Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Media and Architects of Online Censorship Law Heap Pressure on Rumble After it Defends Principle of Neutrality

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | September 25, 2023

Media outlets and architects of the UK’s censorship law, the Online Safety Bill, are increasing the pressure on neutral video sharing platform Rumble after it refused to bow down to the UK Parliament’s pressure to demonetize comedian Russell Brand.

The pressure to demonetize Brand came after anonymous sexual assault allegations were made against him. Brand has denied the allegations and has not been arrested, charged, or convicted of any of the allegations made against him.

Several companies, including YouTube, took action against Brand after the allegations surfaced, despite Brand having no content violations on YouTube. But Rumble stood up to the pressure and rejected the UK Parliament’s request to cut off Brand’s monetization, with CEO Chris Pavlovski noting that the allegations against Brand have “nothing to do with content on Rumble’s platform.”

Now, several media outlets and people who helped craft the UK’s online censorship law, the upcoming Online Safety Bill, are targeting Rumble’s stance.

Lord Allan of Hallam, a former Facebook executive who advised on the Online Safety Bill, branded Rumble a “crazy American platform” and expressed disdain at Rumble’s philosophy of allowing free expression.

He and internet law expert Professor Lorna Woods, an architect of the Online Safety Bill, also complained about Rumble’s refusal to bow down to pressure from UK officials and framed it as “grandstand[ing] before the press.”

The Times also took aim at Rumble by noting that under the Online Safety Bill, Rumble will have to “prevent children from seeing pornography… material that promotes self-harm, suicide or eating disorders… violent content… material harmful to health, such as vaccine misinformation” and “take down material that is illegal, such as videos that incite violence or race hate.”

However, Bryn Harris, the Chief Legal Council for The Free Speech Union, pointed out that The Times’ article doesn’t actually provide examples of any of the alleged illegal or harmful to kids content on Rumble.

Additionally, the Associated Press piled in on Rumble after it stood up to the demands of UK officials by claiming that Rumble is a “haven for disinformation and extremism.”

This mounting pressure comes days after the UK passed the Online Safety Bill — one of the most sweeping censorship laws to ever be introduced in the UK. The controversial censorship and surveillance bill is set to come into law next month.

The censorship provisions in the Online Safety Bill can be aimed at both citizens who post speech that’s deemed to cause “harm” and companies that fail to censor this so-called harmful content. The harms in the bill extend beyond physical or direct harm and into the realms of “psychological” harm and “potential” harm. Certain types of “false” communications are also prohibited under the bill.

As UK officials heap pressure on Rumble, reports have revealed that several UK politicians have ties to the pro-censorship Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and the UK politician that pressured Rumble to demonetize Brand received a donation in kind from Google.

September 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Scotland To Set Up New Police Unit To Tackle “Hate” and “Misgendering,” Ignites Free Speech Concerns

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | September 25, 2023

On the brink of implementing Humza Yousaf’s highly contentious legislation early next year, a specialized hate crime unit has been announced by Police Scotland. With the unit scheduled to be operational by November, a comprehensive training of about 16,400 law enforcement officers will follow in December.

This is all in anticipation of the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, expected to be ratified early in 2024. This Act expands upon the existing law, offering a broader protective net for “vulnerable” groups and introduces the notion of “stirring up hatred”.

However, some critics and free speech advocates have raised concerns that the Act, which holds potential to elevate sentencing if prejudice is based on factors such as age, race, disability, religion, transgender identity or variations in sex characteristics, may invigorate the increasingly toxic culture wars surrounding gender issues. It is posited that the law may sidetrack police resources from tackling violent conduct to address “harmful” words.

The thought of free speech being stifled by the new laws is particularly horrifying for some, with warnings that women’s rights advocates may find themselves entangled in allegations of transphobia.

Critics argue that a significant portion of police time may now be geared towards a subjective concept of hate crime, such as “misgendering,” instead of dealing with tangible violent acts.

Helen Joyce, part of the human rights group Sex Matters, asserted her alarm at the creation of this specific hate crime unit. She voiced concern for those who stand for the rights of women and children, warning of a “chilling effect” on free speech, as reported by The Scottish Express.

Police Scotland remains tight-lipped about the size of the proposed unit plus the financial implications of the new laws – a cause for concern for many.

September 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

The US Military Is Laying the Groundwork to Reinstitute the Draft

By Zachary Yost | Mises Wire | September 25, 2023

The most recent edition of the U.S. Army War College’s academic journal includes a highly disturbing essay on what lessons the U.S. military should take away from the continuing war in Ukraine. By far the most concerning and most relevant section for the average American citizen is a subsection entitled “Casualties, Replacements, and Reconstitutions” which, to cut right to the chase, directly states, “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.”

An Industrial War of Attrition Would Require Vast Numbers of Troops

The context for this supposed need to reinstate conscription is the estimate that were the U.S. to enter into a large-scale conflict, every day it would likely suffer thirty-six hundred casualties and require eight hundred replacements, again per day. The report notes that over the course of twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. suffered fifty thousand casualties, a number which would likely be reached in merely two weeks of large-scale intensive combat.

