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Sally Rooney says Palestine Action ban could block publication of her books in Britain

Sally Rooney attends the 2019 Costa Book Awards held at Quaglino’s on January 29, 2019 in London, England [Tristan Fewings/Getty Images]
MEMO | November 27, 2025

Famed Irish novelist Sally Rooney told the UK High Court on Thursday that she may be unable to publish new work in Britain as long as the legal ban on activist group Palestine Action remains in place, citing her public support for the movement, local media reported, Anadolu reports.

Rooney warned that the ban, issued this summer, could even result in her existing books being pulled from shelves, with her case presented in court as an example of the ban’s wider impact on freedom of expression, reported The Guardian.

Rooney praised Palestine Action’s activities as “courageous and admirable,” saying the group is committed to stopping what it views as crimes against humanity by Israel in its two-year military offensive on the Gaza Strip.

In her written witness statement, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations With Friends said the ban would leave her effectively shut out of the UK market, explaining: “It is … almost certain that I can no longer publish or produce any new work within the UK while this proscription remains in effect.”

“If Palestine Action is still proscribed by the time my next book is due for publication, then that book will be available to readers all over the world and in dozens of languages, but will be unavailable to readers in the United Kingdom simply because no one will be permitted to publish it (unless I am content to give it away for free).”

Since the group was banned, Rooney has said she plans to direct earnings from her work to Palestine Action, a decision that prompted her to cancel a UK trip to collect an award over concerns she could be arrested.

The legal ambiguity makes it hard to foresee the full impact of the ban, she said, but warned her publisher Faber & Faber might be barred from paying her royalties. If that happens, she said, “my existing works may have to be withdrawn from sale and would therefore no longer be available to readers in the UK.”

READ: A historic decline in sympathy for Israel in Britain, and an unprecedented rise in solidarity with Palestine in 2025
Adam Straw, representing UN special rapporteur Ben Saul, told the court that growing legal opinion holds the ban to be an unlawful interference under international law, adding that terrorism definitions “do not extend to serious damage to property,” referring to the group spray-painting Royal Air Force planes this July which was cited in the ban.

Representing the home secretary, Sir James Eadie argued that it is for the UK parliament to define terrorism, noting: “Parliament has decided what terrorism is, which includes serious damage to property, whether or not alongside it there is violence against people.”

The hearing will conclude on Tuesday, when the final day of the judicial review is held.

In attacks in Gaza since October 2023, Israel has killed nearly 70,000 people, mostly women and children, and injured over 170,000 others.

In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

November 28, 2025 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Censorship is a Western Value!

By Hans Vogel | November 27, 2025

The key to ruling over a great number of people is to keep them divided. That is how empires throughout history have been ruled. In the eighteenth century, Rousseau once observed that the bigger a state or comparable political construction, the less freedom for the individual. He was absolutely right!

The globalist rulers of Europe, the EU Commissars, and the extensive organizational pyramid they have put in place, ceaselessly remind all of us that “Europe” stands at the pinnacle of civilization and that democratic “European Values” (also known as “Western Values”) are superior. These include freedom of speech, and the inviolability of the human body. These values and rights are enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

These rights may still exist on paper, but in practice they have been subverted piecemeal and hollowed out by the EU evil elite. This process has been underway since the collapse of the Soviet Union and “real existing socialism” around 1990, and was accelerated during the twenty-first century.

As long as the Soviet Union existed, it was easy to keep the citizenry all over Western Europe subdued by pointing to the danger of a Soviet invasion. Therefore, after the end of the Cold War, for a while the sky seemed clearer than ever before.

The globalist elites now needed to find something else with which to keep the population subdued, so they came up with acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer. All forests would soon disappear due to acid rain and anyone who would use anything ranging from hairspray to whipped cream from a can was guilty of accelerating the end of life as we know it, because it would make the hole in the ozone layer even bigger.

These issues disappeared overnight when the three WTC towers in New York were brought down on 11 September, 2001. Most definitely, this was a very elaborately planned and superbly executed enterprise, and the official narrative was swallowed hook, line and sinker by most people. Initially, that is. Very soon, however, doubts began to circulate. Modestly at first, but then morphing into a vast movement of disbelievers all over the West. In the US, those who refused to believe the official narrative were branded “conspiracy theorists” and the term was quickly translated into the various European languages and similarly weaponized.

Although the concept “conspiracy theorist” dated from the 1960s, when in the US it was used to disqualify and socially isolate those who would not believe the official narratives on the Kennedy murders, after 9/11 it became a tool to create social division all over the American Empire. The operations against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and later Syria planted even more seeds of doubt, to the effect that a basis was laid for a profound social dichotomy: on the one hand, those who continued to trust their government, on the other hand, a growing number of skeptics.

Their numbers grew even more during the Great Covid Show. Although statistics on who did and who did not take the jab sometimes show remarkable differences from one nation to another, it is an open question whether these statistics are anywhere near reliable. The best assumption seems to stick to the Pareto principle of 80-20, with 20% in the West not taking the jab.

The Great Covid Show and the subsequent great power confrontation in the Ukraine have solidified the social dichotomy that is now evident all over the West. It is especially in Europe (because of its status as a region under the US yoke) that this deep societal rift presents a special problem. If allowed to go unchecked, this might lead to individual European nations trying to leave the fold.

Although the European ruling elite has consistently failed to prove it is capable of independent, original thought, it seems to have understood the danger resulting from the current societal dichotomy. Yet instead of adapting its policies to the new reality in accordance with those celebrated “Western Values,” it has chosen to fight anyone who disagrees with the EU Commissars. For want of reliable data, it is reasonable to assume that the overall percentage of citizens rejecting the official narratives on anything ranging from Covid to the Ukraine and from anthropogenic climate change to the annual rate of inflation, stands at about twenty. As long as it stays there, everything is fine and dandy, but it becomes problematic whenever that percentage would rise to thirty or even higher.

That is why ever new methods and techniques of thought control have been unleashed on the European citizenry. And the end of it is not yet nearly in sight. Social media are currently the target of a wholesale attack on the freedom of speech. Ostensibly in an effort to protect minors from harmful content on social media and to fight the abuse of children by pedophiles, behind closed doors (remember those “Western Values”!) EU Commissars have decided to impose stricter “voluntary” controls. This will mean that users eventually have to identify themselves by way of digital or facial scans, All because the public is in need of protection! Besides, if a protection racket works for the Mafia, it will work for the government! Citizens need to feel safe and be protected against many dangers. Not only against child pornography, but also against hate speech. Moreover, they need to be properly informed at all times by the news that needs to consist of real information. No “disinformation” therefore!

Nobody seems to realize that the very concept of disinformation is utterly nonsensical, it is actually a non-word, a weaponized mind-fuck. Every message, each news item carries information. Some or all of it might be untrue, but it is still information. To put it differently, each and every lie also carries information. Therefore the word disinformation is a contradiction in terms.

