Civil Liberties « Aletho News

ADL report advocates for deplatforming at website infrastructure level

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | February 20, 2023

A new report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said pressuring online platforms and other internet services to remove those it deems to be far-right extremists is effective in limiting their reach. The report was authored by the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society Belfer fellow Megan Squire.

In preparing the report, Squire analyzed four deplatformed websites, including forum website The Donald, website The Daily Stormer, forum 8chan, and political commentator Nick Fuentes.

Squire compared the individuals and sites’ popularity before and after they were deplatformed, saying the objective is limiting the spread of hateful ideology, not cutting traffic. And according to Squire, deplatforming is an effective way of achieving that goal.

“Deplatforming websites—removing infrastructure services they need to operate such as website hosting—can reduce the spread and reach of extremism and hate online,” she wrote.

Deplatforming also financially affects content creators in other ways. For instance, Fuentes was removed from YouTube and forced to incur the cost of hosting his content on his website. On YouTube, he hosted the content for free and was able to monetize the content. Currently, “he has to run all of that infrastructure himself. He has to find the developers, he has to maintain the website, he has to pay for all that bandwidth,” Squire said.

However, the content creators in Squire’s report have survived even after deplatforming. Others have disappeared.

Squire notes that while deplatforming “works,” the creators of these websites and platforms often “bounce back because there is someone out there that will replatform them.”

Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure and security company, last year acknowledged in its Q3 2022 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that its departure from its neutral position, including the recent blocking of the Kiwi Farms online forum, has resulted in significant negative feedback and a loss of potential customers.

The company has recognized that taking actions against its customers, including banning them from using its products, may cause harm to its brand and reputation. Publicly traded companies such as Cloudflare are obligated to file quarterly reports, which include a section on risk factors.

February 20, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, Zionism | Leave a comment

Banning Seymour Hersh’s “Offensive” Ideas

Subverting America’s Democracy—Now!

BY RON UNZ • FEBRUARY 17, 2023

In an unprecedented step, Youtube has severely restricted as “inappropriate or offensive” Seymour Hersh’s blockbuster Nord Stream Pipelines interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!

Hersh won his Pulitzer Prize more than a half-century ago in 1970 as the fiercely independent reporter who uncovered America’s My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War. During his following decades at the New York Times and the New Yorker he broke some of the biggest stories in journalistic history, including the domestic spying activities of the CIA, the Abu Ghraib prison abuses of the Iraq War, and the killing of Osama bin Laden, while being honored with two National Magazine Awards, five George Polk Awards, and numerous other accolades.

Hersh’s long career arguably ranks him as the most renowned living American journalist, and indeed Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University described him as such in a recent interview.

Then late last week, Hersh dropped a bombshell as big as anything in his career, revealing on his Substack platform the exact details of how the Biden Administration had secretly destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines, an attack on $30 billion of vital European energy infrastructure that constituted an act of war against Germany, one of our closest NATO allies.

How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
Seymour Hersh • Substack • February 8, 2023 • 5,200 Words

As I discussed in my own column, despite Hersh’s stellar career and the massive implications of his remarkable story, almost all our mainstream media outlets boycotted it, ensuring that it received minimal attention.

Seymour Hersh: Standing Tall in a Sea of Lies
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 13, 2023 • 2,000 Words

Hersh said he wanted his story to stand on its own, and was only willing to do a very limited number of interviews, with the first of these being with a small radio podcaster:

He soon followed this up with a half-hour appearance on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, a leading left-liberal news program broadcast on more than 1,400 radio and television stations worldwide, many of them PBS and NPR affiliates.

During that interview, Hersh responded to criticisms and explained that Ukraine’s war with Russia was going far worse than reported by the American media. According to Hersh and some of his government sources, the American attack on the pipelines may have been a disastrous mistake that could result in the collapse of NATO once most Europeans became aware of what had happened.

Democracy Now! has 1.3 million subscribers on its large Youtube channel, and immediately released Hersh’s important interview on that platform. Within hours the segment was approaching 250,000 views on its way to a likely total of many millions, becoming one of the channel’s most popular videos. I naturally linked it in several comments on our website.

But the same day it was released, Youtube suddenly censored Hersh’s Democracy Now! appearance, claiming that it represented “a violation of community standards” and was “offensive”:

As a result, Hersh’s Democracy Now! segment can no longer be viewed anywhere except on the Youtube site itself, and then only after clicking through two layers of warnings. The obvious intent was to drastically reduce Hersh’s potential audience and this will surely succeed. I assume that these restrictions have been combined with the most severe sort of shadow-banning. So a segment that would have probably been seen by many millions will only get a small fraction of that total.

Such Youtube censorship of a top mainstream journalist on a leading mainstream channel seems completely unprecedented, a massive escalation of the previous measures directed against the political fringe. The move was probably driven by concerns of how Youtube had earlier allowed the views of other important public figures to circumvent the blockade of media gatekeepers:

Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, one of our most distinguished political scientists, had spent many years making exactly these same points and blaming America and NATO for the simmering Ukraine crisis, but his warnings had been totally ignored by our political leadership and media. His hour-long lecture explaining these unpleasant realities had quietly sat on Youtube for six years, attracting relatively little attention, but then suddenly exploded in popularity…as the conflict unfolded

Mearsheimer’s lengthy explanation of the origins of the Ukraine war has now accumulated 28 million views, quite possibly more than any academic lecture in the history of the Internet.

Mearsheimer’s other Ukraine interviews and lectures accumulated many millions of additional views, and as a direct consequence of his suddenly enormous Internet presence, the once-boycotted academic was invited to contribute lengthy expositions of his views to such extremely establishmentarian outlets as the Economist and Foreign Affairs, and selected to participate in prestigious public forums such as Canada’s Munk debate and Europe’s Holberg Debate. As a result, probably tens of millions worldwide became exposed to a perspective previously excluded from the Western mainstream media.

In another example, Jeffrey Sachs has expressed very similar concerns about the Ukraine war and over the last few months a couple of his interviews on Democracy Now! have accumulated well over 4 million views, while a different interview with geopolitical scholar Alfred McCoy had reached nearly 2 million more:

When Sachs suggested on Bloomberg TV that the American government had probably been responsible for the pipeline attacks, he was quickly yanked off the air, but his clip went super-viral on Twitter, accumulating several million views.

Meanwhile, the clips of President Biden and other top American national security officials promising to eliminate the Nord Stream pipelines and then crowing about the mysterious explosions that destroyed them have also became ubiquitious on the Internet.

Hersh’s work and record were widely promoted on Twitter.

Tucker Carlson had covered the pipeline attacks from the very beginning and immediately discussed Hersh’s remarkable reporting.

Similarly, Max Blumenthal and Aron Mate did the same on the Grayzone:

But the audiences of both these shows are already overwhelmingly hostile to the Biden Administration, so these segments would be far less threatening than Hersh’s own lengthy interview with Amy Goodman on a program often watched by Biden supporters. Other than that practical consideration, I see no reason why Hersh’s interview would have been censored.

The problem faced by our political establishment is that their current position on the Ukraine war has drawn increasing opposition from individuals with the highest public stature and credibility, not only top journalists and academics like Hersh, Mearsheimer, and Sachs, but also top national security experts such as Col. Douglas Macgregor and Ray McGovern.

Our failed current Ukraine war policy against Russia has only been maintained by one of the tightest information blockades in modern American history, with 99% of the mainstream media and a large majority of the alternative media tolerating no dissenting voices. But the disastrous potential flaws in our strategy become immediately become apparent once they are mentioned and a critical mass of leading figures has now begun to do so, with their views increasingly reaching the public. So a regime of unprecedented censorship may now be imposed to prevent the American people from hearing both sides of the story.

Hence a factual interview of one of our most renowned journalists by a leading media outlet has been stamped “offensive” and heavily suppressed.