The military is already facing an enormous recruiting shortfall. Last year the army alone fell short of its goal by fifteen thousand soldiers and is on track to be short an additional twenty thousand this year. On top of that, the report notes that the Individual Ready Reserve, which is composed of former service personnel who do not actively train and drill but may be called back into active service in the event they are needed, has dropped from seven hundred thousand in 1973 to seventy-six thousand now.

Prior to the Ukraine war, the fad theory in military planning was the idea of “hybrid warfare,” where the idea of giant state armies clashing on the battlefield requiring and consuming vast amounts of men and material was viewed as out of date as massed cavalry charges. Instead, these theorists argued that even when states did fight, it would be via proxies and special operations and would look more like the past twenty years of battling nonstate actors in the hills of Afghanistan. In a recent essay in the Journal of Security Studies, realist scholar Patrick Porter documents the rise of this theory and the fact that it is obviously garbage given the return of industrial wars of attrition.

As military planners have woken up from the fevered dream of imagining that modern war consisted of chasing the Taliban through the hills with complete and overwhelming airpower, they have similarly started to wake up to the idea that industrial war has vast manpower requirements and that seemingly the only way to fill these requirements is by forcing young people into the ranks. That has certainly been the only way Ukraine has been able to maintain its forces, although it has required increasingly draconian measures to do so as conscripts face attrition rates of 80 to 90 percent by Ukraine’s own admission.

Obviously, the reintroduction of conscription is an extremely disturbing prospect given America’s propensity for getting involved in meaningless wars that accomplish nothing other than empowering our enemies, killing and maiming our soldiers, and wasting vast resources.

This is especially true given the unstated assumptions implicit in this paper. Who is the enemy that would be inflicting thirty-six hundred casualties a day? A war in the Pacific against China would primarily be a naval and airpower war with an extremely limited role for the army (even the current inept regime seems unlikely to be stupid enough to try and wage a land war against China) which obviously leaves Russia as the main adversary that would require the U.S. Army to round up conscripts to feed into the attritional meat grinder.

There Is No American National Interest That Requires a Standing Army

However, while these manpower shortages may be a valid concern for someplace like Russia, Ukraine, or Poland, we here in the U.S. are quite fortunate that we have no compelling national interest that would require us to engage in an industrial war of attrition in Eastern Europe.

To the extent we are at risk of becoming involved in such a disastrous mess, it is entirely of our own doing via the entangling alliance known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and our leader’s own messianic gnostic crusades for democracy or whatever pseudo religious ideology is presently in vogue.

The U.S. is blessed as being the most secure power in history. We are the hegemon of the western hemisphere, with vast moats in the form of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that no other state has the capability to project military force across, and all our neighbors are weak and relatively friendly. We are not at any risk of being forced to fight an industrial land war on the home front. Any war the army would be used in would be as an expeditionary force fighting in the eastern hemisphere, where we have no compelling defensive need to do so.

From the beginning of the U.S., there have been warnings against the dangers of both entangling alliances and standing armies. The best solution to the military recruitment crisis is to simply abolish the standing army and not plan to wage a costly and pointless war on the other side of the planet that would result in trillions of dollars down the drain and who knows how many tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans being killed, maimed, and psychologically scarred.

September 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Hungary issues ultimatum to Ukraine

RT | September 25, 2023

Hungary will not support Ukraine “on any issue” until Kiev restores the rights of ethnic Hungarians on its territory, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in parliament on Monday. Budapest’s backing is vital to Ukraine’s bid to join the EU.

“We will not support Ukraine on any issue in international life until it restores the laws that guaranteed the rights of Transcarpathian Hungarians,” Orban said, adding that “for years [the Ukrainians] have been tormenting” Hungarian schools.

Since 2017, successive laws mandating the use of the Ukrainian language have resulted in the closure of around 100 Hungarian schools in Ukraine. These laws have been harshly criticized by the Council of Europe and by human rights organizations.

According to Orban, the situation has deteriorated with the beginning of a new school year, with management at a school in the city of Munkacs forbidding the singing of the Hungarian national anthem or the wearing of Hungarian national colors on the first day back in the classroom.

Around 156,000 ethnic Hungarians live in Ukraine, most of them in the region of Transcarpathia. Once a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this region fell under Soviet control after World War II. It remained in Kiev’s hands when the Ukrainian SSR became modern Ukraine after the fall of the USSR. Ukraine is also home to around 150,000 ethnic Romanians and more than 250,000 Moldovans, and Bucharest has joined Budapest in demanding that the language laws be revised.

Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto warned in March that Budapest would not support Kiev’s applications to join the EU and NATO until these issues are resolved.

Hungary does not provide any military aid to Ukraine or allow weapons to enter the country via its territory. However, Hungary will have veto power over whether Ukraine can join the EU and NATO due to both bodies requiring the unanimous consent of existing members before admitting new states. The dispute over language rights is just one of several points of contention between Budapest and Kiev.