How anyone can reconcile the weaponized use of the term disinformation with “Western Values” such as free speech, is a mystery. Yet the EU Commissars go one step further as they intend to decree new rule. making it impossible for anyone to speak his mind on social media. A kind of full spectrum domination of social media activity by citizens is being prepared.

At the same time, it is a tool for the elites to keep the public divided so as to be able to control it more effectively. This very usefulness may, however, have prevented the elites from analyzing the subject more profoundly.

What can we conclude from this?

In the first place, it seems to indicate that the EU Commissars are very much afraid and that they are finally realizing that growing numbers of Europeans are opposed to their policies. At the same time, they have concluded there is no turning back. It is almost as if they are so afraid of the wrath of the citizens that out of desperation they have decided to control the speech of 450 million Europeans. Therefore the latest decisions of the EU Commissars are a testimonium paupertatis, a proof of their utter intellectual and ethical poverty.

Any government that resorts to the kind of measures decreed by the Brussels Eurocrats is inherently weak, and implicitly realizes that its days are numbered.

November 27, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Ambassador Mike Huckabee Secretly Meets Top Israeli Spy Jonathan Pollard

Let’s remove both Huckabee and Israel from American foreign policy

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • November 25, 2025

Given the high visibility of the Israeli genocide being carried out in Gaza, for the first time many among the American general public are beginning to ask why a rich country like Israel should be getting billions of dollars from the United States taxpayer to pay for waging its war when many Americans are struggling. Inevitably, of course, the press coverage of the questions being asked about the cash flow and what is playing out in Gaza have failed to discuss the real magnitude of the “aid,” which goes far beyond the $3.8 billion a year that President Barack Obama committed to America’s “best friend and closest ally.” In fact, over the past two years, Washington has given Israel more than $21 billion in weapons and cash and just last week the 1,000th US transport plane filled with weapons landed in Israel. On top of all that, there are trade concessions, co-production “defense partnership” projects and dicey charitable contributions from Zionist billionaires that our federal and many state governments shower on the Jewish state, easily exceeding $10 billion in a “normal” year without Israel claiming having “greater need” as it goes about violating ceasefires and killing Gazans, Lebanese and Iranians.

The fact that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have enabled Israel’s slaughter without so much as the slightest hesitation should in itself be damnable, but the average American is fed a steady diet of propaganda favoring Israel through the devastatingly effective Jewish media control that prevails nationwide. Interestingly, however, as the American public is beginning to tire of the Israeli lies, the Israel Lobby in the US is following the orders of Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu, who has declared that his country will be fighting eight wars – seven against all of its neighbors and one to control the United States’ increasingly negative opinion of what Israel represents. As a result, laws like the Antisemitism Awareness Act are being passed to silence “freedom of speech” critics of the Jewish state and criminalize what they are saying.

During his 2016 campaign Donald Trump swore that he would be the best friend that Israel has ever had in the White House, a pledge that some viewed skeptically as Trump was also committed to bringing the troops home from “useless wars” in Asia, most of whom were in the Middle East supporting Israeli interests. More recently Trump admitted that America was in the Middle East to “protect Israel” and he has indeed proven to be the great benefactor he promised to be in responding fully to Netanyahu’s wish list. In his first term in office, Trump increased tension dramatically with Iran, moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights, and basically gave Israel the green light to do whatever it wants on the Palestinian West Bank, including getting rid of the Palestinians.

And currently as all that has already played out the Israelis have attacked and killed thousands of civilians in Gaza, Syria and the West Bank with impunity, protected by the US veto in the UN Security Council against any consequences for their actions while a subservient Congress gives Netanyahu fifty-six standing ovations and bleats that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Trump has made the United States completely complicit in Israeli war crimes and has added a few unique touches of its own to include the widely condemned assassination of the senior Iranian official Qassem Soleimani while on a peace mission in Baghdad in January 2020.

Israel more-or-less openly admits that it controls the actions of the United States in its region, Netanyahu having boasted how the US federal government is “easily moved” when it comes up against the Israeli Lobby. Nor is there any real secret to how the Lobby uses money to buy access and then exploits that access to obtain real power, which is then used to employ all the resources of the US government in support of the Jewish state. The top donor to the Democratic Party, Israeli-American Haim Saban has stated that he is a one issue guy and that issue is Israel. This single-minded focus to promote Israel’s interests at the expense of those of the United States makes the Israel Lobby the most formidable foreign policy lobby in Washington.

One of the tools used by Trump to facilitate the virtual slavery under the Israeli yoke is the appointment of passionately Zionist US Ambassadors to Israel, where they often behave as if they are there to represent Jewish interests rather that those of the United States. Trump’s first term appointment David Friedman was a personal lawyer with no diplomatic or international experience, so he inevitably endorsed with some enthusiasm every extreme proposal coming from Netanyahu, which he then went on to sell to Trump. Friedman, now retired, has a home in Jerusalem and has reportedly opted to spend much of his time in Israel.

Friedman was, however, somewhat of a gem compared to the current ambassador Mike Huckabee, an Israel-Firster Baptist preacher from Arkansas, who repeatedly expresses his love for the Jewish state and white-washes whatever it does. For what it’s worth, on October 13th, 2025, Friedman and Huckabee performed a rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s hit song Sweet Home Alabama in Jerusalem but with altered lyrics that promoted Zionism and the city of Jerusalem itself. Friedman played guitar while Huckabee played bass. Trump, of course, is similar in his overweening embrace of Israel, whether it be because he is being blackmailed, or honestly believes in what he is saying, or even because he has converted to Judaism in 2017, as some believe. In any event, the theatrical duet performance by the two Israel-loving ambassadors failed to provide any benefit to the United States of America.

The complete contempt that the Israelis and Israeli supporters in the US – to include the Ambassador Huckabee – have for other Americans and their interests has been on full display recently and it involves the most significant espionage operation that Israel has ever “run” inside the United States. Jonathan Pollard, the most damaging spy in American history, stole for Israel the keys to accessing US communications and information gathering systems, which gave the Jewish state access to all US intelligence as it was being collected. He was Jewish and a US citizen, his father a professor at Notre Dame University. As a student at Stanford, where he completed a degree in 1976, Pollard’s penchant for dissimulation was already noted by other students. He is remembered for having boasted that he was a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, claiming to have worked for Mossad, to having attained the rank of Colonel in the Israel Defense Forces (even sending himself a telegram addressed to “Colonel Pollard”), and to having killed an Arab while on guard duty at a kibbutz. All the claims were lies.

Physically Pollard was also unappealing, overweight and balding, seemingly an unlikely candidate to become a US Navy intelligence analyst which he accomplished after having failed a polygraph test when trying to join CIA. One review board determined that he had been hired in the first place under pressure from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). According to an intelligence agency after-the fact-damage assessment “Pollard’s operation has few parallels among known US espionage cases… his first and possibly largest delivery occurred on 23 January [1984] and consisted of five suitcases-full of classified material.”

Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger wrote a forty-six page review of the Pollard case that remains largely classified and redacted to this day, detailing what incredible damage Pollard had done. Part of the document states: “In this case, the defendant has admitted passing to his Israeli contacts an incredibly large quantity of classified information. At the outset I must state that the defendant’s disclosures far exceed the limits of any official exchange of intelligence information with Israel. That being the case, the damage to national security was complete the moment the classified information was given over. Ideally, I would detail… all the information passed by the defendant to his Israeli contacts: unfortunately, the volume of data we know to have been passed is too great to permit that. Moreover, the defendant admits to having passed to his Israeli handlers a quantity of documents great enough to occupy a space six feet by ten feet… The defendant has substantially harmed the United States, and in my view, his crimes demand severe punishment… My foregoing comments will, I hope, dispel any presumption that disclosures to an ally are insignificant; to the contrary, substantial and irrevocable damage has been done to this nation. Punishment, of course, must be appropriate to the crime, and in my opinion, no crime is more deserving of severe punishment than conducting espionage activities against one’s own country.”

Pollard was detected and arrested in 1985, convicted in 1987, and imprisoned. The case sent shockwaves through both Washington and Tel Aviv at the time of the conviction. Pollard pled guilty, confessing to selling the thousands of pages of secret documents to the Israelis for cash, vacations to Europe, and promised future payments to be wired to a Swiss bank account. A federal judge correctly dismissed pleas for clemency.

In 2015 Pollard was released from prison under parole which required him to remain in the United States. But in January 2021 Pollard was released from the parole conditions and was allowed to fly “home,” meeting Netanyahu as he disembarked from a private plane that had departed from Newark New Jersey before being given a hero’s welcome. The Pollard trip to his “home” occurred because Donald Trump had obligingly lifted the travel restrictions on him the week before, one more favor to Israel. At the airport, Pollard and his wife knelt to kiss the Israeli soil before Netanyahu handed him an Israeli citizen ID and welcomed him. The 737 luxury-fitted executive jet Pollard and his wife flew on belonged to Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, then the chief donor to the Republicans and to Donald Trump. Adelson was married to an Israeli, Miriam Adelson, who now survives him and continues the donations to the Republicans. Sheldon famously once said that he regretted having worn a US Army uniform when he was drafted in World War 2, much preferring instead that he might have done military service in the Israel Defense Forces.

But the Pollard story does not end there. In July Jonathan Pollard was a guest at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, where he met with Ambassador Mike Huckabee. The meeting was his first with US officials since his release and immigration to Israel. It was a break with precedent and the move by Huckabee, even all these years after the crime, still alarmed American intelligence officials even though, as it was Israel, media coverage in the US was minimal. John Kiriakou, a former CIA counter-terrorism officer, has argued that Pollard should have been detained by the Marine guards at the American Embassy in Jerusalem and should not have been allowed to meet with the ambassador. “[Pollard] has called for Jewish Americans who have security clearances… to begin spying for Israel, just like he did… So for him to be welcomed into the American Embassy is a bridge too far. If anything, he should have been snatched when he entered the American embassy.”

The Trump administration was apparently not consulted regarding the planned get-together. “The White House was not aware of that meeting,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt claimed. It was reportedly left off the public schedule of the ambassador, suggesting at a minimum that it was a terrible decision by Huckabee acting on his own which he made some attempt to conceal. And yet, when the story broke the Trump administration still condoned the actions of the ambassador, who reportedly had a friendly chat with the spy who had done the most grave damage ever to the United States. “The president stands by our ambassador, Mike Huckabee,” Leavitt added, “and all that he’s doing for the United States and Israel.” She did not elaborate on what he has been doing for the United States.

After the story broke, Pollard accused “anti-Israel and isolationist elements within the US government of leaking that he met off-the-books with US Ambassador Huckabee in a bid to discredit and oust the pro-Israel envoy.” He claimed that “the New York Times story was part, or is part, of an effort to discredit the ambassador and have him removed. I think the people behind this are anti-Israel elements within the Trump administration, the neo-isolationists… and others, perhaps pro-Saudi, pro-Qatari elements within the administration that would like to see a person like Ambassador Huckabee sent home.” Pollard later gave an interview in which he named Steven Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner as likely culprits “representing Saudi and Qatari rather than US interests” in brokering the Gaza ceasefire, and he added that he “despises them” for daring to “carry on with terrorists.” Pollard added his view that the 20-point ceasefire plan, leaving the door open to the possibility for Palestinian statehood, threatens Israel’s security and “undermines our independence,” and the October 9th truce-hostage deal that is based on that plan would have been worthwhile only had Israel “unleashed… hell on Hamas” following the October 13th release of the last 20 living hostages from Gaza.

Pollard described his meeting with Huckabee as “personal” and “friendly” and confirmed that it was his first meeting with a US government official after his release by Trump from travel restrictions. He concluded that “A lot of people seem to think that I harbor an anger toward the United States, which I don’t. There were specific people that lied about me, that lied about Israel, that tried to use me as a weapon to undermine the US-Israel special relationship, and those are the people I have problems with but certainly people like Ambassador Huckabee, and others, I have absolutely no problem talking to. If I could guess, I would say it’s that community, particularly the CIA station in the embassy, that probably was the one that initiated this whole effort to discredit the ambassador.”

Pollard clearly is promoting a false narrative that makes himself look like some kind of honorable and valiant defender of Israel when in reality he did what he did for the most base of reasons, i.e. for money. Money is indeed how the Israeli boosters in the United States have been able to flat out corrupt America’s political process to attain the dominance that has enabled them to promote the Israeli agenda. They have bought or intimidated every politician that matters to include presidents, congressmen and even those in state and local governments. Anyone who criticizes Israel or Jewish collective behavior in support of the Israeli state is subject to character assassination and blacklisting a la Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tom Massie. Those who persist are denounced as anti-Semites, a label that is used liberally by Zionist groups. Now Pollard is portraying himself as some kind of Israeli hero. The end result is that when Israel kills civilians in violation of a ceasefire in Gaza and is allowing rampaging armed settlers to destroy Palestinian livelihoods the United States government chooses to look the other way and instead showers the rogue state with money so it can continue to do its dirty work. Providing that political cover for Israel is in part the real dark side of Huckabee’s job as he sees it, not to engage over real American interests.

And then there are the hot buttons a-la the lies about Israel being advanced by Pollard and his ilk which, if the US actually had a functional government that is responsive to the people, should have been pushed long ago. “Best friend” Israel is ranked by the FBI as the number one “friendly” country in terms of its spying against the United States. Pollard is an exception who was actually punished since his crime was so dramatic and damaging, but Israeli spies are routinely slapped on the wrist when caught and never face prosecution for that crime, as one might note in the current “investigation” of Jeffrey Epstein, which was undoubtedly a major MOSSAD intelligence operation.

And there are also the MOSSAD agents who were the “Dancing Shlomos,” celebrating while the twin towers went down on 9/11, who were allowed to go home and various assassinations including JFK and even Charlie Kirk that have an Israeli back story. And Israel has never truly paid any price for the horrific bombing and torpedoing of the USS Liberty fifty-eight years ago, which killed 34 Americans and injured over one hundred and seventy more. The completely unprovoked attack took place in international waters and was later covered-up by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Congress. May they burn in hell. The few remaining surviving crew members are still waiting for justice.