Such restrictions are hardly unknown to me. Just days after I published my first April 2020 article pointing to strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the global Covid epidemic was result of a botched American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), our entire website was banned by Facebook with all our pages deranked by Google.

Moldova’s “football plot” highlights ridiculousness of anti-Russia hysteria

By Ahmed Adel | February 17, 2023

By accusing Moscow of planning a coup d’état in Moldova, President Maia Sandu is trying to divert public attention from the economic crisis in the country whilst also ingratiating herself with the anti-Russia West. In fact, her accusations reached such ridiculous levels that supporters of football club Partizan Belgrade were implicated in the supposed plot to overthrow the current government and install a pro-Russian regime.

Sandu said that Russia is allegedly planning to use foreign saboteurs to topple her country’s leadership, stop its accession to the European Union and use it in the conflict against Ukraine.

“The plan included sabotage and militarily trained people disguised as civilians to carry out violent actions, attacks on government buildings and taking hostages,” she told reporters on February 13.

She added, without providing the evidence, that citizens of Russia, Montenegro, Belarus and Serbia would be among those entering Moldova to try to spark protests in an attempt to “change the legitimate government to an illegitimate government, controlled by the Russian Federation to stop the EU integration process.”

Fans of Serbian football club Partizan Belgrade were banned from travelling to watch their team play Sheriff Tiraspol on February 16 in the first leg of their Europa Conference League knockout play-off tie. In fact, the game was played behind closed doors due to the supposed fears of the coup.

The match had been relocated to the Moldovan capital of Chisinau from Tiraspol, the capital of the self-declared independent country of Transnistria, which is internationally recognised as part of Moldova but is overwhelmingly Russian and Ukrainian in its ethnic makeup. It is more than likely that Sandu reached ridiculous levels of accusations, even to the point of banning football fans, because the supporters of Partizan Belgrade and Sheriff Tiraspol were likely to make pro-Russian statements – something she did not want to be broadcasted to international audiences.

Sandu’s statement is also connected with the economic crisis in Moldova. The country is not experiencing economic growth and is not receiving cheap gas and oil from Russia. Effectively, Sandu is scaring the Moldovan people by making them believe that war is on their doorstep. This serves to distract them from their economic hardships.

It is recalled that at the beginning of her political career, Sandu talked about economic growth, fighting crime, and reducing corruption. However, the level of corruption has increased, inflation is hovering at about 30% and the country is on the verge of bankruptcy.

Rather than deal with these issues, the Moldovan president is trying to please the West by implicating Russia in another scheme. This will not only further deteriorate Chisinau’s relations with Russia, but justify a tightening of domestic and foreign policy against dissidents. Sandu in this way demonstrates that she is useful for Washington and Brussels as she is stamping out pro-Russian sentiment in an authoritarian manner.

Moldova has long lost its constitutionally “ensured” neutral status and now depends on the Americans and Europeans as she sees the future of her country in NATO. Moldova’s parliament approved pro-Western Prime Minister Dorin Recean and his proposed Cabinet in a confidence vote on February 16.

Sixty-two MPs, all from the Sandu-founded Action and Solidarity Party (PAS), voted in favour of appointing the new Cabinet. PAS holds 63 out of 101 seats in the Moldovan parliament, and therefore comfortably passed the new cabinet, especially as the parliamentary opposition did not vote. In this way, Moldova is now firmly in the Western bloc despite constitutionally being neutral and not even being a member of NATO or the EU.

It is recalled that Sandu previously stated that attacks are being prepared in Moldova with the aim of overthrowing the constitutional order of the country. At the time, she called on the parliament to expand the powers of the security services.

Previously, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, when addressing the European Council, said that the Ukrainian intelligence services had intercepted Russia’s plan to overthrow the democratic order in Moldova and that the Ukrainian side informed the Moldovan leadership about it. In this light, Sandu asked Moldova’s parliament to adopt draconian draft laws to equip its Intelligence and Security Service, and the prosecutor’s office, “with the necessary tools to combat more effectively the risks” to the country’s security.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova dismissed Sandu’s claims on February 14 as “absolutely unfounded and unsubstantiated.”

“They are built in the spirit of classical techniques that are often used by the United States, other Western countries and Ukraine,” Zakharova said. “First, accusations are made with reference to purportedly classified intelligence information that cannot be verified, and then they are used to justify their own illegal actions.”

In this way, Sandu is making extremely desperate, but also humiliating justifications to introduce authoritarian laws to stamp out Russophilia in Moldova. To achieve this, she is also bulldozing Moldova’s neutral status, and it is all coming at a major economic cost.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

February 17, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Economics, Russophobia | European Union, Moldova, NATO | Leave a comment

Logically Unsound

Taxpayer cash used to carry out Stasi-style Government Covert Ops

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | February 16, 2023

Two weeks ago civil liberties group Big Brother Watch released a damning report – entitled ‘Ministry of Truth’, a reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 – revealing highly questionable present day behaviour by shadowy UK Government agencies. The charge sheet includes the setting up of opaque surveillance squads to

monitor people who are “critical of the government”,
“tackle a range of harmful narratives online” and
outsource some of this dirty work – at taxpayer expense – to army units (the 77th brigade) and private (privateer?) companies such as Logically.ai (TheLogically Ltd), which claims to ‘intercept [misinformation and disinformation] threats before they become widespread’.

Picture credit: UK Column News

Reading this, you might be forgiven for thinking you had accidentally stumbled into the Science Fiction section of your local bookshop – despite the parallels, this is not a review of a rehashed version of Philip K Dick’s Minority Report.

No: this, unfortunately, is real. HART itself has been on the receiving end of some Logically’s shoddy – and shady – ‘threat interception’, and it is extremely disheartening to note that at the same time as carrying out its sinister actions, this entity was in receipt of more than £1 million of taxpayer cash to fund its operations.

HART’s experience with the disagreeable Logically.ai outfit came in the summer of 2021. Shortly after we had come together as a volunteer group to counter nonsensical government propaganda and policy, six months’ worth of our internal group messaging was leaked and made public. Logically.ai then gleefully dissected and publicised this ‘leak’, attempting to frame our activities as being somehow subversive by publishing out-of-context quotes from these informal chat logs. We reported this to the police, who agreed that this constituted an illegal hack. The police issued a URN number and one of the perpetrators was identified, but no prosecution ensued. We picked ourselves up, published this riposte to the mud-slingers, and carried on speaking out in the hope that balanced discourse might be resumed.

Though highly objectionable and disruptive to us – and very painful for a handful of our volunteer team who were subsequently targeted – ultimately these leaks only helped establish HART’s credentials – the worst any independent reader of the leaks could conclude is that (1) the grammar of our internal chat logs is not up the standard of our public output and (2) we were somewhat naïve in expressing our unadulterated views on some of the charlatans running the show.

Logically.ai pressed home their ‘threat interception’ mandate by smearing our work. Here are some extracts:

Apart from claims that the government is controlling the media, HART believes that the government is using “covert ‘nudges,” and psychological strategies to “increase compliance” with measures, as well as with vaccinations. “Several interventions of this type have been woven into the intensive communication campaign,” a member writes, alleging that fear, shame and peer-pressure are being weaponized by the government.
HART members are critical of policies such as lockdowns, mask-wearing, and vaccination.
HART members frequently recommend alternative treatments such as ivermectin and vitamin D.
The members [of HART] also repeatedly make claims about the media being controlled, social media censoring their views (a number of members have moved to Parler and Gab), often stating that journalists cannot be trusted.

Astute readers will notice that these statements have either been completely vindicated or can be deemed to have been a prudent assessment of the complex risk-reward profile of certain irreversible interventions. In summary, the UK Government used taxpayer money to pay a ‘threat interceptor’ to discredit HART’s correct statements and replace these with fictions of their own making.