Orban’s government has also condemned the Ukrainian military’s efforts to conscript ethnic Hungarians into military service and blocked EU military aid to Ukraine over Kiev’s sanctioning of one of its banks due to its lending activities in Russia. More recently, Hungary has blocked the import of Ukrainian grain to protect its farmers from being undercut, prompting Ukraine to threaten a lawsuit at the World Trade Organization.

September 25, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

US government stopped me from interviewing Putin – Tucker Carlson

RT | September 24, 2023

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has alleged in a recent interview that unnamed figures in Washington obstructed his attempts to interview Russian president Vladimir Putin.

“I tried to interview Vladimir Putin, and the US government stopped me,” Carlson claimed in an interview with Swiss publication Die Weltwoche published on Thursday. He also explained that he felt let down by the lack of support for his situation that he says he received from US news media.

He said: “I don’t think there was anybody who said ‘wait a second. I may not like this guy but he has a right to interview anyone he wants, and we have a right to hear what Putin says’.” The 54-year-old added: “You’re not allowed to hear Putin’s voice. Because why? There was no vote on it. No one asked me.”

The often-controversial media personality didn’t elaborate on the circumstances under which he says there was government intrusion into his plans to interview Putin but it appeared to suggest that it was the current Biden administration which was behind the meddling. Carlson also didn’t mention when the interview with the Russian leader was supposed to take place.

“I’m an American citizen,” Carlson told Die Weltwoche. “I’m a much more loyal American than, say, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, who didn’t even grow up in this country; she grew up in Canada. And they’re telling me what it is to be a loyal American?”

Carlson –previously Fox News’ biggest star– parted ways with the broadcaster in April shortly after the news network settled for $787.5 million a lawsuit with voting-machine company Dominion Voting Systems. Fox News had regularly discussed claims on some of its shows that Dominion’s machines were involved in ‘rigging’ the 2020 US presidential election.

Carlson’s show Tucker Carlson Tonight, during which he frequently discussed issues like gender, race, sexuality and ‘woke’ ideology, was specifically referenced in the Dominion lawsuit.

Since leaving Fox News, Carlson has broadcast abridged versions of his news show on X (formerly Twitter) which regularly draw tens of millions of views.

Meanwhile, Russia TV news channel Rossiya 24 has aired a teaser trailer for a weekend show it says is to be hosted by Carlson. The promo was first broadcast earlier this month and again on September 22 along with the words “at the weekend.” It adds that the “high-profile American presenter is moving to another level. Here.”

Rossiya 24 didn’t state when the show will debut or if it will be original content or translated versions of Carlson’s X broadcasts.

September 24, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

The Great Demoralization

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | September 23, 2023

On March 6, 2020, the mayor of Austin, Texas, canceled the biggest tech and arts trade show in the world, South-by-Southwest, only a week before hundreds of thousands were to gather in the city.

In an instant, with the stroke of a pen, it was all gone: hotel reservations, flight plans, performances, exhibitors, and all the hopes and dreams of thousands of merchants in the town. Economic impact: a loss $335 million in revenue at least. And that was just to the city alone, to say nothing of the broader impact.

It was the beginning of US lockdowns. It wasn’t entirely clear at the time – my own sense was that this was a calamity that would lead to decades of successful lawsuits against the Austin mayor – but it turned out that Austin was the test case and template for the entire nation and then the world.

The reason was of course Covid but the pathogen wasn’t even there. The idea was to keep it out of the city, an incredible and sudden fallback to a medieval practice that has nothing to do with modern public health understanding of how a respiratory virus should be handled.

“In six months,” I wrote at the time, “if we are in a recession, unemployment is up, financial markets are wrecked, and people are locked in their homes, we’ll wonder why the heck governments chose disease ‘containment’ over disease mitigation. Then the conspiracy theorists get to work.”

I was right about the conspiracy theorists but I had not anticipated that they would turn out to be right about nearly everything. We were being groomed for nationwide lockdowns.

At this point in the trajectory, we already knew the gradient of risk. It was not medically significant for healthy working-age adults (which still to this day the CDC does not admit). So the shutdown likely protected very few if anyone.

The extraordinary edict – worthy of a tin-pot dictator of a dark age – completely overrode the wishes of millions, all on the decision of one man, whose name is Steven Adler.

“Was the consideration between maintaining that money, effectively rolling the dice, and doing what you did?” asked Texas Monthly of the mayor.

His answer: “No.”

Clarifying: “We made a decision based on what was in the best health interest for the city. And that is not an easy choice.”

After the shocking cancellation, which overrode property rights and free will, the mayor urged all residents to go out and eat at restaurants and gather and spend money to support the local economy. In this later interview, he explained that he had no problem keeping the city open. He just didn’t want people from hither and yon – the dirty people, so to speak – to bring a virus with them.

He was here playing the role of Prince Prospero in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” He was turning the capital city of Texas into a castle in which the elite could hide from the virus, an action that also became a foreshadowing of what was to come: the division of the entire country into clean and dirty populations.

