Medical Board of California misinterpreted the law
Sutton, an integrative medicine physician practicing since the early 1970s, told The Defender that the Medical Board of California misinterpreted the law when it determined she violated “standards of care” when writing the vaccine exemptions.
Those exemption-specific standards — which came into effect in 2016 via Senate Bill (SB) 277, a California bill that stripped parents of the personal belief exemption for rejecting vaccines for their children — only stated it was up to the physician to decide on a medical exemption based on the needs of the child.
However, in 2019, California passed two more bills — SB 276 and SB 714 — designed to make vaccine exemptions even more difficult to acquire.
Specifically, when a doctor writes more than five medical exemptions per year (as of Jan. 1, 2020) or a school’s immunization rate falls below 95%, the California Department of Public Health (CPDH) has the right to review the medical exemptions.
Physicians since January 2021 are also required to use a standardized electronic exemption form submitted to a statewide database, and CPDH may revoke exemptions that do not conform to vaccination guidelines established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Sutton claimed the Medical Board of California applied its own definition of “standards of care,” in direct contravention to the standard established by SB 277.
“In California, any time a standard of care is written into statutory law, it is more preeminent than a community standard of care that is just held among the general opinion of doctors in practice,” she said.
Sutton believes the Medical Board of California was also applying laws derived from SB 276 and SB 714 that went into effect well after the date she wrote the exemptions.
The CDC’s and ACIP’s vaccine recommendations do not constitute mandates or requirements. According to Sutton, during the lobbying phase of SB 277, a doctor called ACIP and asked whether its recommendations should be considered mandates, and was told that they were only guidelines.
The ACIP guidelines do not mention the word “exemption,” according to Sutton, nor were the guidelines mentioned in SB 277.
“That’s the way guidelines have always been used in standards of care,” Sutton said, calling them “indicators, supports, references — but not mandates.”
Sutton said the mood of medicine is shifting away from a doctor exercising his or her own training and experienced judgment towards doing what the standards and guidelines say.
“This is decidedly against the quality of medicine because there’s no freedom to individualize for the patient,” she said.
Dissecting the California case
The California board revoked Sutton’s license for “gross negligence” and “repeated negligent acts” in issuing permanent vaccine exemptions for eight pediatric patients, saying the exemptions did not comply with standards of care and vaccine guidelines at the time.
The board’s sole expert witness, Dr. Deborah Lehman, infectious disease physician at the University of California, Los Angeles, dismissed Sutton’s claim that SB 277 clearly articulated standards of care regarding exemptions, saying those were not the “community standard of care,” Sutton recounted.
Sutton explained:
“SB 277 was brief and direct to the point. It said that if a child who is required to have vaccines receives a note from a physician stating that it is in the child’s best interests to not be vaccinated, then that suffices to fulfill the requirement and the child can go to school without having the required vaccines. The deciding factor is the physician’s discretion.”
The relevant clause from the bill states:
“If the parent or guardian files with the governing authority a written statement by a licensed physician to the effect that the physical condition of the child is such, or medical circumstances relating to the child are such, that immunization is not considered safe, indicating the specific nature and probable duration of the medical condition or circumstances, including, but not limited to, family medical history, for which the physician does not recommend immunization, that child shall be exempt from the requirements.”
Lehman said doctors must only grant an exemption when there is a contraindication to a vaccine and at no other time.
Lehman claimed the standard of care was determined by whether another physician would treat the medical issue the same or similarly. However, according to Sutton, she omitted the all-important phrase “in the same community.”
In the integrative medicine community in which Sutton practices, it is common for patients to receive more individualized treatments rather than one-size-fits-all approaches.
“It was kind of a force-of-personality situation that was successful in the setting of the courtroom hearing at the administrative level,” Sutton said. “And the board witness prevailed upon the judge to believe that the law had no meaning and that community opinion was higher.”
The California board also questioned Sutton’s decision not to request patients’ medical files or perform physicals in the cases for which she wrote exemptions.
“If I required a physical exam for every vaccine exemption, I could be accused of ‘padding the bill’ because the physical exam contributes nothing to the decision about the risk for a vaccine injury,” Sutton said.
Instead, Sutton’s process was primarily to review patient histories to understand if the child or a family member had suffered a negative reaction to vaccines.