Good riddance to scum like Jonathan Pollard and the Israel-Firsters who enable him. It is reported in Israel that Pollard is now preparing to run for the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, which explains his demeanor and phony narrative. It also all means that it is past time to get rid of folks like Ambassador Mike Huckabee who prefer to advance Israeli interests rather than those of his own country because, he believes, God is telling him to do so. More generally speaking, it is well past time to get rid of the special relationship with Israel, sanctified in the halls of Congress and by a Jewish dominated media, which does nothing good for the United States and for the American people. Israel’s constant interference in the US political system and economy comes at a huge cost, both in dollars and in terms of actual American interests.

So, let’s all resolve for 2026 to do whatever we can to pull the plug on Israel. Let Israel, which is now seeking a 20 year commitment of even more cash annually from the US taxpayer, pay its own bills and take care of its own defense. American citizens who prefer the Jewish ethno-religious state to our constitutional republic should feel free to emigrate. In fact, they should be encouraged to leave. Lacking Washington’s backing, Israel will also be free to commit atrocities and war crimes against all of its neighbors but without the US United Nations veto it will have to begin facing the consequences for its actions. But most of all, as Americans, we will no longer have to continue to carry the burden of a country that manipulates and uses us and also has a certain contempt for us while doing so, witness how Trump’s kid-glove handling of Jonathan Pollard has played out. And maybe just maybe freeing the United States from Israel could lead to an end to all the wars in the Middle East that Washington has been waging in spite of the fact that we Americans are threatened by no one in the region and have no real interest whatsoever in prolonging the agony of staying engaged there.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org

November 25, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

The GRANITE ACT: Wyoming Bill Targets Foreign Censors With $10M Penalties

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | November 24, 2025

The first cannon shot in a new kind of free speech war came not from Washington or Silicon Valley, but from Cheyenne. Wyoming Representative Daniel Singh last week filed the Wyoming GRANITE Act.

The “Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny & Extortion Act,” passed, would make Wyoming the first state to let American citizens sue foreign governments that try to police what they say online.

The bill traces back to a blog post by attorney Preston Byrne, the same lawyer representing 4chan and Kiwi Farms in their battles against censorship-driven British regulators.

Byrne’s idea was simple: if the UK’s Ofcom or Brazil’s Alexandre de Moraes wanted to fine or threaten Americans over online speech, the US should hit back hard.

Exactly one month after that idea appeared on his blog, it’s now inked into Wyoming legislative paperwork.

Byrne said:

“This bill has a long way to go until it becomes a law, it’s got to make it through legislative services, then to Committee, and then get introduced on the floor for a vote, but the important thing is, the journey of this concept, the idea of a foreign censorship shield law which also creates a civil cause of action against foreign censors, into law has begun.”

That “journey” may be the kind of slow procedural trudge that usually kills most ideas in committee, but the intent here is anything but mild, and, with the growing threat of censorship demands from the UK, Brazil, Europe, and Australia, there is a lot of momentum here to fight back.

“For the first time, state legislators are moving to implement rules that will allow U.S. citizens to strike back, hard, against foreign countries that want to interfere with Americans’ civil rights online,” Byrne continued.

The Act would let American citizens and companies sue foreign governments or their agents for trying to censor them, and, crucially, it strips away the usual escape hatch of sovereign immunity.

In its legal filing responding to the 4chan and KiwiFarms lawsuit, Ofcom insisted it has “sovereign immunity” and told the court there were “substantial grounds” for throwing out the case on that basis.

The regulator’s lawyers framed Ofcom as a protected arm of the British state, immune from civil claims even when its decisions target a platform based entirely inside the United States.

Ofcom treats the idea of “sovereign immunity” as something substantial but the First Amendment as something that does not exist at all.

The GRANITE Act is a defensive maneuver against a growing global trend. “Foreign governments and their agents increasingly seek to restrict, penalize or compel disclosure concerning speech occurring wholly within the United States,” the bill warns.

Such efforts, it argues, “conflict with the constitutions of the United States and of Wyoming and chill speech by Wyoming residents and entities.”

The act’s definition section is where its true reach becomes clear. It covers “any law, regulation, judgment, order, subpoena, administrative action or demand of a foreign state that would restrict, penalize or compel disclosure concerning expression or association” that would otherwise be protected under US law.

The text is well-researched and knows all the buzzwords of tyranny, naming the categories most likely to cause friction: “foreign online safety, hate speech, misinformation, disinformation, defamation, privacy, or ‘harmful content’ laws.” It’s a catalog of the modern speech-control toolkit, all of which Wyoming now places firmly outside its borders.

Wyoming’s approach also bars its own agencies from playing along. “No state agency, officer, political subdivision, or employee thereof shall provide assistance or cooperation in collecting, enforcing or giving effect to any measure” that qualifies as foreign censorship. The phrasing borrows from the constitutional doctrine of anti-commandeering, warning that local officials won’t be drafted into enforcing foreign censorship orders.

In Byrne’s view, that legal protection has let overseas bureaucrats act like international hall monitors, wagging fingers at Americans through threats of fines or content bans.

Byrne didn’t mince words about what he thinks this law could mean:

“If we get corresponding federal action, this law, and laws like it, could represent the single greatest victory for global free speech in thirty years.”

The teeth of the bill lie in its damages. The minimum penalty: ten million dollars. It matches the scale of fines already threatened by the UK and others, which have been dangling penalties of $25 million or 10 percent of global revenue for non-compliance.

The math, as he puts it, is simple. A country can censor an American, but that choice now comes with a very real price tag.

“Foreign countries can bully the shit out of American citizens and companies because they know that US law potentially protects them from consequences for doing so. We should take that immunity away from them.”

Byrne’s theory is that once the threat of US civil suits hangs over foreign regulators, the entire global “censorship-industrial apparatus” starts to wobble.

Byrne notes that the GRANITE Act would also relieve the White House from having to deal with diplomatic flare-ups over censorship complaints.

Trial lawyers would take over that job, freeing the president to “move on to other, more important matters.”

If the Act becomes law, the power to fight foreign censorship wouldn’t rest with federal agencies but with American citizens, state courts, and civil litigators. It would empower them to fight back against foreign censors.

In the global tug-of-war over speech, Wyoming could suddenly become a frontline jurisdiction.

November 24, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

The Money Behind the Muzzle: Germany’s Fivefold Surge in Speech Control

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | November 24, 2025

Government spending on digital speech regulation in Germany has surged over the past decade, increasing more than five times since 2020 and totaling around €105.6 million by 2025.

The findings come from The Censorship Network: Regulation and Repression in Germany Today, a detailed investigation by Liber-net, a digital civil liberties group that monitors speech restrictions and information control initiatives across Europe.

The report describes a sprawling alliance of ministries, publicly funded “fact-checkers,” academic consortia, and non-profit groups that now work together to regulate online communication.