It is therefore galling – to say the least – to note that Logically.ai, a government contractor, presented a Kafkaesque self-referenced submission to the House of Commons Joint Pre-legislative Scrutiny Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill by stating that its “investigation into the HART Group is just one example of how those pushing misinformation target legitimate public figures and media outlets to amplify and endorse their content. Without thoughtful safeguards in place, there is a clear risk we could see more of this kind of activity, particularly around elections and political campaigns”.

Well quite. It is frustrating that they didn’t just quote Orwell:

“Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary”.

For a bit of Walter Mitty light relief, it is worth perusing some of Logically.ai’s so-called ‘fact-checks’. With about 98% of humanity having cottoned on by now, in January of 2023 the keyboard warriors at the UK Government’s favourite ‘threat interceptor’ were still bravely wading into battle in defence of virus-defeating shreds of damp cotton worn over one’s breathing orifices — Logically.ai’s efforts are extremely weak fodder compared to the recently updated Cochrane review of these ‘physical interventions to disrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses’.

All of this would be uproarious slapstick comedy if it wasn’t deadly serious. Logically.ai’s underhand disinformation campaigning has led to some of our voluntary senior clinician members who are full time nhs employees, facing long investigation processes, with threats to career and huge risk for their dependent families — this is nothing short of despicable, when these clinicians were doing nothing other than questioning dubious policies with no evidence base, thus aiming to protect their patients and the public and fulfil their oath to first do no harm.

Shortly after its action against HART, Logically.ai appointed Brian Murphy, a senior Department of Homeland Security and former FBI executive as ‘Vice President of Strategic Operations’. We do not need to ask why.

By suppressing legitimate discourse, the reprehensible actions of Logically.ai and its shadowy handlers will undoubtedly have contributed to supporting vested interests and corporate greed. How else did an “adult-only vaccine, for people over 50” end up getting injected into young children? Setting aside the exorbitant cost of this exercise, every single death and adverse event in anyone up to the age of 49 could have been avoided but for these people and entities that executed these ‘black ops’ against legitimate and constructive dissent. Do not take our word for it: even those that were cheerleaders for so-called “extraordinary vaccine success” have come round to our point of view:

“The entire population was vaccinated or offered the vaccine, which now looks like a terrible idea when there were deaths among young people who really had no need to be vaccinated. They were not at risk from Covid. The mantra was it limited transmission. We hear less about that now. Parliament was shut down. Government colluded with social media giants to suppress legitimate questions about the origin of the virus and all manner of other policy debates”.

Neatly summarised. If only the checks and balances had been in place to allow rational and constructive discourse – and shadowy ‘black ops’ outfits hadn’t been paid by the UK Government to deploy guerrilla tactics as part of ‘threat interception’ – many lives could have been saved. Yet Logically.ai’s work will have helped frighten politicians and journalists off engaging with HART (and other professional groups) who were providing a much-needed critical voice and therefore slowed a return to common sense thinking. Furthermore, some of our members (all of whom are unpaid volunteers) faced long investigation processes with professional regulators or employers. Trying to silence professionals — who may have dependent families — by threatening their careers is nothing short of despicable. These clinicians were doing nothing other than questioning dubious policies with no evidence base. Their primary intention was to their oath to first do no harm, and protect their patients and the public.

For those minded to think of the UK civil service as a benign & mostly ‘good’ counterweight to a (perhaps corrupted and politicised) UK Government, Big Brother Watch’s Ministry of Truth report is a shocking read, covering appalling behaviour by various parts of the UK Government and the civil service. While it has been extensively covered in various alternative media outlets as well as Spectator and the Mail on Sunday (“Army spied on lockdown critics: Sceptics, including our own Peter Hitchens, long suspected they were under surveillance. Now we’ve obtained official records that prove they were right all along”), mainstream coverage has been relatively forgiving. Our experience tells us that much more is yet to come to light. The Ministry of Truth report quite correctly points out that “Whitehall officials are tasked to make a success of government policies – not to act as an authority on truth. These two roles clearly conflict”. These conflicts have not yet been resolved.

The key take-away for those who have hitherto believed that ‘the system’ might be acting in your best interests is a recognition that possibly – just possibly – historical precedent should encourage at least a modicum of scepticism when lapping up the Party Line from so-called ‘trusted’ sources. Statements from ‘saintly’ leaders along the lines of “We will continue to be your single source of truth… unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth” are giant red flags – why does the truth need to be controlled by government diktat? Why does Ofcom still prescribe what broadcasters can and cannot say on topics of critical importance such as these we are seeking to discuss?

For those who have been attempting to challenge the mainstream ‘official’ narrative since March 2020, the Ministry of Truth report is little more than confirmation of what is already well known – or at least suspected – and of course there is great suspicion that this is just a ‘Limited Hangout’ (a controlled minor admission before the ‘dead cat’ strategy is deployed to move the conversation on). On the plus side, it is heartening to see that this is an apolitical topic – it is noteworthy that people from the left and right of the political spectrum are voicing concerns.

The authorities – or actors within – have systematically neutered discourse and the freedom of speech that are so critically necessary for democracy to work properly. Subsequent non-denials and obfuscation – and lack of any sort of regret – give a clue that what Big Brother Watch has been able to publish is likely only the tip of the iceberg.

Let us hope that those controlling the mainstream narrative will find the growing cacophony of peaceful & rational protest harder and harder to ignore.

Call to action:

Please share this article with friends, family and colleagues
If you haven’t already done so, please sign up for HART’s free regular bulletin here.
Please read the Big Brother Watch Ministry of Truth report;
Get active:
- If you have been affected by any of the ‘black ops’ outfits listed above, consider complaining, e.g. to the International Fact-Checking Network: https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/complaints-policy
- Consider complaining about Logically.ai’s activities to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport
- Write to Logically.ai’s shareholders, which include
  - Vitruvian Partners
  - Amazon Alexa Fund
  - XTX Ventures, the venture capital affiliate of XTC Markets, a leading global algorithmic trading firm, and the
  - Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF – Mercia Equity Finance), managed by Mercia Asset Management PLC.
  - The British Business Bank.

These investors have ethical responsibilities, and are regulated by the FCA. The industry association, the British Venture Capital Association, might also be interested.

February 16, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | DHS, FBI, UK | Leave a comment

US State Department funds UK think tank that aids in censorship of Americans

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | February 16, 2023

The US State Department funds UK-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an organization that partners with platforms to flag misinformation and disinformation. The organization has been accused of classifying conservative viewpoints as hate and disinformation.

In September 2021, the State Department awarded ISD a grant to “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda” in the UK and Europe after it won the US-Paris Tech Challenge. The challenge was also won by the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an organization that has been accused of demonetizing conservative news websites by putting them on a blacklist used by advertisers, the Daily Caller reported.

The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) funded the ISD to research Russian disinformation tactics on Wikipedia. However, the department insisted that it does not engage in content moderation on social media.

ISD has several partnerships with social media platforms on content moderation decisions. The organization is a member of Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council, which advises the platform on how to respond to misinformation.

ISD is also part of YouTube’s Trusted Flagger program, whose members are tasked with improving the platform’s enforcement of its guidelines and can flag more content than other users. Google said that it “prioritizes flags from Trusted Flaggers.”

The organization also has partnerships with Google to counter hate and extremism in the UK and Europe. It also partners with Amazon’s Audible, Facebook, and Microsoft.

ISD is mostly focused on extremism and terrorism. However, it has also been targeting what it deems misinformation and hate.

February 16, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | Facebook, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Spotify, United States, YouTube | Leave a comment

Ireland’s protests – will Varadkar go full Trudeau?

By Gavin O’Reilly | OffGuardian | February 15, 2023

Since Russia began its special military operation in Ukraine almost a year ago, one of the key features of the collective West’s response, alongside sanctions and the expulsion of Russian diplomats, has been the accommodation of refugees fleeing the conflict, with millions of Ukrainians being housed across Europe since last February, including 70,000+ in the 26-County Irish State.