The mayor further added a strange comment: “I think the spread of the disease here is inevitable. I don’t think that closing down South Bay was intended to stop the disease from getting here because it is coming. The assessment of our public health professionals was that we were risking it coming here more quickly, or in a greater way with a greater impact. And the longer we could put that off, the better this city is.”

And there we have the “flatten the curve” thinking at work. Kick the can down the road. Postpone. Delay herd immunity as long as possible. Yes, everyone will get the bug but it is always better that it happens later rather than sooner. But why? We were never told. Flatten the curve was really just prolong the pain, keep our overlords in charge as long as possible, put normal life on hold, and stay safe as long as you can.

Prolonging the pain might also have served another surreptitious agenda: let the working classes – the dirty people – get the bug and bear the burden of herd immunity so that the elites can stay clean and hopefully it will die out before it gets to the highest echelons. There was indeed a hierarchy of infection.

In all these months, no one ever explained to the American public why prolonging the period of non-exposure was always better than meeting the virus sooner, gaining immunity, and getting over it. The hospitals around the country were not strained. Indeed, with the inexplicable shutdown of medical services for diagnostics and elective surgeries, hospitals in Texas were empty for months. Health care spending collapsed.

This was the onset of the great demoralization. The message was: your property is not your own. Your events are not yours. Your decisions are subject to our will. We know better than you. You cannot take risks with your own free will. Our judgment is always better than yours. We will override anything about your bodily autonomy and choices that are inconsistent with our perceptions of the common good. There is no restraint on us and every restraint on you.

This messaging and this practice is inconsistent with a flourishing human life, which requires the freedom of choice above all else. It also requires the security of property and contracts. It presumes that if we make plans, those plans cannot be arbitrarily canceled by force by a power outside of our control. Those are bare minimum presumptions of a civilized society. Anything else leads to barbarism and that is exactly where the Austin decision took us.

We still don’t know precisely who was involved in this rash judgment or on what basis they made it. There was a growing sense in the country at the time that something was going to happen. There had been sporadic use of lockdown powers in the past. Think of the closure of Boston after the bombing in 2013. A year later, the state of Connecticut quarantined two travelers who might have been exposed to Ebola in Africa. These were the precedents.

“The coronavirus is driving Americans into unexplored territory, in this case understanding and accepting the loss of freedom associated with a quarantine,” wrote the New York Times on March 19, 2020, three days after the Trump press conference that announced two weeks to flatten the curve.

The experience on a nationwide basis fundamentally undermined the civil liberties and rights that Americans had long taken for granted. It was a shock to everyone but to young people still in school, it was utter trauma and a moment of mental reprogramming. They learned all the wrong lessons: they are not in charge of their lives; someone else is. The only way to be is to figure out the system and play along.

We now see epic learning loss, psychological shock, population-wide obesity and substance abuse, a fall in investor confidence, a shrinkage of savings reflecting less interest in the future, and a dramatic decline in public participation in what used to be normal life events: church, theater, museums, libraries, fares, symphonies, ballets, theme parks, and so on. Attendance in general is down by half and this is starving these venues of money. Most of the big institutions in large cities like New York, such as Broadway and the Met, are on life support. The symphony halls have a third empty seats despite lowering prices.

It seems remarkable that this three-and-a-half year-long war against basic liberty for nearly everyone has come to this. And yet it should not be a surprise. All ideology aside, you simply cannot maintain much less cultivate a civilized life when governments, in combination with the commanding heights of media and large corporations, treat their citizens like lab rats in a science experiment. You only end in sucking away the essence and vibrancy of the human spirit, as well as the will to build a good life.

In the name of public health, they sapped the will to health. And if you object, they shut you up. This is still going on daily.

The ruling class that did this to the country has yet to speak honestly about what transpired. It was their actions that created the current cultural, economic, and social crisis. Their experiment left the country and our lives in shambles. We’ve yet to hear apologies or even basic honesty about any of it. Instead, all we get is more misleading propaganda about how we need yet another shot that doesn’t work.

History provides many cases of a beaten down, demoralized, and increasingly poor and censored majority population being ruled over by an imperious, inhumane, sadistic, privileged, and yet tiny ruling class. We just never believed we would become one of those cases. The truth of this is so grim and glaring, and the likely explanation of what happened so shocking, that the entire subject is regarded as something of a taboo in public life.

There will be no fixing this, no crawling out from under the rubble, until we get something from our rulers other than public preening about a job well done, in ads sponsored by Pfizer and Moderna.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

September 24, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

The Emerging ‘Hindsight Narrative’

It was all just ignorance and corporate greed …

By Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D. | September 23, 2023

I listen attentively when doctors and other health professionals who once shilled for the covidian tactics of ‘sheltering in place’ (what a quaint euphemism for imprisonment!), masks (how much more evidence do we need to show that they are and always have been useless for viral respiratory pathogens?), and, of course, the innovative mRNA-based jab, all the while never caring to spare a breath for natural immunity or early treatment, have a change of heart.