She said:
“From my understanding and from the group of physicians that I worked with at the time — Physicians for Informed Consent — the risk factors for vaccine injury lie completely in the story of what’s happened to the child when they have had vaccines and what has happened to their blood relatives when those people had vaccines.”
After the passage of SB 277, Sutton said there was “a great deal of conversation” among doctors about how the law could be read and interpreted and how exemptions could be constructed rationally based on the scientific literature.
That literature showed several different areas of concern around vaccinations, including “The aluminum contained in vaccines can trigger neurologic issues and autoimmune disease,” Sutton said, adding, “There is the question of regression after vaccines and neurodevelopmental delays such as autism.”
“There’s also a higher risk of allergies, and then there’s the immediate reactions where a person collapses or has a seizure after a vaccine,” she said.
“A doctor has to make an extra effort in order to understand the historical pattern of vaccine reactions that would indicate risk of vaccine injury, or how to diagnose mitochondrial dysfunction,” Sutton said.
During the California hearing, Sutton shared extensive scientific citations supporting her medical decision-making, including research by Dr. Chris Exley on the dangers of aluminum in vaccines.
She told the board that it was neither intelligent nor humane to force a family to continue to vaccinate after one of their children had already died or been injured by a vaccine, and shared her clinical observation that unvaccinated patients are healthier than those who are vaccinated.
The California board also claimed Sutton neglected to provide informed consent to her patients requesting vaccine exemptions.
Sutton was uncertain exactly what the board meant here but surmised it was saying she did not adequately highlight the diseases that could develop if the parents failed to vaccinate their children.
Deeming the real issue with informed consent to be advising patients about the potential harms of vaccination, Sutton said, “I don’t think I repeated the CDC bylines.” Instead, she believed the parents who came to her for exemptions were already “more than aware” of the risks of childhood diseases.
From her point of view, there was already enough vaccine promotion happening with mainstream media and schools “echoing over and over” how “vastly dangerous chickenpox” and the other childhood diseases were.
The California board’s concern about Sutton not requesting previous medical records is based on the notion of “Don’t trust a single word the patient says,” Sutton said, an attitude that necessitates getting “every documentation” about adverse vaccine reactions before making a decision.
“That’s not the way medicine works,” Sutton said. “But that’s what was expected in terms of a medical exemption interview. It’s like building a legal case instead of a medical case.”
Further wrongdoing was implied by the California board in pointing out that a number of the exemptions Sutton wrote were for patients for whom she was not the primary care provider.
“That is implying that the primary care doctor knows the patient best,” Sutton said. “And that is good in a lot of ways, but it can be a problem for the patient if it’s a large practice that has been forbidden to give vaccine exemptions.”
Sutton said that if a patient’s need cannot be addressed by that group, even if it’s their primary care group, then it is akin to patient abandonment.
SB 277, the law in effect during the period Sutton wrote the exemptions, never had a requirement that exemptions be written by the primary care physician, or even by a pediatrician or pediatric infectious disease expert, according to Sutton.
“So their [Medical Board of California’s] statements were beyond the law and that’s what they were enforcing against doctors,” she said.
Although the board improperly focused on laws that went into effect in 2019 and later, Sutton said, “That very argument could not be persuasively made by the attorneys at the time.”
Board expert: ‘Science has been decided’ on vaccine risks
The Medical Board of California conducted a three-day “trial” for Sutton in June 2021 in an administrative court with a single judge and no right to a jury.
Three experts spoke on behalf of Sutton, while Lehman, the board’s single expert, testified against her.
Lehman lacked basic knowledge of vaccine risks and stated that all doctors should follow the CDC’s vaccine schedule.
When asked to quantify the risk of vaccine injuries, Lehman said, “I don’t need to cite articles in my report, because the science has been decided … If you want answers to these questions, I would refer you to the CDC.”
After denying any knowledge of Dr. Peter Aaby’s more than 400 articles on PubMed analyzing vaccine dangers, Lehman characterized the journal as “low impact” and Aaby as “anti-vax.”
Sutton’s witnesses were Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, pediatric neurologist, Dr. James Neuenschwander, family physician with vaccine expertise and Dr. LeTrinh Hoang, integrative medicine pediatrician.
They skillfully articulated the heterodox perspectives on vaccine dangers and referenced a number of recent studies on vaccine adverse effects, while noting the lack of data on vaccine safety or government studies comparing health outcomes for vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals.