The first question that springs to mind regarding this approach however, is that if it is being done out of genuine concern for those fleeing conflict in Ukraine, then why was it not implemented in 2014 when that war first began?

In April of that year, following five months of Western-instigated violence in response to then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to suspend an EU-trade deal in order to pursue closer ties with neighbouring Russia, the ethnic Russian Donbass region in the east of the country would break away to form the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, their residents having little choice lest they face genocide and ethnic cleansing at the hands of the anti-Russian neo-Nazi elements which composed the new Western-backed Kiev government.

A war on both Republics would follow, involving neo-Nazi paramilitaries such as Azov Battalion and Right Sector, which despite efforts to resolve the conflict peacefully via the federalisation solution offered by the Minsk Accords, would ultimately result in 14,000 deaths over the space of 8 years.

Despite this slaughter, no mainstream campaign existed in Ireland during the same period intended to expel Ukrainian diplomats or to welcome those fleeing conflict in the Donbass.

Likewise, no similar campaign has existed for those fleeing other conflicts such as that in Yemen, classed as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis by the United Nations, with a paltry 70 Yemenis being granted access to social services in the 26 Counties in the past year, in comparison to 72,609 Ukrainians in the same period following Russia’s intervention.

It must also me asked that if Leinster House genuinely cared about the plight of refugees fleeing conflict, then why contribute to the conflicts that created those refugees in the first place by allowing US warplanes to land in Shannon Airport over the past 20 years?

Since the Russian operation began in Ukraine last February, talks of the 26 County State joining an EU army have increased amongst establishment voices also, with the stated aim of such an alliance being to ‘act in complementarity’ with NATO, the coalition having been a key contributor to the refugee crisis over the past two decades by laying waste to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

With these facts established, it can safely be concluded that Leinster House’s ‘concern’ for refugees has little to do with helping those fleeing war, and much like the wider West’s support of Ukrainian ‘freedom fighters’ being a cover to use Ukraine as a proxy to tie Russia down in an Afghan-style military quagmire.

Further, the Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil coalition is using emotive media coverage of the Ukrainian conflict as a means to swell the labour market and to keep wages stagnant on behalf of the corporate class.

Indeed, protests related to the effects of such a move would arise in late November, when upwards of 300 migrants were suddenly moved into a disused office block in East Wall, a working-class area of inner-city Dublin.

Residents would begin what would go on to become weekly demonstrations over the move, citing the lack of consultation with community officials beforehand, the suitability of the office block for accommodation, and the lack of transparency on whether those who had been moved into the office block had been vetted.

Despite these protests receiving support from residents of the office block themselves, the Irish mainstream media would, in lockstep, decry them as being ‘anti-refugee protests’ and ‘organised by the far-right’, a label that would also be applied to similar protests that emerged around Dublin and other locations in response to other wildly unsuitable locations chosen by Leinster House to accommodate adult migrants, including a school in Drimnagh, like East Wall, another working-class area of Dublin.

This dismissal of ordinary working class people’s concerns as ‘far-right’ bears a stark similarity to mainstream media descriptions of last year’s Freedom Convoy in Canada, when in response to a government mandate requiring all truck drivers re-entering from the US having to be vaccinated, a nationwide protest would begin in the second-largest country in the world.

The government of Justin Trudeau – like Leo Varadkar, another ‘Young Global leader’ of the World Economic Forum – would respond in an authoritarian fashion, freezing the bank accounts of protest organisers and attacking demonstrators with mounted Horses and teargas.

An approach, that with the head of the 26-County police force condemning the current protests and secretive police units monitoring organisers, may soon become a reality on the other side of the Atlantic.

Gavin O’Reilly is an Irish Republican activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism; he was a writer for the American Herald Tribune from January 2018 up until their seizure by the FBI in 2021, with his work also appearing on The Duran, Al-Masdar, MintPress News, Global Research and SouthFront. He can be reached through Twitter and Facebook and supported on Patreon.

February 16, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite | Ireland | Leave a comment

Forensic Probe Reveals Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda Died of Poisoning, Family Says

By Igor Shapovalov – Sputnik -16.02.2023

The Government Junta of Chile was the highest organ of state power in the South American nation during the 1973-1990 military dictatorship. The period was characterized by repressive policies and extensive economic transformation. It is estimated that more than 3,000 people were killed, and tens of thousands disappeared during the military rule.

New research into the remains of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda has confirmed that poisoning was the cause of his death in 1973, the poet-diplomat’s nephew Rodolfo Reyes has said.

Following the court-approved exhumation of the body, international experts were called in to examine the remains of the Nobel laureate. According to Reyes, the results of the study confirmed he died not from cancer, as stated in official documents, but from poisoning.

Reyes has detailed that the final report outlined traces of the botulism agent had been found in the poet’s remains. Moreover, experts at McMaster University in Canada and the University of Copenhagen determined the bacteria had entered his body before death, thus confirming the idea of poisoning.

“We now know that there was no reason for the clostridium botulinum to have been there in his bones,” Reyes told Spanish media. “What does that mean? It means Neruda was murdered through the intervention of state agents in 1973.”

The report was released to Paola Plaza, a Chilean judge, on Wednesday; however, she has not made the findings public. It’s expected the report will be publicly released on March 7.

In Chile, Neruda is known not only as a poet but also as a diplomat and public figure. The Chilean Communist Party nominated him for president in 1970, although he later withdrew his candidacy in favor of socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende, who would later go on to be overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet in a US-backed coup.

Neruda died on 23 September 1973, 12 days after the coup d’état that toppled the Allende government. He died at the Santa Maria Hospital in Santiago. Speculation on Neruda’s cause of death has remained a hot talking point for decades, with his body having been first exhumed under court order in 2017.

February 16, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties | Chile, Human rights | Leave a comment

Rumble wins injunction against New York’s online censorship law

The law was deemed to be a violation of the First Amendment

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | February 14, 2023

A judge has blocked a New York law that attempted to regulate “hateful conduct” online.

The legislative package, signed into law last summer, was Gov. Kathy Hochul’s attempt to force the moderation of content under nebulous terms such as “hate.”

The bill required, “social media networks to provide and maintain mechanisms for reporting hateful conduct on their platform.” It defined hateful conduct broadly as, “the use of a social media network to vilify, humiliate, or incite violence against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.”

The law also said that platforms must have a “clear and concise policy readily available and accessible on their website and application which includes how such social media network[s] will respond and address the reports of incidents of hateful conduct on their platform[s].”

The law was challenged by the free speech video platform Rumble, alongside FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and First Amendment legal scholar Eugene Volokh, primarily on First Amendment grounds.

On Tuesday, Judge Andrew L. Carter, Jr. (S.D.N.Y.) blocked the law. “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate,’” the court wrote.

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

In an unsurprising fashion, Judge Carter ruled that the law was a violation of the First Amendment. “The First Amendment protects from state regulation speech that may be deemed ‘hateful,’” the court wrote, “and generally disfavors regulation of speech based on its content unless it is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest.”

The court added that the law, “chills the constitutionally protected speech of social media users,” adding “social media websites are publishers and curators of speech, and their users are engaged in speech by writing, posting, and creating content. Although the law ostensibly is aimed at social media networks, it fundamentally implicates the speech of the networks’ users by mandating a policy and mechanism by which users can complain about other users’ protected speech.”

The court highlighted the ways in which the law violated the First Amendment, saying, “the law also requires that a social media network must make a ‘policy’ available on its website which details how the network will respond to a complaint of hateful content. In other words, the law requires that social media networks devise and implement a written policy—i.e., speech.”

The other factor considered by the court was that the law “requires a social media network to endorse the state’s message about ‘hateful conduct’” – another First Amendment violation.

“Implicit in this language is that each social media network’s definition of ‘hateful conduct’ must be at least as inclusive as the definition set forth in the law itself. In other words, the social media network’s policy must define ‘hateful conduct’ as conduct which tends to ‘vilify, humiliate, or incite violence’ ‘on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.’”