Well, after a bit of travelling down their personal roads to Damascus and seeing a light strong enough to make them revise their former gospels, they have had their conversion, have joined our side and are now front and centre on the resistance pulpit.

I acknowledge that we need all the help we can get and I am grateful for their assistance, but I am often mindful that the explanations offered by some of them, in their hindsight, only go so far. In fact, they fall far short of an appreciation that the whole phoney covid pandemic was an ‘operation’ perpetrated upon the globe by a powerful faction that sought not only to enrich their already rich selves but to enslave us and, with their bioweapons, to kill and maim.

It wasn’t just a matter of Pfizer, Moderna and Astrazeneca licking their chops at the opportunity to make wild profits by pushing an inadequately tested agent while nervous health officials erred on the side of ‘vaccinating’ everyone who breathed as a precautionary measure based on fearful and ignorant worry … No. It was more, it was more profound, it was more devilishly destructive and centrally planned.

Yes, there was — there is — a conspiracy, not just organic goosestepping and Sierpinski triangles. It was a bunch of high-placed people who set about controlling and literally destroying a large swath of the world’s population, deliberately, and relentlessly.

They are still going at it and with more than just the lethal Jab. The ‘reset’ they planned includes widespread censorship, the destruction of foundational principles of medicine, digital identification, social credit permissions, total surveillance, a fraudulent climate ‘emergency’ leading to further restrictions upon human autonomy, and, naturally, more and more inoculations. The scale of their operation is immense and its fruits should be visible by now to anyone who dares to think.

Ignorance and corporate greed are not the prime movers. Not to finger the Globalist Cabal for the murderers they are is to let them off the hook and to dissipate the energies of our resistance. Not to connect the dots is to be left with a picture so incomplete that responsibilities are diffused and the most significant guilty parties are at leisure to continue their machinations unscathed.

I chanced to have a conversation with a health practitioner the other night, a person who had been coerced into the Jab to preserve his job, a person who joined us at Parliament here in Wellington as we protested the mandates, a person who has worked behind the scenes to assist others in the health care system who opposed the regimen of masks, quarantine and jabs. When I asked him point-blank whether he thought there was indeed a ‘depopulation agenda’, he shook his head. It was the proverbial bridge too far, but it gave me an idea.

Those celebrated doctors and nurses, familiar to MSM audiences as mouthpieces for the Programme at the outset, who influenced countless people to toe the line — what if they, in their new shining garb within the freedom community, painted the full picture?

I still can’t explain how any self-respecting health professional could have lost his or her wits so completely in 2020 so as to have discarded the principles of their discipline. Could they really have forgotten about natural immunity and early treatment and the need for a genuine vaccine to be tested over years for safety and efficacy?

But never mind. If our new apostles of good sense can now use their heft and influence to enlighten the many who waver in the middle about the true extent and depravity and the planned coordination informing the covidian psyops, they will have atoned for their earlier lapses and complicity. But unless they have the courage to go that far, I, for one, will regard their intentions with grave suspicion.

Unless they have the guts to serve up the whole enchilada, they can take their morsels elsewhere.

September 23, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

U.S. Senate Again Rejects Call to Abolish COVID Vaccine Mandate for Teen Pages

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 21, 2023

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Tuesday for the third time introduced legislation to lift the COVID-19 vaccination requirement for young adults in the U.S. Senate Pages Program — and for the third time, the resolution failed.

The Senate Pages program, which pays young adults ages 16 and 17 to assist on the senate floor, requires applicants be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 — including all boosters.

Paul last week introduced the same resolution but it failed to pass. His first attempt, which also did not pass, was a broader resolution introduced on Sept. 7 that sought to remove COVID-19 testing, vaccination and masking requirements for pages.

A press release issued Wednesday by Paul’s office said Senate Democrats “for the third time” refused to “follow the science” and “unanimously objected” to the resolution.

According to Paul, the requirement is politically motivated, not based on science, and puts healthy American young adults at risk for vaccine-induced myocarditis.

In a senate floor speech before the vote, Rand cited numerous studies that reported an increased risk of heart inflammation with each successive COVID-19 vaccination.

Paul said:

“Why are we forcing these kids to do something that I would say is against medical advice to be a page in our program here?”

“How would you feel if your perfectly-healthy football player or band member is given the vaccine and comes home with heart inflammation?”

Risk of vaccine-related myocarditis is greater than risk of hospitalization from COVID-19

Rand pointed out that a study by epidemiologist Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, Ph.D., reported the risk of myocarditis in teenage boys after receiving a second dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine was roughly 5 times greater than the risk of hospitalization from COVID-19.

“So you’re asking yourself, ‘Well, can my kid go to the hospital or get the heart inflammation?’” Paul said. Both are rare, he said, but there is a greater chance of heart inflammation.

Paul noted that among healthy children and young adults, there is a “nearly zero” risk of dying from COVID-19.

The public knows this and has “largely resisted” vaccinating their children against COVID-19, he added.

The argument that young people be vaccinated to protect more vulnerable populations does not hold up, Paul said, because “No serious scientist now argues that COVID-19 vaccines stop transmission. No one.”