“And on this very little evidence, people like the board expert are proclaiming to the high heavens these are safe and effective,” Sutton said. “All of these other concerns are irrelevant.”
Administrative court structure promotes ‘raw power’
In Sutton’s interactions with California, Massachusetts and New York, she observed a notable lack of due process when compared with civil and criminal courts.
In the proceedings with the Massachusetts board, one of the documents filed against her did not list any specific complaints, making it difficult for Sutton to defend herself. “I had to intuit what they were complaining about and then make up the answers,” she said.
When she brought this shortcoming to the magistrate’s attention, he confirmed that such detail is not required in administrative courts.
“The structure of the administrative-level courts promotes the raw power that’s exercised by the medical boards,” Sutton said, adding, “It’s not an exercise within the law and it doesn’t benefit the people, but only the administrative state itself.”
Sutton mentioned the Federation of State Medical Boards, which coordinates all of the medical boards in the U.S., sent out warnings to doctors about misinformation, masks, vaccines and exemptions related to COVID-19, she said.
“It’s a private, unelected group that’s been around for over 100 years,” she said. “It’s not visibly related to any government entity.”
Together with its partner agency, the International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities, it forms an integral part of the administrative state that is undermining the doctor-patient relationship and helping to delicense doctors like Sutton.
Sutton said, “They are both in the same building at the same address in Euless, Texas. So there is a centralized organ to control medical boards around the world, which means controlling doctors around the world.”
“The coordination of COVID happened through organizations like that,” she added.
Doctors incentivized to ignore vaccine injuries
Sutton said the financial incentives to vaccinate everyone within a medical practice discourage doctors from connecting adverse health outcomes to the vaccines.
“The Blue Cross Blue Shield Provider Incentive Program manual of 2016 listed a $400 bonus to the doctor for every two-year-old who was on the CDC vaccine schedule on time,” she said, “as long as 63% of the practice was vaccinated.”
“That’s going to influence how you respond to a parent when they say, ‘Johnny had a seizure after the MMR [measles-mumps-rubella] vaccine,’” Sutton said, adding, “Do you put that in the chart as an MMR vaccine reaction? Or do you say, ‘Oh, it must be something else’?”
If a child has a febrile seizure, the doctor may well chalk it up to normal childhood fever rather than to a recent vaccination, Sutton said. “So we bias our own literature, our own notes, by the things that have been allowed in terms of financial incentives.”
Sutton said financial incentives must be removed from medicine to restore its integrity.
“It’s too much impact on physician judgment and motivations are not angelic,” she said. “We’re humans. So if somebody says ‘If you just get 10 kids vaccinated you’ll get $4000,’ I’m going to be looking for those 10 kids to vaccinate and I’ll be rationalizing to myself why that’s okay.”
Part of the problem, according to Sutton, is the state of the vaccine research literature that keeps doctors in the dark about the reality of adverse events.
“Vaccines have been very poorly studied,” she said. “Some of them were approved, like hepatitis B, after only four days in one case and five days in another brand’s case study — and it was approved for use in every newborn baby.”
Other vaccines have been studied for as long as 42 days, but none long-term, which is necessary to see the development of autoimmune diseases like asthma that don’t show up immediately after vaccination, she said.
“So the board expert could say there’s no evidence that an adverse event is related to vaccines, which is not accurate because the evidence is there — but it’s not in the evidence that the CDC accepts,” Sutton said.
According to Sutton, the CDC “very carefully curates” the articles and studies it puts on its website to support its own policies. If a CDC-sponsored study shows adverse vaccine reactions, it won’t appear on its website, she said.
Sutton shared the story of a former cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic who was training to do heart transplants when her 12-month-old daughter received an MMR vaccine and immediately regressed with severe autism. The woman had to leave the cardiology program and return to her home in Europe to care for her child.
Sutton said this woman claimed the CDC was researching a lot of topics, including that the rubella virus in the MMR vaccine persists in the body for a long time and results in granulomas in the case of immune-deficient children and sometimes immune-competent adults.
“This is not on the CDC website,” Sutton said. “So if we look at the nature of the research supporting our vaccine program, we would be astonished and staggered and ashamed because we’re injecting our children with very little evidence that these vaccines are safe or effective.”