The court singled out how the law would have forced free speech platforms such as Rumble “whose websites have dedicated ‘pro-free speech purpose[s],’ which likely attract users who are ‘opposed to censorship’” to “speak about hateful conduct.” This would be a form of compelled speech.

The court ruled that Rumble has, “an editorial right to keep certain information off their websites and to make decisions as to the sort of community they would like to foster on their platforms. It is well-established that a private entity has an ability to make ‘choices about whether, to what extent, and in what manner it will disseminate speech…’”

“The founding fathers would be proud today,” Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski tweeted. “Rumble’s legal team is next level amazing.”

February 15, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties | Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

Face masks – Medical Protection, or Badge of Obedience?

By Martin Hanson | OffGuardian | February 15, 2023

I don’t normally watch TVNZ’s Seven Sharp, but on 5^th October 2021 we were told that an immunologist would be on the programme to debunk certain ‘Covid myths’.

One such ‘myth’ was the belief that natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced immunity. In response, clinical immunologist Dr. Maia Brewerton said that natural immunity to Covid-19 is not as good as the vaccine.

No evidence was given. Just an assertion.

As an ex-science teacher, I found Dr Brewerton’s statement to be unsatisfactory, for the following simple reason: the vaccine can only generate antibodies to a single viral antigen (the ‘spike’ protein), whereas the whole virus particle reportedly contains 29 proteins, which can therefore evoke the production of a correspondingly greater diversity of antibodies.

So, if the part of the viral RNA that codes for the spike protein RNA undergoes a mutation, the vaccine-induced antibody may be unable to bind to the mutant antigen, but with natural immunity there will a range of ‘back-up’ antibodies that can bind to the other proteins of the virus.

I wrote to Dr. Brewerton to make this point, asking her if she could provide evidence for her Seven Sharp statement.

I received no reply.

This was particularly disappointing because we had repeatedly been urged by the authorities to ‘accept the science’.

One might think that such a single experience may not be particularly significant; Dr. Brewerton might be snowed under with work. But soon after Dr. Brewerton’s appearance, Stuff invited readers to submit questions on Covid, so I sent a similar question to the one I had asked of Dr. Brewerton.

Again, I received no reply.

I was beginning to sense that the authorities might not be too keen to take their own advice to ‘go with the science’, since the very essence of science is examination and questioning of evidence.

This feeling was solidified in August 2022, when I came across a paper co-authored by Professor Michael Baker, an epidemiologist at the University of Otago, who has been one of chief advocates for the wearing of masks during Covid-19. The paper was titled “The Covid-19 experience in Aotearoa New Zealand and other comparable high-income jurisdictions and implications for managing the next pandemic phase”.

In the article I could find no evidence supporting the efficacy of masks in the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’, so I wrote to Prof. Baker, saying that I had looked for, but had failed to find, any research evidence supporting the efficacy of mask wearing and hoped that he might be able to provide it.

Again, I received no reply.

An essential element in science is the challenging of established ideas in robust, untrammelled debate, in an environment that encourages questioning. Without such openness, science can be misused by powerful interests as a means of disguising misinformation as information.

In the complete absence of evidence-based debate in the media, I was forced to go elsewhere to find out what’s going on. One such source is Ian Miller’s “Unmasked: The Global Failure of Mask Mandates”. Using data from North America, Europe, and parts of South America, and county level in the U.S., Miller presents a compelling case that masks have failed their most significant test – to significantly reduce transmission of Covid. Indeed, it’s clear that masks have no health utility at all, but are an emblem of obedience to power.

In March 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. Government’s chief medical expert was interviewed on 60 Minutes, and he unequivocally expressed his opinion on masks:

There’s no reason to be walking around with masks.. . . . .when you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

Until his recent retirement, Dr. Fauci has spent his half-century-career as the US Government’s chief medical expert, whose calm, avuncular charm inspired confidence in millions, so his word on the airwaves carried a lot of weight.

Though his was the most familiar voice, organisations such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) prior to Covid, had expressed similar reservations on the utility of masks.

In February 2020, the CDC issued a document called “Community Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic Influenza – United States, 2017”. It drew on the findings of nearly 200 research articles published over the years 1990 and 2006, and was specifically concerned with non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI’s) by which people could protect themselves in the event of an epidemic.

The NPI’s the CDC document described for influenza pandemics included voluntary home quarantine of exposed household members and use of face masks in community settings when ill (emphasis added). There was no recommendation that masks should be used by healthy people in the general population.

The CDC was not the only prominent public health body to update its pandemic planning. In 2019 the WHO produced a document “Non-pharmaceutical Public Health Measures for Mitigating the Risk and Impact of Epidemic and Pandemic Influenza”. The first comment on the available evidence was hardly justification for subsequent compulsory masking in public places [emphasis added]:

The evidence base on the effectiveness of NPIs in community settings is limited, and the overall quality of evidence was very low for most interventions. There have been a number of high-quality randomized controlled trials (RCTs) demonstrating that personal protective measures such as hand hygiene and face masks have, at best, a small effect on influenza transmission …”

And in the United Kingdom’s Department of Health issued a guidebook titled “UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011” which, in point 4.15, said [emphasis added]:

Although there is a perception that the wearing of facemasks by the public in the community and household setting may be beneficial, there is in fact very little evidence of widespread benefit from their use in this setting. Facemasks must be worn correctly, changed frequently, removed properly, disposed of safely and used in combination with good respiratory, hand, and home hygiene behaviour in order for them to achieve the intended benefit. Research also shows that compliance with these recommended behaviours when wearing facemasks for prolonged periods reduces over time.”

It’s clear, then, that pre-Covid, public health authorities were unconvinced of the utility of mask-wearing by the general public. So, one is entitled to wonder why, soon after the WHO announced that Covid-19 had pandemic status, governments in North America, Europe, and Australasia began to ‘encourage’ people to wear masks in indoor public places. This was achieved by a combination of legislation and publicly expressed statements by ‘experts’.

In some cases the language was hyperbolic, verging on blood-curdling. In an interview on Newshub in July 2022 Prof. Michael Baker said:

“If you go out when you have this infection and infect your friends and family…you are going to kill some people – just like drinking and driving. We need a massive shift in thinking,”

In my e-mail to Prof. Baker, I had mentioned that I had been unable to find any evidence to support enforced wearing of masks in indoor public places. Since then I have come across two research papers, the most recent showing an investigation into the effects of masking by Beny Spira, Associate Professor of Infectious Disease at the University of São Paulo in the Journal Cureus, Journal of Medical Science.

The research, titled Correlation Between Mask Compliance and COVID-19 Outcomes in Europe, and published April 19, 2022, analysed the correlation between mask usage against morbidity and mortality rates in the 2020-2021 winter in Europe.

Data from 35 European countries on morbidity, mortality, and mask usage during a six-month period were analysed. They found that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage. On the contrary, there was a positive (though not strong) correlation between mask usage and mortality, suggesting that mask use was associated with slightly greater risk of death.

Of course, correlation does not prove causation, but these results are, or should be, cause for reflection by the authorities. But it seems not.

Whereas the Beny Spira study was retrospective, studying possible effects of mask-wearing in whole populations, a prospective study follows the fate of samples of volunteers, some of whom wore masks and others who did not.

A particularly important study by scientists at the University of Copenhagen during April and May 2020 was published in the academic journal Annals of Internal Medicine. It cast doubt on policies that force healthy individuals to wear face coverings in hopes of limiting the spread of COVID-19. The New York Times reported that…

“Researchers in Denmark reported on Wednesday that surgical masks did not protect the wearers against infection with the coronavirus in a large randomized clinical trial.”

The experiment involved over 6,000 participants who had tested negative for Covid-19 immediately prior to the experiment. Half the participants were given surgical masks and asked to wear them at all times in public places; the other, control half, were instructed to not wear masks. After a month, participants were tested for Covid-19 and for antibodies against the virus.