He added, “Yet here we are, with Democrats saying, ‘You’re not smart enough to make your own decisions. We will make these medical choices for you.’”

‘In a free society, no one should be forced to receive an injection’

Paul called out Democrats for endorsing authoritarianism by expecting “submission” from U.S. parents. He said:

“They don’t want you to have the choice to keep your kids safe and make a decision whether or not your kid, who may well have already had COVID, needs yet another vaccine … They just want you to shut your eyes, be quiet and do as you’re told.”

Paul said the Democrats’ medical policy for citizens is to, “Shut up. Do as you’re told. Take the injection. We don’t care if your kid might get sick. We don’t care if you have a choice. We don’t care if you have any say in your kid’s medical care.”

“In a free society,” he added, “no one should be forced to receive an injection into their body that they do not wish to have.”

Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.

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.

September 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Biden’s 2024 Campaign Will Continue Flagging “Misinformation” To Big Tech

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | September 21, 2023

The Biden regime’s practice of flagging content for censorship and pressuring platforms to remove content that it deems to be “misinformation” is so pervasive that it’s the subject of a major censorship lawsuit where an appeals court recently ruled that the Biden admin violated the First Amendment when pushing for social media censorship.

Despite this ruling, Joe Biden’s 2024 presidential campaign plans to continue flagging so-called misinformation to social media platforms, “reaching out” to social media companies, and working with media outlets to “fact-check untruths.”

Additionally, it may target “deepfakes” in states with laws against the technology and use “applicable copyright laws.”

According to POLITICO, Biden’s campaign will hire hundreds of staffers and volunteers to monitor online platforms as part of this effort.

Not only is Biden’s campaign planning to continue engaging in actions similar to those that were flagged by an appeals court for violating the First Amendment, but one of the leaders of the Biden campaign’s effort will be Rob Flaherty, a former White House Digital Director who is a defendant in the First Amendment lawsuit that the appeals court ruled on.

Flaherty is currently a deputy campaign manager for Biden’s 2024 campaign.

Documents that were uncovered as part of the censorship lawsuit against the Biden admin revealed that Flaherty was one of the Biden White House’s most aggressive censorship proponents.

Flaherty demanded that Facebook censor then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Fox News and Outkick host Tomi Lahren. He also pressured Facebook to suppress The Daily Wire and the New York Post while boosting The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Additionally, he pushed for the censorship of “borderline content” (a term that Facebook uses to describe content that doesn’t violate the rules but could result in “vaccine hesitancy”) and “coded language.” If Facebook employees didn’t censor to his liking, Flaherty would berate them.

POLITICO notes that “Biden has continued to back Flaherty as his social media attack dog,” despite the ongoing lawsuit and an investigation into Big Tech-federal government censorship collusion led by Jim Jordan.

Flaherty told POLITICO that “the campaign is going to have to be more aggressive pushing back on misinformation from a communications perspective and filling some of the gaps these companies are leaving behind.”

The Biden campaign plans to focus its misinformation targeting efforts on leading Republican candidates, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ “Covid anti-vaccine rhetoric.”

As Biden’s 2024 campaign doubles down on pressuring social media platforms to censor, the Supreme Court is considering whether to hear the censorship lawsuit that accuses the Biden White House of violating the First Amendment.

The Biden campaign’s admission that it will be flagging so-called misinformation in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election follows a major censorship controversy that erupted in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election.

Just three weeks before the 2020 election, a bombshell story alleging that Joe Biden was involved in a corruption scandal was censored by Big Tech platforms.

51 former intelligence officials subsequently signed a letter suggesting the story was part of a Russian “disinformation” campaign and the Biden campaign used this talking point to downplay the story, despite the laptop being real. The FBI also warned Facebook about a “dump” of “Russian disinfo” just before the Hunter Biden laptop story broke.

79% of Americans believe “truthful” coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election.

September 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

DHS still withholding information in its efforts to censor “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation”

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | September 22, 2023

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is continuing to hold back information about its efforts to police online speech in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The Americans For Prosperity (AFP) Foundation, a political advocacy group, has spent years attempting to get the DHS to hand over records on its efforts to censor “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.” However, the DHS has responded by heavily redacting any records it turns over to the group.

The DHS is citing FOIA Exemption 7(E), which protects “techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions,” to justify the redactions.

Kevin Schmidt, the Director of Investigations at AFP, blasted the DHS for obfuscating the contents of the documents.

“If DHS believes it has the authority to police people’s online speech, it should be open with the public about what those authorities are,” he said.

He added that the DHS’s use of FOIA Exemption 7(E) “suggests the DHS is either overstating its authorities or it’s abusing FOIA exemptions to avoid transparency.”

Despite the heavy redactions, the documents do show the DHS arguing it has the authority to target “MDM” — its acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.

Another document shows that the DHS’s Disinformation Governance Board had a “Ukraine MDM Playbook” before it was shut down.