It started as a handful of “anti-hate” programs and has evolved into a broad state-financed system of “content controls,” supported by both domestic and foreign grants.

Liber-net’s accompanying databases and map document more than 330 organizations and over 420 separate grants, rating each on a one-to-five scale according to its level of direct censorship involvement.

Between 2020 and 2021, public funding for these initiatives tripled, and by 2023 it had doubled again.

Source: The Censorship Network: Regulation and Repression in Germany Today

The Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) has been the leading funder, responsible for more than €56 million in allocations since 2017.

Much of this money has gone to the RUBIN consortium, a research group developing artificial intelligence tools designed to identify and filter “disinformation.”

Liber-net notes that these systems, while presented as safeguards against falsehoods, also concentrate control over what qualifies as legitimate speech.

Foreign contributions have further reinforced this system. The European Union has provided roughly €30 million since 2018, including €4 million for Deutsche Welle’s Media Fit program, which counters online narratives related to the Russia-Ukraine war.

The United States government has contributed about $400,000 to fourteen German organizations during the same period. These combined investments reveal a coordinated transatlantic interest in shaping the online information landscape.

The financial expansion has been matched by a more aggressive enforcement effort within Germany.

In June 2025, police executed around 170 raids targeting individuals accused of online “hate speech.” Earlier raids reported by CBS in February focused on similar allegations.

One of the most publicized cases involved David Bendels, editor-in-chief of Deutschland Kurier, a publication affiliated with the AfD. Bendels received a seven-month suspended sentence for posting a meme on X that showed Interior Minister Nancy Faeser holding a sign reading “I hate freedom of expression.”

The legal foundation for these operations is the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which requires social media platforms to remove illegal or offensive content within strict deadlines.

Originally framed as a tool to combat extremism, the law has drawn opposition from parties across the spectrum, including the Left Party, the Free Democrats, the Greens, and the AfD.

They argue that it undermines open debate and gives private corporations excessive authority over what can be published online.

Liber-net’s research positions Germany as a key actor in Europe’s expanding structure of information control.

Liber-net concludes that Germany’s speech regulation framework has moved beyond addressing harmful content and now functions as a managed system for policing public discourse.

With significant funding, cross-border backing, and little transparency, the country’s “content control” network demonstrates how easily censorship can be institutionalized under the language of safety and social responsibility.

November 24, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Ally of ex-Bosnian Serb leader wins election

RT | November 24, 2025

A close ally of longtime Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik has won a snap presidential election in Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to preliminary results.

Sinisa Karan’s apparent victory comes after Dodik was removed from office over his refusal to obey the rulings imposed by an international envoy overseeing the peace-monitoring regime in Bosnia.

Karan, the candidate of Dodik’s Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) and the entity’s minister for scientific and technological development, took about 51% of the vote, after nearly all ballots were counted. Branko Blanusa, the candidate from the opposition Serb Democratic Party, won roughly 48%, with turnout just under 36%.

The snap vote was called after Bosnia’s state court convicted Dodik in February of failing to comply with the decisions of Christian Schmidt, the international high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Schmidt, a German national, has a strong mandate to oversee the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the bloody 1992-1995 Bosnian War.

In 2023, Schmidt invoked his powers to annul legislation passed by Republika Srpska’s authorities that sought to strip state-level courts and police of jurisdiction in the entity and declared the envoy’s decrees non-binding. Dodik himself has branded Schmidt a “tourist” and declined to recognize his authority.

A state court in Sarajevo later found Dodik guilty of failing to implement Schmidt’s decision, sentencing him to one year in prison – a term he avoided by paying a court-approved fine – and banning him from holding public office for six years.

With election results coming in, Karan pledged to continue Dodik’s policies “with ever greater force,” adding that “the Serb people have won.” Dodik, meanwhile, promised voters that “I will remain with you to fight for our political goals,” stressing that Karan’s “victory will be my victory too.”

Both Karan and Dodik have advocated for close ties with Russia, with the former calling Moscow “one of the greatest allies and friends of Srpska.” Dodik has echoed the sentiment, suggesting that the West was using Ukraine to provoke “a war with Russia.”

November 24, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

Germany Turns an X Post Into a Police Raid at Dawn

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | November 18, 2025

The story starts with a tweet that barely registered on the internet. A few hundred views, a handful of likes, and the kind of blunt libertarian framing that is common on X every hour of every day.

Yet in Germany, that tiny post triggered a 6am police raid, a forced phone handover, biometric collection, and a warning that the author was now under surveillance.

The thing to understand is that this story only makes sense once you see the sequence of events in order.

The story goes like this:

  • A man in Germany, known publicly only as Damian N., posts a short comment on X, calling government-funded workers “parasites.”
  • The post is tiny. At the time he was raided, it had roughly a hundred views. Even now, it has only a few hundred.
  • Despite the post’s obscurity, police arrive at Damian’s home at six in the morning.
  • He says they did not show him the warrant and did not leave documentation of what they seized.
  • Police pressured him to unlock his phone, confiscated it, took photos, fingerprints, and other biometric data, and even requested a blood sample for DNA.
  • One officer reportedly warned him to “think about what you post in the future” and said he is now “under surveillance.”
  • The entire action was justified under Section 130 of the German Criminal Code, which is meant to prohibit inciting hatred against protected groups.
  • Government employees are not such a group, which makes the legal theory tenuous at best.
  • Damian’s lawyer says the identification procedures and possibly the raid itself were illegal.

That is the sequence. A low-visibility political insult becomes a criminal investigation involving home searches, device seizure, and biometric collection.

The thing to understand is that this is not about one man’s post. It is about a bureaucracy that treats speech as something to manage and a set of enforcement structures that expand to fill the space they are given.

Start with the enforcement context. Germany has built a sprawling ecosystem around “online hate”: specialized prosecutor units, NGO tip lines, and automated scanning for taboo keywords.
The model is compliance first and legal theory second.

Once you create an apparatus like this, it behaves the way bureaucracies behave. It looks for work. It justifies resources by producing cases. A tiny X post with inflammatory language becomes a target because it contains the right keyword, not because it has societal impact.

Police behavior fits the same pattern. Confiscating phones is strategically useful because it imposes real pain without requiring a conviction.

Even prosecutors have said that losing a smartphone is often worse than the fine.

Early-morning raids create psychological pressure. Collecting biometrics raises the stakes further. None of this is about public safety. It is about creating friction for saying the wrong thing.

The legal mismatch is the tell. Section 130 protects groups defined by national, racial, religious, or ethnic identity.

There is also the privacy angle, which becomes impossible to ignore. Device access, biometrics, DNA requests: these are investigative tools built for serious crimes.

Deploying them against minor online speech means the line between public-safety policing and opinion policing has already been crossed. Once a state normalizes surveillance as a response to expression, the hard part becomes restoring restraint.

It is a deterrence strategy, not a justice strategy. And it reinforces why free speech and strong privacy protections matter. Without them, minor speech becomes an invitation for major intrusion.

The counterintuitive part is that the smallness of the post makes a raid more likely, not less.

High-profile content generates scrutiny and political costs. Low-profile content discovered through automated or NGO-driven monitoring is frictionless to act on. Unless people are reading Reclaim The Net, most people never hear of these smaller cases.

Looking ahead, the pressure will only increase. As more speech moves to global platforms that are harder to influence, local governments will lean more heavily on domestic law enforcement as their lever of control.

That means more investigations that hinge on broad interpretations of old statutes and more friction between individual rights and bureaucratic incentives.

This is particularly true in Germany and places like the UK, where the government doesn’t seem to feel any shame about raiding its citizens over online posts.

November 18, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Ecuadorians reject all proposals in 2025 referendum

Al Mayadeen | November 17, 2025

Ecuadorian voters delivered a decisive blow to President Daniel Noboa on November 16, 2025, rejecting all four questions posed in a national referendum. With roughly 90% of the ballots counted, more than 60% of voters opposed lifting the constitutional ban on foreign military bases, and similar majorities rejected proposals to eliminate public funding for political parties, reduce the number of legislators, and convene a constituent assembly.

This outcome dealt a significant setback to Noboa’s administration, which had framed the referendum as a solution to Ecuador’s worsening security crisis. His plans to welcome US military installations in Manta and Salinas hinged on overturning the 2008 Constitution’s prohibition on foreign bases. However, the majority of Ecuadorians voted to preserve their constitutional protections and sovereignty.

The referendum included three constitutional reforms and one popular consultation:

  • Question A proposed removing the ban on foreign military installations, opening the door for a US return to coastal bases.
  • Question B aimed to eliminate state financing for political parties, a move critics said would undermine opposition groups.
  • Question C sought to halve the National Assembly.
  • Question D proposed establishing a constituent assembly to rewrite the Constitution.

The results were unequivocal: 60.56% opposed foreign bases,  58.04% voted against ending public party funding, 53.47% rejected the reduction of assembly members, and 61.61% rejected the constituent assembly.

Political fallout for Daniel Noboa

Noboa, who was re-elected in April 2025, positioned himself as a law-and-order leader aligned closely with Washington. He promoted the referendum as a means to address rampant violence and crime, exacerbated by gang activity and weakening public institutions. Yet the electorate’s verdict reflected broader dissatisfaction, not only with the proposals, but also with the government’s approach to governance.

The administration’s removal of diesel subsidies in September, which triggered a month-long national strike and left three dead, deeply damaged public trust. This unrest, paired with concerns over sovereignty and democratic erosion, fueled a grassroots rejection of Noboa’s agenda.

Grassroots mobilization

Opposition to the referendum coalesced into a broad front that included environmentalists, labor unions, indigenous movements, and former President Rafael Correa’s supporters. The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) led the “No” campaign through a nationwide “minga,” or communal mobilization, emphasizing collective defense of Ecuador’s sovereignty and constitutional rights.

Despite the government’s well-funded media campaign and endorsements from international allies, the opposition leveraged community assemblies and grassroots activism to reach voters. The referendum thus became a referendum not just on policy, but on the legitimacy of foreign influence and elite-driven reform.

Implications for US military strategy in Latin America

Washington had quietly backed Noboa’s plan to reintroduce US forces to Ecuador. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem toured the proposed base sites days before the vote, a move seen by many as overreach. The US previously operated out of Manta until 2009, when Ecuador’s ban on foreign bases forced its departure.

The rejection halts plans for permanent US installations in Ecuador and complicates regional military operations, particularly counternarcotics missions in the eastern Pacific. Without Ecuadorian bases, the US must rely on more distant and costly alternatives in El Salvador, Puerto Rico, or at sea.

November 17, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

The Surgeon General’s Final Diagnosis: When the Doctor Who Silenced the Sick Prescribes “Love”

By Sayer Ji | November 11, 2025

Before Dr. Vivek Murthy prescribed “community” as America’s cure, he helped engineer the policies that tore it apart.

When outgoing Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released his January 2025 essay, “My Parting Prescription for America,” it was framed as a heartfelt reflection on the nation’s loneliness and disconnection. The document reads like a sermon on “love,” “service,” and “community” — invoking Christian compassion, Hindu dharma, and African Ubuntu to offer a kind of spiritual healing for America’s fractured soul.

But beneath the soft prose lies a striking irony: the very official who now urges the nation to “choose community” presided over one of the most divisive and dehumanizing public health regimes in U.S. history. His tenure was marked by systematic censorship, defamation of independent scientists and health advocates, and the suppression of truthful reporting about vaccine injuries and deaths — all documented in federal court filings and corroborated by congressional investigation.

The Surgeon General Who Prescribed Silence

In 2021, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy partnered with the now-disgraced Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and its soon-to-be-deported founder, Imran Ahmed, to launch a campaign labeling “health misinformation” as a public threat and urging social media companies to “take more aggressive action” against those who questioned the official COVID-19 narrative.

As detailed in Finn v. Global Engagement Center (3:25-cv-00543) (Doc. 83), Murthy’s office collaborated with entities like the CCDH, the White House, and Big Tech platforms to pressure for the removal or throttling of lawful speech — including posts about natural immunity, vaccine injury, and early treatment protocols.

This coordination, which the complaint describes as a “fusion of state and private power to suppress disfavored viewpoints,” forms part of a broader transnational censorship enterprise now under legal scrutiny.

Murthy’s rhetoric about “protecting public health” masked an unprecedented effort to erase public testimony from the vaccine-injured and to delegitimize independent medical experts whose research contradicted pharmaceutical and government messaging. Many of those targeted — including myself — were falsely branded as part of the “Disinformation Dozen,” a defamatory construct disseminated to newsrooms worldwide through UK-linked NGOs and U.S. federal agencies.

Covering the Wounds He Helped Inflict

In his “Parting Prescription,” Murthy writes that “community is the formula for fulfillment” and that the modern epidemic of loneliness demands “love, courage, and generosity.”

Yet his own tenure systematically dismantled trust and belonging, dividing families, churches, and workplaces through moralized public health edicts.
Lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates — all publicly championed by Murthy — fractured communities, creating the very isolation he now laments.

The Surgeon General who now preaches about “connection” was among those who ordered Americans to sever their most human bonds: to distance from loved ones, to shun the unvaccinated, and to treat dissenters as diseased threats.

His later call to “build a new social contract” founded on service and civic programs like the “Youth Mental Health Corps”is telling. It repackages the same surveillance-based public health infrastructure — behavioral tracking, centralized intervention, social credit by another name — in the language of compassion.

Weaponizing Psychology: Pathologizing Dissent

Murthy’s tenure advanced a subtle but potent form of psychological warfare: pathologizing dissent as sickness.

When he declares that division and distrust are symptoms of a “spiritual crisis,” he erases the political and moral legitimacy of resistance. Those who refused the experimental injections, questioned corporate capture of science, or defended medical choice are reframed not as engaged citizens but as patients in need of behavioral correction.

This framing, echoed by the World Health Organization and the Surgeon General’s “advisories,” lays the groundwork for the next phase of informational control — one cloaked not in censorship, but in therapeutic paternalism.

The Great Inversion: Coercion as Care

At the heart of Murthy’s “Prescription” is a moral inversion: coercion recast as compassion.

Throughout the pandemic, his messaging repeatedly equated compliance with virtue and questioning with harm. His Office’s partnership with the CDC and White House COVID Response Team normalized the language of “protecting others” — a phrase that justified censorship, job loss, and social exclusion.

Now, Murthy’s final reflection dresses that same ideology in the soft robes of empathy. His triad of “relationships, service, and purpose”reads less like a personal wellness philosophy than a state catechism — urging citizens to find meaning through collective obedience to approved narratives.

The Spiritual Disguise of Technocratic Power

Murthy’s invocation of faith traditions — Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and Ubuntu — is striking not for its inclusivity, but for its instrumental use of sacred language to legitimize centralized authority.

In merging spirituality with governance, Murthy mirrors a broader trend in global health policy: the conversion of care into control, where moral virtue is measured by conformity to bureaucratic “truth.”

The true crisis is not loneliness, but alienation from truth — a wound deepened by those who censored, shamed, and silenced the nation under the guise of saving it.

From Surgeon General to Social Engineer

Murthy closes his “Prescription” with a challenge:

“We are kin, not enemies… Good people with hearts full of love can change the world.”

But for the thousands of Americans censored, deplatformed, and defamed under his watch, and many more who were injured or killed by the experimental jabs he declared were necessary, those words ring as hollow as a pharmaceutical apology after the damage is done.

True love cannot coexist with coercion. True community cannot be built on lies.

The enduring legacy of Murthy’s public health tenure is not one of healing but of division, distrust, and epistemic violence — the destruction of the social immune system that protects a free people: open inquiry and dissent.

A Prescription Reversed

If Murthy’s farewell message was sincere, his repentance would begin with acknowledgment — of the vaccine-injured, of the silenced physicians, of the citizens whose livelihoods and voices were destroyed in the name of “safety.”
Until then, his “parting prescription” serves not as medicine, but as mirror — reflecting the psychological alchemy of a technocratic era that calls its injuries love.

Referendes

  1. Murthy’s My Parting Prescription for America (your uploaded PDF) — referenced for quotes and thematic contrast.
  2. Ji et al. v. Center for Countering Digital Hate et al. (Doc. 83 – Second Amended Complaint) — for legal and factual references regarding Murthy’s actions, coordination, and the broader censorship regime.
  3. Judicial and congressional context — including Missouri v. Biden and Kennedy v. Murthy, which form the legal frame for federal involvement in viewpoint suppression.

November 15, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

EU’s “Democracy Shield” Centralizes Control Over Online Speech

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | November 13, 2025

European authorities have finally unveiled the “European Democracy Shield,” we’ve been warning about for some time, a major initiative that consolidates and broadens existing programs of the European Commission to monitor and restrict digital information flows.

Though branded as a safeguard against “foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI)” and “disinformation,” the initiative effectively gives EU institutions unprecedented authority over the online public sphere.

At its core, the framework fuses a variety of mechanisms into a single structure, from AI-driven content detection and regulation of social media influencers to a state-endorsed web of “fact-checkers.”

The presentation speaks of defending democracy, yet the design reveals a machinery oriented toward centralized control of speech, identity, and data.

One of the more alarming integrations links the EU’s Digital Identity program with content filtering and labelling systems.

The Commission has announced plans to “explore possible further measures with the Code’s signatories,” including “detection and labelling of AI-generated and manipulated content circulating on social media services” and “voluntary user-verification tools.”

Officials describe the EU Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet as a means for “secure identification and authentication.”

In real terms, tying verified identity to online activity risks normalizing surveillance and making anonymity in expression a thing of the past.

The Democracy Shield also includes the creation of a “European Centre for Democratic Resilience,” led by Justice Commissioner Michael McGrath.

Framed as a voluntary coordination hub, its mission is “building capacities to withstand foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) and disinformation,” involving EU institutions, Member States, and “neighboring countries and like-minded partners.”

The Centre’s “Stakeholder Platform” is to unite “trusted stakeholders such as civil society organisations, researchers and academia, fact-checkers and media providers.”

In practice, this structure ties policymaking, activism, and media oversight into one cooperative network, eroding the boundaries between government power and public discourse.

Financial incentives reinforce the system. A “European Network of Fact-Checkers” will be funded through EU channels, positioned as independent yet operating within the same institutional framework that sets the rules.

The network will coordinate “fact-checking” in every EU language, maintain a central database of verdicts, and introduce “a protection scheme for fact-checkers in the EU against threats and harassment.”

Such an arrangement destroys the line between independent verification and state-aligned narrative enforcement.

The Commission will also fund a “common research support framework,” giving select researchers privileged access to non-public platform data via the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Political Advertising Regulation.

Officially, this aims to aid academic research, but it could also allow state-linked analysts to map, classify, and suppress online viewpoints deemed undesirable.

Plans extend further into media law. The European Commission intends to revisit the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) to ensure “viewers – particularly younger ones – are adequately protected when they consume audiovisual content online.”

While framed around youth protection, such language opens the door to broad filtering and regulation of online media.

Another initiative seeks to enlist digital personalities through a “voluntary network of influencers to raise awareness about relevant EU rules, including the DSA.” Brussels will “consider the role of influencers” during its upcoming AVMSD review.

Though presented as transparent outreach, the move effectively turns social media figures into de facto promoters of official EU messaging, reshaping public conversation under the guise of awareness.

The Shield also introduces a “Digital Services Act incidents and crisis protocol” between the EU and signatories of the Code of Practice on Disinformation to “facilitate coordination among relevant authorities and ensure swift reactions to large-scale and potentially transnational information operations.”

This could enable coordinated suppression of narratives across borders. Large platforms exceeding 45 million EU users face compliance audits, with penalties reaching 6% of global revenue or even platform bans, making voluntary cooperation more symbolic than real.

A further layer comes with the forthcoming “Blueprint for countering FIMI and disinformation,” offering governments standardized guidance to “anticipate, detect and respond” to perceived information threats. Such protocols risk transforming free expression into a regulated domain managed under preemptive suspicion.

Existing structures are being fortified, too. The European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), already central to “disinformation” monitoring, will receive expanded authority for election and crisis surveillance. This effectively deepens the fusion of state oversight and online communication control.

Funding through the “Media Resilience Programme” will channel EU resources to preferred outlets, while regulators examine ways to “strengthen the prominence of media services of general interest.”

This includes “impact investments in the news media sector” and efforts to build transnational platforms promoting mainstream narratives. Though described as supporting “independent and local journalism,” the model risks reinforcing state-aligned voices while sidelining dissenting ones.

Education and culture are not exempt. The Commission plans “Guidelines for teachers and educators on tackling disinformation and promoting digital literacy through education and training,” along with new “media literacy” programs and an “independent network for media literacy.”

While such initiatives appear benign, they often operate on the assumption that government-approved information is inherently trustworthy, conditioning future generations to equate official consensus with truth.

Viewed as a whole, the European Democracy Shield represents a major institutional step toward centralized narrative management in the European Union.

Under the language of “protection,” Brussels is constructing a comprehensive apparatus for monitoring and shaping the flow of information.

For a continent that once defined itself through open debate and free thought, this growing web of bureaucratic control signals a troubling shift.

Efforts framed as defense against disinformation now risk becoming tools for suppressing dissent, a paradox that may leave European democracy less free in the name of making it “safe.”

November 14, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Trump’s and the Pentagon’s Illegal Killings in the Caribbean

By Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation | November 13, 2025

In federal criminal cases, U.S. District Judges issue the following types of instruction to jurors:

“The indictment is not evidence of any kind. It is simply the formal method of accusing a person of a crime. It has no bearing on the defendant’s guilt or innocence, and you must not consider it in your deliberations except as an accusation. You must not assume the defendant is guilty just because he or she has been indicted. The defendant begins this trial with a clean slate.The burden is entirely on the government to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

In other words, an indictment carries absolutely no evidentiary weight whatsoever. It is simply an accusation. It is not proof. It is not evidence. The jury is prohibited from considering it when deciding guilt or innocence.

This principle applies to any person accused of violating federal criminal statutes.

President Trump and the Pentagon have now attacked and killed more than 70 people on the high seas in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean near South America. They justify these killings by claiming that the victims are engaged in a violations of U.S. federal drug laws.

But the fact is that Trump’s and the Pentagon’s claims are nothing more than  informal accusations. In fact, their informal accusations don’t even amount to a formal accusation set forth in a grand-jury indictment. That’s because a grand jury cannot issue an indictment unless it sees evidence that establishes that there is “probable cause” that the accused committed the crime. With Trump’s and the Pentagon’s informal accusation, no such burden of proof is required.

Therefore, if a jury is prohibited from using an indictment to convict a person who the feds are accusing of having violated U.S. drug laws, it stands to reason that U.S. officials are prohibited from killing people based simply on their informal accusation that the person has violated the law.

In fact, with the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, our American ancestors expressly prohibited the federal government from depriving any person of life without due process of law. It has been long established that due process in a criminal case means, at a minimum, two things: (1) being formally notified of the specific charges that the defendant is accused of violating; that’s what a grand-jury indictment is for; and (2) a trial where the government is required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt with relevant and competent evidence that the person actually did commit the crime. The accused, if he elects, can have a jury, not the judge, decide whether or not he is guilty.

There have always been some Americans who hate these provisions. They prefer how things are done in nations run by totalitarian regimes, where the government wields the omnipotent power to kill or punish anyone it suspects of having committed a crime — without having to go through the difficulty and expense of formally accusing people and according them a trial.

Nonetheless, like it or not, that is our system of government, and it remains so unless and until the Constitution is amended to end it.

What about the fact that it is the military that is carrying out these killings? No matter the exalted position that the national-security establishment has come to play in America’s federal governmental system, it doesn’t alter the constitutional principles at all. All it means is that the military is operating in the role of a policeman who is enforcing a federal criminal statute.

For example, suppose that Trump’s military troops that are occupying various U.S. cities begin enforcing federal drug laws by arresting people and then turning them over to the DEA for incarceration and prosecution. The military would simply be operating in a police capacity, not in a war situation.

It’s no different with those killings in the Caribbean. The military, which, by the way, is legally prohibited from enforcing drug laws inside the United States, is simply operating in a police capacity when it is enforcing U.S. drug laws on the high seas. It is essentially standing in the stead of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

What about Trump’s and the Pentagon’s claim that the U.S. is at war and, therefore, it’s okay for soldiers to kill the enemy in war. Clearly that claim is a ruse designed to justify their extra-judicial killings. The concept of war involves conflicts between nation-states, not enforcement of criminal statutes. There is no war between the United States and Venezuela, Columbia, Mexico, or any other Latin American country.

After all, if Trump’s and the Pentagon’s ruse was valid, it would entitle them to use the military to kill drug-war suspects here inside the United States under the claim that enemy drug forces have invaded and occupied the United States and are waging “war” against the United States. In fact, their ruse would enable them to use the military to kill anyone they wanted who they claimed had violated any federal criminal statute.

What about Trump’s and the Pentagon’s claim that the victims are also being accused of violating federal terrorism statutes and, therefore, that it is okay to summarily kill them? Again, it’s just another ruse to justify the extra-judicial killing of people who are accused of violating U.S. criminal laws. After all, terrorism itself is a federal criminal offense. That’s why there are criminal prosecutions for terrorism in federal district court. Trump and the Pentagon are bound by the same principles in federal criminal cases involving terrorism as they are with cases involving alleged federal drug offenses. They are required to secure federal criminal indictments and accord the people with trials, where they bear the burden of proving that the defendants really are guilty of terrorism (or drug offenses) before they can kill them or punish them.

One more point worth noting: The troops carrying out these killings are obviously loyally and blindly obeying orders to commit an illegal act. That’s because, as I have long pointed out, their loyalty is to their commander-in-chief, notwithstanding the oath they take to support and defend the Constitution.

Trump, the Pentagon, and the troops are clearly engaging in illegal conduct with their extra-judicial, unconstitutional drug-war killings. The problem is that given their omnipotent power within America’s federal governmental system, neither the Congress nor the Supreme Court or anyone else will — or can — do anything to stop them.

November 13, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

AfD Leader Slams EU Plans to Create New Intelligence Unit as Move to Concentrate Power

Sputnik – 13.11.2025

The creation of a new intelligence unit led personally by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will not improve the security of EU citizens, but only strengthen Brussels’ control over the bloc, Alice Weidel, co-chair of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, said on Thursday.

Earlier this week, the Financial Times newspaper reported that the EU Commission would establish a new intelligence unit led by von der Leyen to enhance the use of data collected by national intelligence agencies due to security concerns and a potential reduction in US security support for Europe.

“Von der Leyen plans [to create] her own EU intelligence service. This will not improve the security of citizens, but will expand surveillance and the power of the Brussels bureaucracy. Another dangerous step towards an EU superstate. Not with the AfD!” Weidel wrote on X.

The unit plans to recruit officials from across the EU’s intelligence community to consolidate and share intelligence for joint purposes, the newspaper reported. However, the plan has not yet been officially communicated to all EU member states, and no specific deadlines have been set, according to the report.

The move faces opposition from senior officials in the EU’s diplomatic service, who manage the bloc’s Intelligence and Situation Centre (Intcen), the report said. They argue that the new unit could duplicate Intcen’s functions and threaten its future.

Harald Vilimsky, EU lawmaker from the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), has said that the plan to create a separate intelligence analysis unit within the Secretariat-General of the European Commission is the next step in von der Leyen’s plan to concentrate power in Brussels’ hands. Instead of strengthening democratic control, she wants to create a shadow structure that places national intelligence agencies under Brussels’ supervision without any mandate, transparency or legitimacy, he added.

November 13, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

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