Financial incentives in research and drug approvals are also highly problematic, according to Sutton.
“Medicine is no longer medicine,” she said. “It’s become co-opted as another business. Sickness is more profitable than health and mandates are more profitable than choice.”
“Otherwise, despite the efforts of individual doctors, the profession will be working against humanity and really becomes organized brutality instead of healthcare,” Sutton said.
‘The whole storm is not finished’
Sutton has exhausted or curtailed her administrative appeals with the states that have removed her license to practice medicine.
However, she and several doctors are planning to file a collective action in federal court in the spring. They are being supported by the nonprofit Physicians & Patients Reclaiming Medicine, where Sutton’s story is currently featured.
Meanwhile, Sutton keeps in touch with many of her colleagues who have suffered the same fate.
“They are recouping from the reputational and financial losses after being attacked,” she said. “So people don’t quit, but there is a lot of sadness about medicine.”
Sutton talked about the “diaspora” away from the state of California because of the discrimination that’s happened to families who had a health concern about a vaccine for their child.
“There’s been a lot of pain. So the whole storm is not finished,” she said.
Lacking a medical license, Sutton has turned to offering health education for a small group of clients. They meet monthly over Zoom, and individuals can discuss their concerns privately with her. But she no longer diagnoses, treats or does physical exams.
Sutton is currently preparing a course about integrative medicine to present to a group of acupuncture students.
John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
January 9, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, Human rights, United States |
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Those who have experienced serious health issues following their Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccination are raising more concerns about censorship on social media platforms. These individuals, who consider themselves victims of the vaccine, report that their attempts to share their experiences and symptoms online are being stifled.
Among these is a father of two who suffered a life-altering blood clot, leading to permanent brain damage, after receiving the vaccine in spring 2021. He is currently pursuing legal action against AstraZeneca in the High Court in London. Similarly, a lawsuit has been filed by the husband of a woman who tragically died following her vaccination.
Others who believe they have suffered adverse reactions to the jab, yet are not involved in any legal battles, have expressed frustration over the suppression of their voices on platforms like Facebook.
They claim that they are being pushed towards using cryptic language and self-censorship to evade group shutdowns, as reported by the Telegraph.
UK CV Family, a private Facebook group founded by Charlet Crichton, serves as a support network for over 1,000 members who feel they have been harmed or bereaved by the Covid vaccines. Crichton, who experienced a severe reaction to the AstraZeneca vaccine, had to abandon her 13-year-long Sports Therapy business due to prolonged bed rest. The group, which was established in November 2021, has earned the status of core-participant in the Covid Inquiry, allowing members like Crichton, who claims to have suffered myocarditis post-vaccination, to testify in the inquiry.
Crichton revealed that her comments had been blocked to prevent misuse, and she even faced a temporary ban from Meta for allegedly not meeting their standards.
She also noted that some members have experienced shadow banning, where their posts are obscured from public view.
Further, YouTube attempted to censor a video featuring lawyers discussing vaccines at the Covid Inquiry, citing a breach of their medical misinformation policy. A video of Stephen Bowie, a Scottish Vaccine Injury Group member who suffered a spinal stroke and blood clots post-vaccination, received a similar warning.
January 8, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
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In 2015, the “Defend the Guard Act” was introduced in the West Virginia legislature, aiming to bring sanity to our nation’s foreign policy and the legal abuses foisted upon our servicemen within our state’s National Guard.
This proposed law emerged from long forgotten principles, pieced together into legislation that was committed to the idea that our troops ought to only be sent into foreign wars with a declaration of war by the U.S. Congress—a constitutional mandate forsaken for over eighty years now.
With the Congress renouncing its solemn responsibility, over time, the process of throwing American troops into foreign wars has become a matter of unilateral decree by the president, an office swayed carelessly by the administrative state and impulsive bureaucrats from the Pentagon.
The consequences of this radical departure from our nation’s traditional governance have been predictable: a catastrophic state of “Forever Warfare,” financially and morally bankrupting our country.
The Defend the Guard Act, then, is a last-ditch effort to reassert legislative oversight before it’s too late, and force Washington to confront the neglected ethics long held by the Western “Just War Tradition”—that armed conflict should always be a measure of last resort.
The legislation, however, is more than just a simple procedural check. A crucial aspect is its focus on keeping our Guard units at home, where they’re needed most. A state’s National Guard is essential for handling local emergencies like floods and storms or securing our borders.
Over the years, a troubling trend has emerged: many of the National Guard members who have been cut down on the front lines of Washington’s perpetual foreign wars hail from rural states akin to West Virginia—states like Arkansas, Ohio, and Kentucky, or Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.
This disproportionate burden of foreign wars borne by our country’s rural regions—areas often dismissed by the elites of this nation as “flyover country”—is not just a tragedy, it’s an outrage. To the ruling coastal elite, our servicemen from such states are seen as expendable.
During the height of the Iraq War, for instance, nearly half of all combat brigades were National Guardsmen, a great many from rural states held in contempt by the managerial ruling class, who don’t think twice about them or their families.
Central to this entire affair has been the incredible efforts of Sgt. Dan McKnight (Ret) and the organization he formed, Bring Our Troops Home. Dan’s leadership and organizational skills have propelled this idea from a meager initiative in West Virginia to a national movement.
Dan’s devotion to the cause, coupled with his talent to articulate its urgency, has galvanized massive support and brought critical attention to the subject—amplifying the voices of combat veterans everywhere and motivating state legislators across the country to take action.
Each year, as we’ve fought to advance this ‘Defend the Guard’ legislation, formidable resistance is encountered, primarily from the Pentagon and their bureaucratic lackeys. The “Brass” and the useful idiots sent to carry out their bidding employ a wide range of sordid tactics; from disingenuous accusations of “failing to support the troops,” to more aggressive methods behind closed doors—like threats of federal-funding cuts and hints of public defamation against those who support the legislation—the hostility has only intensified.
The escalation of these schemes if a sign of their growing desperation. It’s quite common now for uniformed general officers to patrol the halls of state capitols, lobbying state legislators against the bill with Machiavellian tactics.
These blatant measures on behalf of public “servants” attached to the Pentagon pose a direct challenge to the fundamental American principle of civilian authority over the military—raising questions as to who really controls the armed forces of this country anymore.
Despite this ordeal, the Defend the Guard Act has begun to spread like wildfire, thanks again in large part to Dan McKnight’s heroic efforts. This once-regional idea has now found resonance in dozens of state capitols across the nation.
Huge victories have been achieved with the bill’s passage in the Arizona Senate, and—as of four days ago—its success through the New Hampshire House, marking an even bigger milestone. With the potential to reach up to 40 states this coming year, a pivotal turning point is at hand.
The success of this movement underscores a very critical moment for our states to leverage their inherent powers within our country’s federalist framework, compelling the federal government in Washington to adhere to its foundational principles.
Paramount in this endeavor is the protection of our courageous servicemen within the National Guard—along with the prudent treatment of all of our country’s warriors, who honor their sacred oaths they swore to the Almighty when they donned the uniform.
By reviving long-neglected political principles and promoting the classical virtues, true leaders can be encouraged to emerge and drive efforts that can also safeguard our nation as a whole.
Next week, for the tenth consecutive year, I’ll re-introduce the Defend the Guard Act here in West Virginia. As the idea spreads, I’m hopeful a growing resolve to uphold the virtues our country was founded upon will as well.
Pat McGeehan is a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates representing the first district.
January 8, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Militarism | United States |
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“Endless hysteria will keep you free,” said none of the Founding Fathers. But President Joe Biden missed that message before his absurdly overheated speech last Friday near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Biden draped himself in Revolutionary War virtue as he demanded that Americans quiver in fear at the prospect of his reign ending. Biden invoked the third anniversary of the January 6 Capitol clash to effectively call for canceling the 2024 presidential election.
At a minimum, Biden wants to turn the November election into a referendum on Adolf Hitler. Biden boasted, “We are still a nation that gives hate no safe harbor.” A few minutes before that uplifting assertion, Biden accused Donald Trump of “echoing the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.” CNN reported last week that Biden campaign aides plan to go “full Hitler” on Trump, making “a direct comparison to the Nazi leader rather than couching their attacks by saying Trump ‘parroted’ him.” A few weeks ago, the Biden campaign posted a graphic on Twitter comparing Trump and Hitler’s rhetoric.
Biden continually equated democracy with freedom. And whatever is good for democracy is “close enough for government work” to freedom. Biden declared, “Democracy means having the freedom to speak your mind.” Unless Team Biden disapproves of your thoughts, of course.
Biden neglected to explain why his vision of democracy justifies the near-total suppression of freedom of speech for his opponents. On July 4, Federal Judge Terry Doughty condemned the Biden administration for potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history,” and a federal appeals court condemned Team Biden for “suppressing millions of protected free-speech postings by American citizens”—mostly by conservatives and Republicans.
“If only Uncle Joe had known about that abuse,” right? Like hell. Biden’s Justice Department is fighting tooth and nail at the Supreme Court to preserve his power to secretly censor anyone the feds claim is spouting disinformation, perhaps including denying that Biden is God’s gift to America.
Another key to Biden’s vision of democracy is that the president is entitled to imprison peaceful protestors who opposed him. Biden proved the villainy of Trump supporters by touting case numbers from January 6: “Since that day more than 1,200 people have been charged for the assault on the capitol, and nearly 900 of them have been convicted and they have been sentenced to more than 840 years in prison.”
Biden neglected to quote the bombshell Washington Post report today revealing that vast numbers of the January 6 charges have been crap cases. Federal judges have rejected Biden Justice Department sentencing demands in almost 90% of the January 6 cases—an astounding record. If those cases were not being tried by juries overstocked with federal employees and NPR devotees, the prosecutions would have crashed and burned long ago.
The Supreme Court may obliterate many of the cases. More than 320 of the convictions against J-6 protestors hinge on a bizarre contortion of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley law enacted after corporations destroyed documents sought by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“The average sentence for those convicted of obstructing an official proceeding has been 39 months,” the Post reported. Former federal prosecutor Gene Rossi warns that the Supreme Court taking that case is a “red flag and a loud gong” because that law was the “North Star” used by prosecutors. If the Supreme Court strikes down the Biden twist of the 2002 law, that will make the January 6 prosecutions look like one of the worst witch hunts in American history.
Yet, according to Team Biden, the real problem is that not enough lives have been ruined for sinful thoughts on January 6. Last Thursday, Matthew Graves, Biden’s chief prosecutor for the District of Columbia, issued a warning of potentially thousands of more January 6 indictments: “If a person knowingly entered a restricted area [near the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021] without authorization, they already committed a federal crime. Make no mistake: Thousands of people occupied that area that they were not authorized to be present in in the first place.” Talking about hounding people who merely were in the general vicinity of the Capitol confirms that for Team Biden, “Trespassing plus thought crimes equals terrorism.”
Actually, Biden’s FBI already classifies all the people arrested for January 6 Capitol clash offenses as domestic terrorists—even people busted for “parading without a permit.” The FBI presumes that any American suspected of supporting the January 6, 2021 protests forfeited his constitutional rights. An FBI whistleblower revealed in congressional testimony in May 2023 that FBI headquarters pressured FBI agents to treat anyone who attended the January 6 protests as a criminal suspect. Roughly 2,000 pro-Trump protestors (including an unknown number of undercover agents and informants) entered the Capitol that day. But an FBI analyst exploited the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to unjustifiably conduct warrantless searches on 23,132 Americans citizens suspected of January 6 offenses “to find evidence of possible foreign influence, although the analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence,” according to FISA Chief Judge Rudolph Contreras.
Biden assured the audience that “we still believe that no one, not even the president, is above the law.” Okay, but what if the president or the vice president uses the names Robert Peters, Robin Ware, and JRB Ware as email aliases to hustle business deals for a family member? Is it OK for them to slip the law then?
The only way to assume that Biden is not “above the law” is to assume that his decrees alone are the law. The Supreme Court struck down his COVID vaccine mandate, his moratorium for evicting deadbeat renters, his $500 billion federal student loan forgiveness scheme, and numerous other Biden policies.
Biden spent half an hour fearmongering and then closed by promising “freedom from fear.” This is the famous Biden two-step—demagoguing to his heart’s content and then closing with a few schmaltzy uplift lines, entitling the media to re-christen him as an idealist.
Biden castigated Trump as the “Election Denier in Chief,” a new offense not yet been codified in the statute book. Biden endlessly warned that Trump posed a deadly threat to both freedom and democracy. Biden campaign masterminds were clever enough to permit an unknown local politician to deliver the “takeaway” from the day’s events. Biden was preceded at the podium by Dauphin County commissioner candidate Justin Douglass, who proclaimed that “Donald Trump represents a clear and present danger” to democracy. Since Trump is the ultimate enemy of the Constitution, anything that Biden and his campaign does to banish Trump from the ballot will be pro-democracy.
Obviously, if Americans value democracy, then the presidential candidate favored by the most voters in recent polls must not be allowed on the ballot. Team Biden favors a version of “Guardian Democracy” where voters are only permitted to cast ballots for candidates that the ruling class approves. This is part and parcel with the Democratic Party’s plan to let all future elections be determined by ballot harvesting and tsunamis of unverified mail-in ballots.
Why should we believe that democracy dies unless Biden gets four more years to violate the Constitution, censor and jail his opponents, and domineer practically every aspect of Americans’ lives (“step away from that gas stove before we have to hurt you”)? As Thomas Jefferson declared long ago, “An elective despotism is not the government we fought for.”
January 8, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | FBI, Human rights, United States |
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The line is clear
We are now approximately four years removed from the unleashing of the covid so-called pandemic and the consequential measures adopted and enforced world-wide that created terror in the global populace, imposed unprecedented strictures, subverted foundational principles of medicine and foisted an unnecessary and dangerous inoculation upon a mostly unwitting public.
Some of us, at the very outset, upon hearing the mainstream messages of bat-inspired trans-species migration of a respiratory virus, suspected that things were amiss. The frenzied media, however, with their ‘case’ counts, death counts and fraudulent reporting about the actual lethality of the pathogen, were unstoppable and relentless, and I can forgive the many who began to shudder at this unexpected turn of events and who lined up for the dubious polymerase chain reaction ‘test’ and who, ultimately, placed every hope upon an emergency so-called vaccine, convinced as they were that our world was engulfed by an incomparable threat.
I have a harder time forgiving doctors who threw their senses and duties out the window, were unperturbed by the omission and suppression of attempts to treat and prevent the pathogen before hospitalization was required, abandoned informed consent, pushed the covid jab and regarded those who preferred to keep their minds and bodies and general health intact by not receiving the jab as a dangerous entity.
I frankly cannot forgive those physicians who, wielding considerable influence in establishment media, used this influence to sway their followers to accept something that has now been shown demonstrably and repetitively to be a health disaster
Perhaps, however, under the unnerving full-court press of a rabid and unchecked propaganda campaign waged by once highly-regarded journalistic authorities, everyone can be forgiven for having, essentially, lost their wits. Perhaps.
But now, four years hence, as the general picture has clarified itself, anyone with a sentient eye or ear not wedded to mainstream pulp can conclude that there never was a genuine pandemic, there never was a need to lock and shut down the entire world, and there never was or will be a need to inject billions with a gene-altering concoction that has hurt and killed too many to pass muster as a real and viable vaccine. We can further conclude that the preposterously tremendous control over people exhibited by the roll-out of the covid campaign, and the submission of people to the evisceration of their unalienable rights — these were not organically evolved developments, but consequences of a highly orchestrated deployment of power.
In short, all things covid was a strategically planned operation — a war-crime — the likes of which are unprecedented, and the consequence of which is to move the world towards some kind of autocratic fiefdom wherein we ‘little people’ surviving the first waves of the onslaught will be subjugated to the whims and directives of The Few.
I don’t care how many X followers one may have, or how many Sierpinski triangles one may conjure, how many high-profile interviews one has done, how many conferences one has attended, how many grants one has received, or how many plaudits one has obtained from our freedom-loving community: unless one can see the line and step across it, I regard you as an Enemy.
What line? The line that separates those who understand the concerted efforts of a Global Cabal to inflict the covid mess upon us for purposes of control, versus those who assert that this mess was essentially the result of unfortunate circumstances complicated by greed, incompetence, opportunism, corruption, human error and the like. To espouse the latter is untruthful and enervating: it takes the life out of our tenuously cobbled opposition and plays into our opposition’s hands.
Pick a side. To deny that the genocide visited upon us has been deliberately perpetrated, regardless of what you may invoke in the way of prudence, reason and thoughtful consideration, is to join the ranks of its perpetrators.
Pick a side, the line is clear, and time is short.
Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D.
January 2024
January 7, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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