The AFP Foundation isn’t the only entity that’s struggled to get the DHS to hand over information on its speech policing activities. It has previously stonewalled Congress’s attempts to get details on the DHS’s “anti-disinformation” practices.

Additionally, the DHS has been accused of attempting to avoid transparency by using channels such as Slack and personal cellphones to hold meetings about its misinformation efforts.

September 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Canada Launches UN Declaration Pledging Restrictions On Online “Disinformation”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | September 22, 2023

A “global” declaration – that only manages to garner the support of 27 out of 193 UN member countries. How dreadfully humiliating – some might say.

But rest assured, Canada’s government will find a way to spin this abysmal result of its effort to use this year’s (likely, as ever, a waste of time and taxpayer money) UN General Assembly gathering in NYC to push some of its own agenda – or the agenda it’s tasked to push.

First, what is this yet another “global declaration” – and why has it failed so spectacularly? (The answer may in fact be the same.)

According to an announcement by the Canadian government, cited by the press, the purpose of the “global” declaration is to combat “disinformation.”

“Global Declaration on Information Integrity Online,” is what it’s called, and besides the “trusty” Canadians, the Dutch were also seemingly randomly thrown (an EU country, one or the other) into drafting it.

And look who was readily on the side, to sign it: the US, the UK, Germany, Australia, Japan, Korea, etc.

There are (not many, though) more countries here, but their alignment on “issues” was never in question; and now, instead of a UN General Assembly as a place of the meeting of the minds and meaningful discussions, we have it as a showdown for a world aligning into different, this time huge and truly global blocs, to showcase their different allegiances.

How dreadful – for world peace, going forward.

Meanwhile – what does the Canadian document that only managed a meager backing at the UN have in mind?

It’s “necessary and appropriate measures, including legislation, to address information integrity and platform governance.”

If any of us tried to make the Canadian proposal more ludicrously broad-worded than this is, I’m sure we’d not succeed. But there is an attempt to narrow the “declaration” down. If suitable, “we” go back to “international human rights law.”

So – those who sign the document will do so in a way that complies “with international human rights law.” (?)

Problem: a number of full-fledged UN members are saying, the very UN founding Charter really any longer means anything – having been broken by the likes of Canada, time and time again.

There’s other usual declarative tosh as you might see from these governments’ daily briefings – the only time they ever try to narrow down or clearly define any of the “definitions” is when they mention the tech they’d like to better control – such as ChatGTP.

September 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sunak’s Net Zero ‘U-turn’ – or is it?

By Ben Pile – September 20, 2023

Rishi Sunak’s ‘watering down’ of certain Net Zero targets is the first time that the green policy agenda has had ANY scrutiny of any consequence, despite many failures, starting with the ruinously expensive Renewable Obligation, extending into the totally failed CfDs that allowed wind farm developers to lie to achieve planning consent over rival generators and technologies. Not one part of the green policy agenda has lived up to any promise to deliver good to the British public.

It was the mildest possible reversal. It is in fact an attempt to SAVE Net Zero, not roll it back.

Complaints that it has left Britain without an ‘industrial policy’ or has left ‘investors’ without ‘confidence’ are for the birds. It has put the UK in the same policy position as the EU (more on which in a bit), and there is no evidence of green policies having delivered any significant industrial development to these shores. No green jobs. No green growth. No green industrial revolution. Not even a BritishVolt. It is a farce.

Politicians, who know nothing of the subject in fact, have been misled into believing that strong climate targets encourage domestic manufacturing. That is a lie. The main beneficiary of UK & EU climate laws has been China, of course, which benefits from cheaper energy prices (among other things) precisely because China does not have energy policies like ours. Strict targets are not industrial policy. Nobody was looking to develop ‘Gigafactories’ in the UK for the fact of the UK having the earliest ICE car sales ban. It’s a nonsense.

Sunak has taken stock of the simplest elements of green policy failure:

1. No politician has any clue how to realise Net Zero targets. To understand this, you need to drill down into the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) advice to Parliament, and advice from wonks and academics to the CCC itself. They speak more candidly the deeper you investigate. The promises of upsides are simply lies. There are no drop-in replacements for the things that make our lifestyles today. That is why the CCC told Parliament that up to 62% of emissions reduction is going to come from ‘behaviour change’, which is to say that Net Zero requires government to use the criminal law and price mechanisms to regulate what people can do. That is what Sunak means when he says that previous governments have not been straight with the public. It is fact.

2. The green lobby has LONG promised lower prices and greater energy security but has failed to deliver. There have been many claims that the costs of wind power have fallen based on low ‘strike prices’ offered by wind farm developers since the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme was introduced in 2017. None of those miraculous strike prices have been achieved. The wind farm developers simply reneged on them. They were never going to take them up. They calculated that they would never have to. This came to crunch in the latest auction, when the government removed the wind farm operators’ ability to walk away from the contract — they called the wind sector’s bluff. No bids were offered. The major promise of renewable energy has been utterly debunked by the green lobby’s own actions.