The Times reported that of the 4,860 participants who finished the experiment, 42 people in the mask group, or 1.8 percent, got infected, compared with 53 in the unmasked group, or 2.1 percent. The difference was not statistically significant.

Dr. Henning Bundgaard, lead author of the experiment and a physician at the University of Copenhagen, told the Times the results of his research were clear.

“Our study gives an indication of how much you gain from wearing a mask,” Bundgaard said. “Not a lot.”

Surprisingly, or perhaps (in view of what follows) unsurprisingly, the most elite medical journals – The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association – all refused to publish the paper.

Though the study’s researchers have been reticent about their results, some have hinted that it was their conclusions rather than their methodology that lay behind the rejections. Christian Torp-Pedersen, professor and chief physician at the research department at North Zealand Hospital, told Denmark’s Berlingske Daily:

We can’t start discussing what they are dissatisfied with. For if so, we must also explain what the study showed. And we do not want to discuss this until it has been published.”

When asked when the study would be published, one of its researchers, Thomas Benfield, Professor of infectious disease at the University of Copenhagen replied:

As soon as a journal is brave enough to accept the paper.”

In their paper, the Danish scientists described their findings as ‘inconclusive’, yet it seemed that their failure to produce evidence to support the official narrative was enough for the most élite journals to refuse to publish it.

Anyone who was cynical enough to suspect that discouragement of open debate was not confined to these journals would have found support for this ‘conspiratorial’ view from two leading Oxford University academics, Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine, and Dr Tom Jefferson, a Clinical epidemiologist and Senior Associate Tutor, when they published an article in the Spectator magazine on Nov 19, 2020. The article was titled: ‘Landmark Danish study shows face masks have no significant effect.’

In quoting the Danish findings, Heneghan and Jefferson added: “As a result, it seems that any effect masks have on preventing the spread of the disease in the community is small.”

But then Facebook warned that the article was ‘false information’ claiming that it had been ‘checked by independent fact-checkers’

An angry Prof Heneghan told 70,000 followers on Twitter: ‘I’m aware of this happening to others – what has happened to academic freedom and freedom of speech? There is nothing in this article that is false.’

Such attempts to shut down views contrary to the official narrative should come as no surprise, especially in light of recent revelations about what amounts to ‘public-private censorship’ of free speech.

The revelations began soon after billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, in which he pledged to release internal documents that would reveal how the previous owners of Twitter had suppressed free speech. The files were released for examination by two independent journalists, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss. In an interview on Fox News, Taibbi said:

I think the major revelation of the Twitter files so far is that we’ve discovered an elaborate bureaucracy of what you might call public-private censorship. Basically, companies like Twitter have a system by which they receive ten tens of thousands of requests for action on various accounts, typically through the DHS [Department of Home Security] and FBI, but these requests were coming from basically every agency in the government. We’ve seen them from the HHS, from the Treasury, from the DOD [Department of Defence], even from the CIA, and they will send basically long lists of accounts in Excel spreadsheet files and ask for action on those accounts. And in many cases, Twitter is complying.”

So it’s not too much of a stretch to think that governments have been using Twitter to stifle public dissent over masks.

And it’s not just censorship that’s been the only tool in the box; even more has been the deliberate stoking up of fear, as Laura Dodsworth explains in an introduction to her book A State of Fear. In an introductory article to her book she gives some examples of things to be afraid of. A small sample:

Being tall: “People over 6ft have double the risk of coronavirus, study suggests” (DailyTelegraph 28 July 2020)
Being bald: “Bad news for baldies as new US study finds they’re 40% more at risk of coronavirus. New research has found a strange link between male baldness and the severity of the virus showing men without hair are more likely to end up in hospital.” (Daily Star, July 23, 2020).
Owning a dog and taking home supermarket deliveries: “Dog-owners face 78% higher risk of catching Covid-19 – and home grocery deliveries DOUBLE the risk, study finds.” (Mailonline 17 November 2020).
Being male: “Is testicle pain potentially a sign of Covid? 49-year-old Turkish man who had no other symptoms is diagnosed with the virus” (Mailonline 18 November 2020) and
Erectile dysfunction: “COVID-19 could cause erectile dysfunction in patients who have recovered from the virus, doctor warns” (Daily Mail, Dec 6, 2020)
Your toes: “Coronavirus: People who contract COVID may develop red and swollen toes which turn purple, say scientists” (Sky News UK 29 October, 2020

Taken individually, these might be amusing, but together, they are part of “a panoply of doom-mongering headlines”.

No doubt some will say that Dodsworth is a ‘conspiracy theorist’, but her allegations are confirmed by UK Government publications. On 22^nd March 2020, SPI-B, the behavioural science sub-group of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), published a document titled “Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures”, advocating the use of applied psychology to influence social behaviour. Though the focus of the document was on social distancing rather than masks, the intention to use fear is clear:

“The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging. To be effective this must also empower people by making clear the actions they can take to reduce the threat.”

Moreover, Option 2 of Appendix B recommends using the media “to increase sense of personal threat” [emphasis added].

The cynical use of behavioural psychology to manipulate the attitudes and behaviour of populations has not been restricted to the U.K.; it’s been international. Here in New Zealand, in the early days of the pandemic, Jacinda Ardern’s use of the phrase ‘team of 5 million’ was a masterstroke.

But while this might have worked with a fearful, apathetic, naïve, and gullible public, masks and lockdown rules were flouted by some of our leaders in New Zealand, who didn’t see the need for such petty restrictions.

Chief among these was Siouxsie Wiles, the 2021 Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year, and a key adviser to Jacinda Ardern. On Sept 18, 2021 Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon interviewed her.

“Now that we know Covid-19 is airborne, stay away from people who aren’t in your bubble. With new knowledge that Covid-19 is airborne, that’s no longer something safe to do. Please don’t go out and chat with a friend while you are out. Don’t hang around and have a chat, connect in other ways. We’ve got phones, we’ve got Skype, we’ve got Zoom…we need to physically disconnect for a little while,” she said.

“Stay away from people.”

The trouble is, Wiles wasn’t following her own advice. On September 3, 2021, while Auckland was still in Level Four lockdown, she was observed “hanging around and having a chat” with a journalist at Judges Bay, Parnell.

Even more damning, the whole episode was recorded on video, in which Wiles was shown sitting in close proximity to the journalist, and neither was wearing a mask, in clear breach of her own and the government’s advice and mandates.

And on 7 September 2021, RNZ, Wiles said that wearing a mask at Level Two is advisable:

It depends on where the wind is blowing you could have a gust of wind that if someone infected blows it to you or if you were infected blows it to someone else… For the good of everybody, wearing a mask when you’re out of your home is a good idea.”

As independent journalist Cameron Slater pointed out: “If her advice is to wear a mask at Level Two, presumably it would apply doubly at Level Four.” And
“Siouxsie Wiles lives in Freemans Bay, and in order to get to Judges Bay would require a trip in excess of 5km one way and 5km back again. This is in contravention of Level Four regulations that require you to ‘stay local’”.

Slater reported that when the Prime Minister was approached for comment about why it was acceptable for one of her key science advisers to be seen breaking lockdown rules, while Police are busy harassing shoppers, no reply had been received.

In a healthy democracy, the media would be speaking truth to power, so why were the media silent on Wiles’ flouting of the rules? Slater explained why the BFD made it public:

The simple reason is that we are not part of the Prime Minister’s Team of $55 million [a reference to the NZ government fund to rescue “grassroots public interest journalism”, which many see as a form of government control]. This story was given to 1News journalist Benedict Collins. After sitting on the story for five days he informed my source that they had spiked the story. The reason given was that it wasn’t a politician so there was no public interest in the story. Make no mistake, this story was suppressed by an editor at 1News.”

The Wiles case is one of many. The one garnering the most international odium was the 2021 G7 Summit in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, U.K. Among the leaders attending were President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Photographs taken of the President and First Lady, the Queen, President Trudeau and Prince Charles show them clearly in breach of the ‘two metre’ social distancing rule, and neither is any of them wearing masks, and some show them with arms on each other’s shoulders.

Cynical comments referred to their ‘hypocrisy’ – ‘do as I say, not as I do’, and so on, but their behaviour goes deeper than that.

For one thing, the elite clearly didn’t believe there was any medical need for such social measures, implying that the real purpose was the enforcement of obedience.

Moreover, in making no attempt to conceal their flouting of their own rules, they were showing ostentatious contempt for us, the proles.

In the greater scheme of things, Covid-19 is but one ‘dot’ of many in the picture. While many can cope with the individual ‘dots’, joining them together to see the whole picture is, for some, just too much.

One thing that can make it easier is the fact that it’s nothing new. Over 2300 years ago the Greek philosopher Plato dealt with the problem of how hierarchical societies ensure that people did not think ‘incorrectly’ using his Allegory of the Cave, described in his Republic. The allegory takes the form of an imaginary conversation between Socrates and his pupil, Glaucon.

Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine people living in a huge cave that is only open to the outside world with difficulty. Most of the people in the cave are prisoners since early childhood. They are chained to the wall, facing the back of the cave, unable to move so they cannot turn their heads to see a fire behind them. Between the prisoners and the fire is a low wall, behind which is a path along which non-prisoners carry puppets and other objects that cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The shadows playing on the wall are all the prisoners can see; unable to see the fire, the prisoners believe the shadows to be real.

The central message of Plato’s allegory is that the human-created shadows are the political doctrine of a nation state. Although that was over two millennia ago, the cave allegory is more relevant than ever today. Industrial society is living in a state of deep ignorance, in which ‘reality’ is created by powerful agencies and their ‘puppeteer’ stenographers, the media.

Nearly a century ago, Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, implied that we are being manipulated by the clever use of psychology. Bernays is widely regarded as the ‘father’ of public relations, the polite term for the manipulation of public opinion. In his 1928 book Propaganda he wrote:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. This is merely a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organised.

38 years later, Harvard history professor Carroll Quigley published an extraordinary 1300-page book Tragedy and Hope, and in 2016 Joseph Plummer published a condensed 200 page version, Tragedy and Hope 101.

Quigley reveals that real political power operates in secret, over which ‘democratic’ elections have little or no influence. He shows that secret, powerful networks of individuals are behind world events, and that “representative government” is a fraud.

Plummer summarises the situation:

Real power is unelected. Politicians change, but the power structure does not. The Network operates behind the scenes, for its own benefit, without ever consulting those who are affected by its decisions.
The Network is composed of individuals who prefer anonymity. They are “satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power.” This approach of secretly exercising power is common throughout history because it protects the conspirators from the consequences of their actions.
A primary tactic for directing public opinion and ‘government’ policy is to place willing servants in leadership positions of trusted institutions (media, universities, government, foundations, etc.). If there is ever a major backlash against a given policy, the servant can be replaced. This leaves both the institution and the individuals who actually direct its power unharmed.
Historically, those who establish sophisticated systems of domination are not only highly intelligent; they are supremely deceptive and ruthless. They completely ignore the ethical barriers that govern a normal human being’s behavior. They do not believe that the moral and legislative laws, which others are expected to abide by, apply to them. This gives them an enormous advantage over the masses that cannot easily imagine their mind-set.
Advances in technology have enabled modern rulers to dominate larger and larger areas of the globe. As a result, the substance of national sovereignty has already been destroyed, and whatever remains of its shell is being dismantled as quickly as possible. The new system they’re building (which they themselves refer to as a New World Order), will trade the existing illusion of democratically directed government for their long-sought, “expert-directed,” authoritarian technocracy.

This disturbing reality contradicts everything our governments, education and media instil in us from cradle to grave, so it is inevitable that such ideas will be dismissed as the ravings of a crazy ‘conspiracy theorist’.

The trouble is, far from being a conspiracy nutter, Quigley was a distinguished member of the Ivy League; a pre-eminent historian who taught at Princeton and Harvard universities and an adviser to the American Defense Department and US Navy.

So how did Quigley arrive at this ‘secret knowledge’? Plummer explains:

Carroll Quigley was a well-connected and well-credentialed member of Ivy League society. Based on his own words, and his training as a historian, it appears that he was chosen by members of a secret network to write the real history of their rise to power. However, as Quigley later realized, these individuals did not expect or intend for him to publish their secrets for the rest of the world to see. Shortly after publishing Tragedy and Hope in 1966, “the Network” apparently made its displeasure known to Quigley’s publisher, and the book he’d spent twenty years writing was pulled from the market.”

Much of the above will be very disturbing to neophytes, so much so that many will throw up their hands and reject it out of hand. To such doubters, I would ask them to explain the facts I’ve presented in any other way.

Martin Hanson is a retired biology teacher living on New Zealand’s South Island. He was born and educated in the UK, where he received a degree in zoology from the University of Manchester.

February 15, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, North Zealand | Leave a comment

Here’s why Ukraine’s Zelensky wants a long war with Russia

By Andrey Sushentsov | RT | February 15, 2023

It is unlikely that President Vladimir Zelensky expects to win militarily. But it seems that he genuinely believes that he will succeed in turning Ukraine into something like Israel – a paramilitary state living with a sense of constant military threat.

Ukraine doesn’t have the military or economic resources of its own to achieve victory, and the resources provided by the West will never be enough to inflict a final defeat on Russia. Zelensky’s calculation is likely based on the belief that by offering Ukraine as a tool for NATO to use against Russia, he will constantly mobilize Western support and thereby ensure his own survival, and that of his associates.

In the worst-case scenario, as he sees it, Zelensky is probably counting on emigrating to the West with his closest associates, where they will advocate a continued policy of Russian containment. But does he care about the interests of ordinary people in Ukraine?

The unprecedented hardships of war that the country now faces could have been significantly reduced if Zelensky had been willing to settle the crisis diplomatically. Russia has repeatedly taken diplomatic initiatives to resolve this conflict. In the first phase, for example, negotiations took place in Belarus and Turkey. However, under the influence of the US and the UK, Kiev has set a course to prolong the conflict, banking on Western military assistance to achieve its goals.

As Ukraine’s own military and economic resources have dried up, the country has become increasingly dependent on Western supplies, and has ultimately become a tool to fight Russia. Nevertheless, Kiev still has the opportunity to begin talks with Moscow.

Zelensky could take the initiative to negotiate a status quo that is still comfortable for Ukraine. Of course, as the Russian military campaign progresses, the situation will change in ways that are far from favorable to Kiev. And the solutions put forward by the Russian delegation at the beginning of the crisis will no longer be on the table. However, there is still the possibility of a sustainable peace, with reduced risks of escalation into Europe’s biggest military conflict since the Second World War and a nuclear catastrophe.

Zelensky could still claim the laurels of a peacemaker who sacrificed some of his personal ambition in the name of saving Ukrainian lives and ensuring a peaceful future for his country.

A truce would alleviate the economic difficulties of Kiev’s supporters in the West, and thus generate some gratitude. Ukraine would also save a considerable amount of its military resources. Peace would obviously limit them, as deliveries would dry up, but those resources in situ would still be at the disposal of the Ukrainian government.

Yet, Zelensky’s government acts as if it sees no value in preserving Ukrainian statehood. The administration is squandering citizens’ lives and the economic fabric of the country in the belief that this sacrifice is necessary to gain some possible, rather indefinite, advantage in the future. Instead of acting as a peacemaker, as someone who is prepared to make sacrifices to save the lives of his people, Zelensky acts like a gambler, while feeding the population military propaganda.

The unprecedented military, political and economic support Ukraine is receiving from abroad essentially covers up all of the mistakes by Zelensky’s government. A strategy which is based on the axiom “war will pay for everything”. At home, the militarist line has allowed the president to establish a political dictatorship and persecute his opponents in all spheres of state life, including religion. As a result, he has secured an unprecedented concentration of power in his hands and, for the first time in Ukrainian history, silenced all centers of opposition.

Zelensky need not worry about Ukraine’s economic well-being in the short term: the foreign economic aid being handed to the Ukrainian government will suffice. Meanwhile, Kiev is still actively betting that Russia’s $300 billion in foreign currency reserves, frozen in the West, will fall into its hands. What would amount to state-piracy would also allow it use the money as it sees fit.

As a result, Zelensky expects that even if he is defeated and loses part of his territory, he will remain in power as the military leader the West needs for the new Ukraine, which will be the main anti-Russian outpost on NATO’s eastern borders. One that will be armed to the teeth, saturated with Western economic aid and that will provide its citizens with an acceptable standard of living.

I believe that Zelensky is genuinely convinced he will succeed in turning Ukraine into something like Israel, a paramilitary state in a hostile environment, and living with a sense of constant military threat. I do not exclude the possibility that even in the worst-case scenario, where there is a complete collapse of his government, Zelensky expects to find himself and a group of his closest associates in exile in the West. Once there, they will actively advocate a continued policy of containment and defeat of Russia. History shows that this prospect has every chance of materializing.

Andrey Sushentsov is the Valdai Club program director.

February 15, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Economics, Militarism | NATO, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Canada’s conservative leader Pierre Poilievre says no to digital ID

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | February 13, 2023

The leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, said that if he were to be elected Prime Minister, he would not impose digital IDs. He made the comment on a campaign trail in Windsor, Ontario.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government announced its federal Digital Identity Program last August.

“And to answer your question, I will never allow the government to impose a digital ID,” Poilievre said.

Poilievre’s comment came a few days after Alberta and Saskatchewan’s premiers said that they were not interested in a federal digital ID.

“The government of Saskatchewan is not creating a Digital ID nor will we accept any requirements for the creation of a digital ID tied to healthcare funding,” said Saskatchewan’s Premier Scott Moe.

Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith said that she fully supported what Moe said.

Transport Canada has recently announced that the Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI) project is ongoing, contrary to earlier reports suggesting that the project has been discontinued.

The KTDI is a collaborative effort between the World Economic Forum (WEF), Accenture, INTERPOL, various government entities, and the governments of the Netherlands and Canada. The project was initiated in 2018 to create a secure and decentralized digital identity system for travelers between the Netherlands and Canada. The system utilizes cryptographic encryption and distributed ledger technology to ensure the protection of travelers’ personal information.

February 14, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Alberta, Canada, Human rights, Netherlands, Saskatchewan, WEF | Leave a comment

One year ago, this Western democracy dipped into autocracy

By Rachel Marsden | RT | February 14, 2023

On February 14, 2022, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked a sweeping nationwide measure, the kind of which hadn’t been used since his father, former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, during the October Crisis of 1970, amid a rash of terrorist incidents perpetrated by Francophone separatists in the province of Quebec.

The federal Emergencies Act, which replaced the War Measures Act used in 1970, as well as during both World Wars, is supposed to be used in cases of serious threat to national security or public welfare. So what was the threat that caused Trudeau to pull out the big guns? A convoy of truckers and their supporters — coined the Freedom Convoy — headed to Canada’s capital city of Ottawa to defend the notion of equal rights of all Canadians to work, assemble, enjoy indoor leisure activities, and travel regardless of anti-Covid vaccine status. The fact that these fundamental aspects of everyday life could no longer be taken for granted was a testament to how authoritarian the Canadian government had already become. And when Canadians finally decided to demonstrate that they were fed up, the Trudeau government’s response was an unprecedented crackdown that put Canada on par with countries that it in-turn criticizes.

“We are broadening the scope of Canada’s anti-money laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use. These changes cover all forms of transactions, including digital assets such as cryptocurrencies,” deputy prime minister and finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, said during the Emergency Act announcement. She also introduced an order “authorizing Canadian financial institutions to temporarily cease providing financial services where the institution suspects that an account is being used to further the illegal blockades and occupations. This order covers both personal and corporate accounts.”

It’s hard to imagine that the conflation of Freedom Convoy protesters and terrorism was just coincidental. Western governments use the tactic frequently. The European Union, for example, routinely evokes “Russia” and “ISIS” in the same breath when arguing for the need to control “disinformation” or “propaganda”. Putting two very different things in the same rhetorical basket served to associate them in people’s minds. So people end up thinking that these average Canadians are like terrorists, and then end up supporting the blocking of their bank accounts by government order.

During an inquiry into the use of the Emergency Act, whose results are expected to be made public just after the one year anniversary of the events, it emerged that a CEO of one of Canada’s banks encouraged Freeland to make this designation. “Label them as terrorists,” he said. “Seize the assets and impair them.” Apparently the government simply dutifully complied.

Trudeau ended up lifting the order nine days later on February 23, 2022, before it could be defeated in a challenge, but the damage was done. As a Canadian born and raised near Vancouver, my earliest memories of protests and strikes roughly date back to the same time that I learned to walk. The Freedom Convoy protests weren’t any different from others. Many public demonstrations are loud, and block traffic. I can’t even count the number of times that traffic was halted on a particular Vancouver area bridge and into the downtown core, all because of environmental protesters perched in old growth trees. The cops usually just end up charging them with mischief, but no one calls a national emergency over it.

Freeland has argued that the extraordinary measures were needed to protect Canada’s economic interests. “What was happening was profoundly jeopardizing the Canadian economy and putting investment in Canada at risk,” she told the inquiry. Sorry, not buying it. How many protests against Canadian oil and gas pipeline projects, which are clearly critical to Canada’s economic security, have lasted for months on end while the government just sat back and let the police do their jobs as they see fit?

As civil rights groups have pointed out, wielding the Emergencies Act was like using a jackhammer on a thumbtack. It failed to specify who in Canada could be targeted by it, and in theory could have been used against anyone or any cause. “By invoking the Emergencies Act, Cabinet gave itself power to enact wide-reaching orders without going through the ordinary democratic process. Using this Act, the federal government gave police increased authority to shut down peaceful protests, on any issue, right across Canada,” argued the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. And that’s without even getting into the merits of the cause.

At the same time, the Canadian government invested a billion dollars to help Canadian provinces set up an integrated digital passport system that linked health and jab records to a digital QR code, much like the European Union’s digital Covid certificate that determined who had received the number of jabs mandated by the government as a prerequisite for access to all the old basic freedoms of daily life. The more people were coerced into getting jabs so they could travel, keep their job, or work out in a gym, the more digital identities could be tied to digital QR codes.

While the mandates have since largely fallen away, that digital tracking infrastructure hasn’t. It is still firmly in place. As long as it persists, it will serve as a reminder of Canada’s authoritarian turn under a questionable but convenient sanitary pretext — and of the government overreach that the Freedom Convoy fought against.

February 14, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Canada, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights | Leave a comment

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Fanatical Followers of the Covid Regime: A Jim Jones-Style Cult?

By Professor Roger Watson and Dr. Niall McCrae | The Daily Sceptic | November 15, 2021

As scholars at leading British universities over recent decades, we witnessed the replacement of critical thinking and debate by narrative: facts are discrimination and scientific method is imperialism; truth, instead, is derived from ‘progressive’ values. This educational trend may be a major contributory factor to the ease in which society has been inculcated to the Covid ‘new normal’ of masking, testing, and repeated doses of vaccines for a disease of similar risk to severe influenza.

One doesn’t need much critical reasoning to observe the flawed logic of some vaccination enthusiasts, such as people who respond to experiencing any side effects, however debilitating, by saying “at least I know it’s working”, or, after contracting the disease despite their promised inoculation (over 90% effective, according to initial drug company claims), “I’d have been worse off without the jab.” … continue

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