3. Behind the scenes, the failure of both global and national climate policy has been known for a long time — since the Paris Agreement (PA) at the latest. The PA is not in fact a ‘global agreement’; it allows countries to determine their own commitment. And all that has done in turn is reignite the talking point that beset global climate policymaking in the 1990s and 2000s: the ‘free rider’ problem. Some emerging one-time ‘developing’ economies, are now booming, whereas much of the West/G7 is stagnant and facing deindustrialisation, precisely as critics of climate policy had argued, decades ago. This is why there has been so much emphasis since the PA on LOCAL government, such as LTNs/ULEZ/CAZs, using ‘air pollution’ as a proxy battle in the climate war. This was encouraged by central government, which accelerated this fake ‘localism’ during lockdowns by making large grants available to local authorities to restrict private car use. Sunak has seen the robust response to this in London, in Wales, and in cities that have adopted them, and has realised that the public has been setting down its own red lines. The green agenda is now visible to all and politically toxic.

4. Despite claims that other countries are steaming ahead with boiler bans, car bans, heat pumps, and championing Net Zero policies, especially in Europe, they are in fact creating deep schisms between and within EU member states. Auto manufacturers in Germany are warning that they cannot compete with Chinese rivals. Germany, struggling to find energy, itself is racing towards deindustrialisation, threatening the economic foundations of the Union. Its boiler ban, advanced by psychopathic Greens threatens to destabilise its own political centre of gravity, with a huge surge of interest in the AfD, now biting on the heels of the CDU in the polls. This risks not only the destabilisation of Europe, but geopolitical schism that could ultimately undermine NATO. Poland is pushing back against EU climate targets. The Netherlands, having overextended its green agenda looks set to oust its political establishment at the November election following the growth of the BBB movement, and the even newer New Social Contract party. There is the obvious polarisation of French politics, which needs no repetition here. And there is the case of Sweden’s new right-of-centre government abandoning its Net Zero targets in favour of a technology-first approach. Sunak can see all this green policy failure *everywhere* that green blobbers point to, while claiming such chaos is success.

5. ESG is failing. Former BoE governor Mark Carney, who just this week ranted against Liz Truss, disgraced his former office. Carney was appointed by Johnson to lead the The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), which claimed to have aligned financial institutions with $130 trillion AUM. Vanguard and BlackRock seem to be reversing out of the Alliance. And a number of major insurance firms, including Munich Re and Zurich too, have joined the backlash. And Sunak knows about markets.

6. Ukraine, Russia, and the realignment of geopolitics. Who really believes that Western diplomats now have any chance of bringing Russia, China, and India into the Net Zero suicide pact? The drawbridge is up. And the G20 meeting saw Modi humiliate the entire green movement. Sunak offered the climate fund £1.6 billion — roughly speaking a quid per Indian. And as many Indians said “What?!! We’re going to the Moon, mate!”

Sunak can see all of these problems. And none of them are going to be solved by banning petrol and diesel car sales in 2030, or by banning boilers. The world is a fundamentally different place now, post-Brexit, post-covid, post-Russia-Ukraine, after 15 years of Climate Change Act failures, and the deindustrialisation of the West. All that carrying on with Net Zero as usual is going to do is, far from strengthening Britain’s position on the ‘world stage’, is further undermine our economy and industries, and political stability. Nobody else, except countries facing equivalent problems, perhaps, cares about our degenerate political class’s ideological fantasies. Global climate policy is collapsing as global politics shifts, whereas the basis for the UK’s draconian domestic climate policy agenda was ALWAYS global political institutions: the EU & UN etc, not domestic popular support. It’s not 2008 any more. Neither the ROW nor the UK public are as tolerant of being pushed around. And utopian, technocratic, supranational political ambitions look like so much cynical build-back-better bullshit that simply do not wash.

The histrionics that are now the counterpoint to Sunaks mildest possible Net-Zero flip-flop are the chorus of an extremely small, but extremely noisy and over-indulged part of British society that has got far to used to not being slapped down by reality, and, like spoilt infants, they are determined to find the boundaries of their behaviour. They are utterly deranged by ideology, and incapable of allowing their claims to be tested by simple arithmetic. They speak glibly in the most superficial terms about things they know nothing about: how the world must be organised; how the entire economy will be powered; how ordinary people’s lives will be managed. They lie. They try to tell people that banning things and imposing expensive restrictions will make them better off, make them safer and ‘create jobs’. From bottomless bank accounts, they commission idiot wonks at remote think tanks to produce glossy ideological bunk.

Sunak could not have done less to correct this mess. But what he has done is a good thing. And it includes setting a trap for the eco-catastrophists. The more they howl and wail, the more they will expose their utter contempt for ordinary people. It is not in Sunak’s gift, even if he wanted it, to reverse the entire sorry policy agenda. Too much stands in his way. But every scream and tantrum from the blobbers will bring that possibility closer to him or a successor. Because no person with a functioning brain believes that banning the boiler later, rather than earlier, is a good thing. And so the blobbers are set to out themselves, for the duration of this controversy, as brainless ideological zombies. Long may it continue.

September 21, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »