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Japan steps up its digital ID push, tells public they may lose health insurance if they don’t sign up

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | October 27, 2022

There is a discernible and forceful push in many countries toward digitization and switching citizens’ key sensitive personal and financial data from “analog doldrums” to government-controlled (and easily accessible by multiple agencies) centralized databases.

Somewhat telling of how important this task is for those in power, is the fact they are increasingly either pulling all the stops or threatening to, prodding a reluctant population in the desired direction.

In Japan, those who are unsure about signing up for digital IDs – and reports say, those are many – are being told they risk losing their public health insurance, AP writes.

Japan’s Social Security Number-like scheme was launched back in 2016. It’s called My Number and consists of 12 digits given to all residents. But My Number has been far from a resounding success as many Japanese avoid using it, afraid their personal data and right to privacy could be compromised.

The Japanese society seems technologically savvy enough to understand the underlying risks and harms of some types of technology, which means that this otherwise hi-tech country to this day prefers to do business in person, use cash, stamping seals, and paper documents in administrative procedures – in other words, in all those areas that really matter.

Despite the fact the My Number scheme has not had wide adoption, Japan’s authorities are now apparently doubling down: they want to issue My Number cards with microchips in them to everyone, and those cards will also serve as photo ID since they will contain photographs of their carriers. Some of the information and services the cards are linked to are drivers licenses and public health insurance.

This is where the plot thickens since current health cards do not require photos – but those will be phased out by the end of 2024, meaning that residents who do not apply for My Number cards risk losing their health insurance.

An online petition is currently circulating, having gathered over 100,000 signatures in a matter of days, calling for continued use of the current form of health cards.

“If this was coming from a trustworthy leadership and the economy was thriving, maybe we would think about it, but not now,” Saeko Fujimori, who works in the music industry, told AP.

And there are dark overtones to the report.

October 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Property in German town to be confiscated for asylum seekers

Free West Media – October 26, 2022

So far it has been dismissed as a malicious “conspiracy theory” that living space for asylum seekers would end up being confiscated in Germany. But this “theory” is sadly coming true. In the Bavarian district of Fürstenfeldbruck, not far from Munich, it is being implemented.

The local CSU District Administrator Thomas Karmasin has refused to use gymnasiums as “refugee” accommodation. But the existing public accommodation is running out in the face of exploding numbers of asylum seekers. Karmasin therefore wants to have public and private properties confiscated in order to accommodate the newcomers. The first efforts have already started.

Karmasin said in a statement that immigration policy was a federal matter. As in 2014 to 2016, during the last “refugee” crisis, he refused to make school gyms available again.

This development is likely to put affected locals under severe stress in forcing a show of solidarity with Ukrainians or Senegalese accommodated in their apartments and single-family homes.

In a recent SZ interview, sociologist Karin Scherschel who is pro-migration, warned that election campaigns should not be fought on the subject of migration “because it always creates a mood”. If Scherschel had her way, the immigration debate would be ignored.

With authorities now confiscating homes, the matter is certain to create a volatile mood.

According to a so-called general clause under police law, people in Germany who are threatened with homelessness may be accommodated in empty apartments or hotel rooms, even against the will of the owner. Before doing so, the authorities must have exhausted all other possible options.

It is probably only a matter of time before these state encroachments will also extend to private residential property everywhere.

In Stuttgart, 100 tenants were given notice because the homeowner wanted to offer his house to the city for refugees. And in a Bavarian retirement home, the inhabitants were forced to move to higher floors so that young migrants could be accommodated on the ground floor.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation (OECD) assumes that the number of people moving to Germany by the end of the year will exceed the figure of more than two million from 2015.

October 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Seize, not freeze: EU outlines plans for Russian assets

Samizdat – October 25, 2022

The EU seeks to outright confiscate Russian assets rather than just freeze them, but the bloc has yet to lay the legal groundwork for doing so, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday.

The official delivered her remarks during a conference devoted to the rebuilding of Ukraine, which was attended by a number of Kiev’s prominent international donors.

“Our aim is not only to freeze, but to seize the assets,” she said, although cautioning that establishing a legal base for such a move is “not trivial.”

According to von der Leyen, the EU has created a task force that includes various international experts “not only to map out what has been frozen,” but also to see what the legal preconditions would be for seizing Russian assets and using them for the reconstruction of Ukraine.

“The will is there, but legally it is not trivial, there is still a lot of work to reach that goal,” she reiterated, noting that the EU adheres to the rule of law, and therefore this process has to be “legally sound.”

Responding to von der Leyen’s remarks, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that in reality the EU Commission president wants Russia to “exhaust itself being dragged through courts” while trying to retrieve its funds.

During the conference, von der Leyen stated that the World Bank had estimated the cost of the damage to Ukraine at €350 billion ($345 billion). Meanwhile, after Russia launched its military campaign in Ukraine in late February, a multinational task force froze $30 billion in funds belonging to Russian individuals, as well as $300 billion in assets of Russia’s central bank.

Russia strongly criticized the freezing of the funds, with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov saying that the West had essentially committed theft.

Western officials have repeatedly expressed the desire to confiscate Russian assets to benefit Ukraine. However, in July, during another conference on rebuilding Ukraine, Swiss President Ignazio Cassis opposed such a move, arguing that it would establish a dangerous precedent.

“You have to ensure the citizens are protected against the power of the state. This is what we call liberal democracies,” he said at the time.

October 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Odysee blocks French versions of Russia Today after legal demand

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | October 24, 2022

US-based online video sharing platform  has blocked the French versions of Russian state-run news outlets Sputnik and RT after a legal order out of .

“If we want to do business in another country we have to abide by their laws or they shut us down. RT FR and its affiliates are illegal in France. If you want to still watch them from France, use VPN, Odysee tweeted.

Several months ago, the European Union (EU) imposed sanctions on Russia, including banning RT and Sputnik from being broadcast in member countries. The two news outlets were accused of spreading Russian propaganda about the invasion of .

The channels are not allowed on television or online in EU countries. However, they have been circumventing the sanctions through online platforms that are not based in the EU.

A week ago, France’s President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that France is struggling with completely banning Sputnik and RT.

The platform is still broadcasting the English versions of both channels.

October 24, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

“We are not QR codes” New Alberta Premier Danielle Smith apologizes for vaccine passports

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | October 24, 2022

During the United Conservative party’s annual general meeting, Alberta’s new Premier Danielle Smith is seeking legal advice on pardoning those that got arrested or fined for violating COVID-19 rules such as not having a vaccine passport.

“We are human beings,” said Smith. “We are not QR codes,” she said, adding that she wanted to “purge” the QR database.

“I believe that Alberta Health Services is the source of a lot of the problems that we’ve had,” she said.

“They signed some kind of partnership with the  right in the middle of the pandemic; we’ve gotta address that. Why in the world do we have anything to do with the World Economic Forum? That’s got to end.”

“The things that come to top of mind for me are people who got arrested as pastors (and) people given fines for not wearing masks,” Smith said. “These are not things that are normal to get fines and get prosecuted for. I’m going to look into the range of outstanding fines and get some legal advice on which ones we are able to cancel and provide amnesty for.”

Smith also doubled down on her promise to amend the Human Rights Act to ban discrimination based on Covid vaccination status. She said the amendment would focus on Covid vaccines because the issue is not medical, it is political.

“Since it was a very specific reaction to a very specific vaccine mandate, we’re going to be very precise when we write the legislation,” she said.

“We have to get back to an attitude of ‘you take a vaccine to protect yourself.’

“[But] we have to get away from this attitude that you demonize those who make a different choice.”

Smith is a vocal opponent of vaccine passports and mandates, especially the Alberta Health Services (AHS) for not allowing people to work if they are not vaccinated against Covid. According to the premier, people not vaccinated against Covid are the most discriminated against she has seen in her life.

Smith vowed to reorganize the AHS governance system and fire the entire board.

“The system, my friends, is broken,” she said. “Most of those managing AHS today are holdovers from the NDP years. They have had their chance to fix this bloated system and they have largely failed on almost all accounts. Failure is no longer an option.”

Smith failed to address the comments she made during a virtual interview with Western Standard about the World Economic Forum (WEF). During the interview, she said she would end the AHS data sharing deal with other health providers, including Mayo Clinic, under a program overseen by the WEF.

October 24, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Fauci forced to testify on social media censorship

Samizdat | October 22, 2022

The White House’s chief medical advisor, Anthony Fauci, and other senior officials are set to be deposed under oath as part of a lawsuit claiming the government worked alongside social media platforms to create a “massive censorship enterprise” throughout the Covid-19 outbreak.

In a Friday ruling, Judge Terry Doughty granted a joint request from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to compel several current and former officials to testify in the suit, among them Fauci, ex-White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Director of White House Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and two high-level figures from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“After finding documentation of a collusive relationship between the [Joe] Biden administration and social media companies to censor free speech, we immediately filed a motion to get these officials under oath,” Missouri AG Eric Schmitt said in a statement. “It is high time we shine a light on this censorship enterprise and force these officials to come clean to the American people, and this ruling will allow us to do just that. We’ll keep pressing for the truth.”

While the defense insisted that senior officials can only be called to testify about their actions in office under “extraordinary circumstances,” Judge Doughty said the personnel in question met that standard. He added that the two GOP-led states “have proven that Dr. Fauci has personal knowledge about the issue concerning censorship across social media as it related to Covid-19,” ordering him to cooperate with a deposition.

Requests to depose the other officials were granted on similar grounds, as the judge concluded all either held direct meetings with social media firms about the purported censorship, or had close knowledge of those discussions.

Jen Easterly, who heads up the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was also ordered to testify. She played a “central role” in “flagging misinformation to social-media companies for censorship,” the plaintiffs argued, describing the cyber agency the “nerve center” of “the federal government’s efforts to censor social media users.” The same official was said to be involved in the DHS’ now-defunct ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ – dubbed the ‘Ministry of Truth’ by critics – which would have created a new mechanism to facilitate cooperation between the White House and social media sites.

Initially filed last May by Schmitt and  Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, the lawsuit claims the federal government encouraged online platforms to censor, delete or ban certain speech about the pandemic, including discussion of the “lab leak theory of Covid-19’s origin,” as well as questions about the effectiveness of face masks, vaccines or lockdown policies, among other issues. The two AGs have largely relied on documents obtained through subpoenas of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook’s parent firm Meta, which detail regular communications between the government and social media sites.

The White House, as well as the eight officials ordered to testify, have yet to comment on Friday’s ruling. The depositions must take place within 30 days of the order, though it remains unclear whether the defense intends to appeal the decision.

October 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

NEW EVIDENCE PROVES BIDEN ADMINISTRATION PRESSURED FACEBOOK AND TWITTER TO CENSOR AMERICANS

Liberty Justice Center | October 21, 2022 

Yesterday, author and data analyst Justin Hart filed new evidence in his federal lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, and U.S. President Joe Biden. The evidence documents collusion between social media companies and the federal government to silence Americans online on the Internet — a public forum the Supreme Court has determined is the most important place for the exchange of ideas. Hart sued the social media giants and Biden administration in August 2021 for violating his First Amendment right to free speech for working together to monitor, flag, suspend, and delete social media posts it deems “misinformation.”

Hart is represented by attorneys from the Liberty Justice Center, a national public-interest law firm that fights to protect fundamental constitutional rights. Since filing the federal lawsuit, Liberty Justice Center, other nonprofit law firms, and state attorneys general have uncovered communications and documents proving collusion between Big Tech and Biden administration officials at every level. Hart’s attorneys have submitted this evidence gained through public records requests with an amended complaint.

“New evidence confirms what we have long known: our federal government is working directly with Big Tech to silence Americans,” said Daniel Suhr, managing attorney at the Liberty Justice Center. “The government is directing private companies to violate Americans’ free speech rights. Censorship may have started with what they call ‘COVID misinformation,’ but it opens the door for any administration to define any message they don’t like as ‘misinformation.’ This is unconscionable and illegal.”

Justin Hart is the author of Gone Viral: How COVID Drove the World Insane and founder of RationalGround.com. Over the last two years, his Facebook and Twitter accounts were suspended multiple times for sharing data and scientific research about COVID. At the time Hart’s statements and valid public health messages were censored, the facts were deemed “misinformation” by the Biden administration and Big Tech. However, much of what he shared about the detrimental effects of masking, lockdowns, and school closures are now widely accepted as true.

“The depth of the collusion between Big Government and Big Tech is alarming and reveals a sinister plot to undermine the rights of Americans by fully removing certain ideas and people from public discourse,” said Justin Hart, author and plaintiff. “The government does not have a monopoly on truth. By directing and pressuring social media companies to censor Americans, our government is silencing critical discussions and, most importantly, violating our most sacred rights.”

New evidence proves that prior to Justin Hart’s deplatforming in July 2021, the federal government and Big Tech coordinated regularly:

  • Facebook offered the federal government, and it accepted, $15 million in free COVID-19 public health advertising to promote its public health message on the Internet.
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Biden administration officials coordinated its COVID “misinformation” response with Facebook and Twitter by holding regular “be-on-the-lookout” meetings and by providing examples of the types of messages that contradicted the government’s message and it wanted censored.
  • Facebook used proprietary tools to monitor social media posts that contradicted the federal government’s COVID-19 narrative and reported such posts to the federal government.
  • Facebook adjusted its policies and algorithms to align with misinformation policies set by the federal government.

The lawsuit, Hart v. Facebook, was filed Aug. 31, 2021, and is being heard in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division. Case filings are available here.

October 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

We Will Be Challenging Any State’s Covid-19 Vaccine Requirement to Attend School

BY AARON SIRI – INJECTING FREEDOM – 10/20/2022

The CDC’s vaccine advisory committee unanimously voted a few hours ago to add the Covid-19 vaccine to the CDC’s routine childhood vaccination schedule. Immediately following the vote, I received a call from Del Bigtree, ICAN’s founder and host of The HighWire, to tell me that ICAN will support a legal challenge to any state that imposes a Covid-19 vaccine mandate to attend school.

We look forward to bringing those challenges to protect the individual right of every American, especially the youngest among us, as we successfully did when challenging the San Diego School District’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate. Everyone should be free to get numerous shots because that is freedom.  And everyone should be free to reject any unwanted shot because that, too, is freedom.

While most post-March 2020 mandates have been successfully challenged or rescinded, we must never forget that the repressive arm of government is just behind a curtain, waiting to strangle our rights. That is why we must fight, always fight, to push back against that oppression. It is not a war that is won. It is an endless battle with one side pushing the needle toward eliminating individual rights and the other side that must never stop pushing back – because once it swings too far, we will not easily regain our rights.  Power seized is rarely returned.

The next battle front is the body of every child in this country whose parents do not want them to receive a Covid-19 vaccine. A product for which you cannot sue the manufacturers for harm. A product whose clinical trial for children was underpowered, not properly controlled, and that did not review safety for a sufficient duration.  But even in the absence of these issues, corrosive rights-crushing mandates should never exist.

We look forward to, with ICAN’s support, challenging any state’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate for school.

P.S. Note that the CDC’s action of adding the Covid-19 vaccine to its routine childhood vaccine schedule does not automatically make it mandatory in all states for attending school. In most states, the state itself needs to take action to make it mandatory. The expectation is that some states will seek to do just that.

October 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

The crushing of dissent throughout the covid era

Orwellian parallels worsen by the week

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | October 8, 2022

The recent actions of the financial technology company, PayPal, to close the accounts of subscribers expressing political opinions of which they disapprove, represents the latest example of censorship within so-called liberal democracies. Their strategic decisions to block the online monetary activities of the Free Speech Union, the Daily Sceptic website and the Us For Them campaign group – although later reversed – signal the willingness of powerful global big-tech companies to collude with governments in the crushing of activities that challenge the dominant narratives.  But no one should be surprised; we have all been manipulated by top-down censorship and state propaganda for many years, a dystopian process that accelerated during the covid era.

Since the emergence of the novel coronavirus in early 2020, there has been widespread censorship of views that do not support the two mantras of covid-19 orthodoxy: namely that, ‘Lockdowns and other restrictions were appropriate responses’ and ‘The mRNA vaccines are safe and effective’. Indeed, the unprecedented and non-evidenced covid restrictions could not have been so successfully imposed without propaganda in all its forms. Contrary to popular opinion, techniques of manipulation do not only characterise recognised totalitarian regimes, but are now endemic within contemporary liberal democracies. And three, overlapping, forms of non-consensual persuasion have been widely deployed throughout the covid era to control the narrative and subsequent behaviour of citizens:

1.      Control through emotional manipulation

The covert influencing of people’s emotions via use of behavioural-science ‘nudges’ has been well documented. Based on the advice of state-employed psychological experts, the covid-19 communication strategy has relied heavily on evoking uncomfortable feelings in the populace as a way of inducing them to ‘do the right thing’, where what is ‘right’ is solely determined by government-appointed officials. In particular, the manipulation of fear, shame and scapegoating – or ‘affect’, ‘ego’ and ‘norms’, to use the euphemisms of behavioural science – has been conducted for this purpose via the broadcasting of selective statistics, alarming images and emotional messaging. Furthermore, the decision to impose mask mandates was most likely informed by the knowledge that face coverings enhance the power of each of these three nudges, thereby increasing people’s compliance with government diktats.

Despite escalating concerns about the ethical basis of the state’s deployment of behavioural science, there has been a stark reluctance of anyone in authority to accept responsibility for this form of manipulation. The British Psychological Society (the formal guardians of ethical application of psychological interventions) is of the view that covertly inflicting emotional distress on people so as to promote compliance with covid restrictions and the vaccine rollout is acceptable as it is encouraging ‘social responsibility’, thereby colluding – along with other professional bodies – with the state’s mission to silence dissent and eliminate contrary behaviour. Meanwhile the Government show a reluctance to explore the ethics underpinning their deployment of nudges as evidenced by their ‘Public Administration and Public Affairs Committee’ ignoring a request for an independent inquiry and the omission of any mention of behavioural science in the draft terms of reference for the Inquiry into the covid-19 pandemic.

2.      Control through modulating the flow of information

A second way of controlling dissent – used at unprecedentedly high levels throughout the covid event – has been via the regulation of information flow within our TV, radio, newspaper and social media outlets. Ease of access to facts, data and opinion (including that of scientific experts) has been mainly determined by the degree to which the information corresponds with the dominant narratives: write or speak words supportive of lockdowns, masking and vaccination and they will typically receive preferential treatment within the media’s editorial processes, gaining prominence and ease of access; in contrast, say or print something contrarian and it will most likely be submerged in the quagmire of daily media output.

The seeds of this system of selective information flow had been sown prior to 2020 with the formation of the ‘Trusted News Initiative’ (a coalition of mainstream media, publishers and big-tech companies) aspiring to ‘create a global alliance of integrity in news’ by countering ‘misinformation’ and ‘bias’. Furthermore, at the start of the pandemic, Ofcom – the UK’s communications regulator – instructed broadcasters not to cover anything that went against the Government’s narrative. This censorial alliance ensured that voices expressing dissent about covid restrictions and the vaccine rollout were disadvantaged, displaced to the inaccessible fringes of media output.

In the UK, there has even been military involvement in the form of the 77th Brigade with their explicit mission to create and spread material ‘in support of designated tasks’ while also ‘supporting counter-adversarial information activity’. Internationally, the WHO has effectively modulated the flow of information via the use of fact-checking organisations and collaborations with Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and YouTube, so as to guarantee that ‘science-based health messages from official sources’ (aka the dominant narrative) appear first when one searches for covid information.

Specific examples of the impact of this – seemingly global – operation to control information flow are numerous. They include: Professor Gupta (an epidemiological expert) being instructed not to mention the Great Barrington Declaration prior to appearing on a BBC discussion programme about lockdowns; academic journals blocking the peer-reviewed covid research of Dr Peter McCullough and the suppression of trial findings that had concluded that Ivermectin was an effective treatment; the removal of Dr Robert Malone (the inventor of mRNA technology) from Twitter; and the removal of MPs Sir Christopher Chope and David Davies from YouTube for, respectively, raising concerns about vaccine damage and vaccine effectiveness.

One fundamental consequence of this selective regulation of information was that our Western media – a supposed pillar of democracy – failed us all in their refusal to scrutinise and evaluate the actions of public officials.

3.      Control through erasing dissenting voices

Presumably based on the assumption that eliminating people before dissent is expressed is a more effective censorial method than controlling their information output, throughout the covid era there appears to have been a systematic state-driven attempt to discredit or cancel those brave individuals expressing views that are inconsistent with the dominant restrict-and-jab narrative.

Since March 2020, anyone who has expressed a contrarian covid opinion in a public space will likely have attracted criticism involving accusations of being ‘right wing’, fascist or a ‘conspiracy theorist’. Efforts by powerful players to destroy reputations and livelihoods through smearing and character assassination have been commonplace. Arguably the most high-profile example of this egregious practice is in regards to the targeting of the main authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a multi-signatory document arguing for an alternative to the blanket lockdowns. In leaked emails between Anthony Fauci (Chief Medical Advisor to the US president) and Francis Collins (the Director of the US National Institute of Health), these powerful state officials refer to the illustrious authors of the document as ‘fringe epidemiologists’ while describing the need for a ‘quick and devastating public takedown’ of their arguments. Furthermore, the extremely popular US podcaster, Joe Rogan, was smeared as a transphobe and racist in the aftermath of him giving a platform to experts expressing views at odds with the dominant covid narrative.

A threat of imminent loss of earnings – actual or implied – is another tactic that has been commonly deployed to cancel those criticising the approach of Western governments to pandemic management. Many academics have suffered in this way, including Canadian professor Julie Ponesse who lost her job after she challenged the vaccine mandates. Of course, such a draconian sanction serves as a warning to many other university scholars who might also be considering expressing dissent.

The recent actions of PayPal suggest that our medico-technocratic powerhouses are not satisfied with inflicting emotional distress, censorship and character assassination on the Western population, but now seek to control how we spend our money. Manipulation by means of regulating access to our finances may be the new front in the war on freedom of verbal and behavioural expression. It raises the spectre of the imposition of a totalitarian social credit system, mediated via a Central Bank Digital Currency, a world where unelected global bureaucrats determine our monthly spend based on the degree to which our behaviour conforms to their version of what constitutes the ‘greater good’.  

In the words of Piers Robinson (an expert on global propaganda), ‘That the censorship, smearing and coercion … has come to be tolerated is a clear indicator of how far our democracies have slipped into an authoritarian abyss’. And the imminent Online Harms Bill, with its ‘legal but harmful’ category, may further restrict our basic human right to freedom of expression. But there is still hope. As more and more people become aware of the associated collateral damage, the dominant narratives on the benefits of lockdowns, school closures, masks and ‘safe-and-effective’ covid vaccines are beginning to crumble. As awareness of ubiquitous state-funded manipulation and censorship grows, increasing numbers of citizens are turning to independent sources of expert information – such as HART and PANDA – for reliable covid updates. The basic human right of freedom of expression within Western democracies must be protected; once lost, it is unlikely to be restored within our lifetimes.

October 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

The majority of Americans are against Big Tech’s plan to censor before the election

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | October 20, 2022

A survey conducted by Susquehanna Polling and Research, on behalf of The Federalist, found that two-thirds of voters oppose Big Tech’s censorship of political content ahead of the midterms.

Respondents of the survey were asked: “Do you approve or disapprove of Big Tech companies such as , Facebook, and  censoring news stories and preventing users from sharing articles and information related to the upcoming election in November?”

66% of the respondents said they oppose the censorship of political content by social media companies. Only 24% said they approve of the censorship, while the rest were undecided or had no opinion.

44% of those who identified as Democrats disapprove of the censorship while 39% support it.

51% of those who approve of ’s performance oppose the censorship, while 35% support it.

The survey also asked respondents if they “trust the corporate news media to tell the truth” or if the media “misrepresent the facts to push a political agenda.”

77% said they think the media do not tell the truth, with only 13% saying they believe the media. Along political affiliation, 59% of Democrats, 79% of independents, and 91% of Republicans said they do not think the media tells the truth.

October 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Majority of US voters say the media is a threat to democracy

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | October 20, 2022

While the media often suggests that social media posts are a threat to democracy, a poll commissioned by the New York Times found that a majority of registered voters believe that the media is a threat.

71% of respondents said that “American democracy is currently under threat.” Of those, 59% said that the media is a “major threat to democracy and 25% said the media is a “minor threat to democracy.” A measly 15% did not think that the media is a threat to democracy.

70% of Democrats, 83% of independents, and 95% of Republicans said the the media poses some sort of threat to democracy. Only 38% of Democrats believe the media is a major threat to democracy, compared to 53% of independents and 80% of Republicans.

The media outranked former President , President , the Electoral College, voting machines, voting by mail, and the Supreme Court as major threats to democracy.

Republicans mentioned voting machines, voting by mail and the federal government as threats to democracy. Democrats cited the Electoral College and the Supreme Court.

October 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Former Pakistan PM barred from elections

Samizdat | October 21, 2022

Imran Khan, the former prime minister of Pakistan, has been banned from running in elections and becoming a member of parliament for the next five years. The decision by the election commission was rejected by his party, which has called for street protests in response to what they say is an act of political bias.

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) accused Khan of failing to properly report how his government handled gifts that he had received while in office. It constituted “corrupt practices” that warranted his disqualification from holding public office, the body announced on Friday.

Senior officials in Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party rejected the ruling and said they would challenge it in court.

Fawad Chaudhry, who was the minister of law under Khan, called the ruling a “slap on the face of 220 million” party supporters and claimed that the verdict was “written by Nawaz Sharif and signed by his servants,” according to local news website Dawn.

He was referring to the former Pakistani prime minister, who is also the brother of the incumbent head of the government, Shehbaz Sharif. Chaudhry declared the “beginning of the revolution.”

Reports of protests and some street clashes between PTI supporters and police have been coming from several cities, including the capital Islamabad, Lahore, Peshawar, and Karachi. On the Lahore–Islamabad motorway, people burned tires, according to videos shared on social media.

In the capital itself, police appeared to deploy tear gas to disperse demonstrators. Footage from the scene showed thick white clouds billowing in the streets, with people running away.

The Pakistani government called the verdict a proper execution of justice and said Khan may face prosecution for corruption. Law Minister Azam Nazeer Tarar also accused the PTI leadership of inciting “mobs” to attack Pakistani cities.

Khan was removed as prime minister in August in a no-confidence vote in parliament. He claimed that it was a soft coup orchestrated by Washington to place a more pliable politician at the helm of the country. Both Shehbaz Sharif and the US government denied the allegations.

The case reviewed by the ECP was related to four gifts from foreign countries, which Khan admitted to selling. In his formal reply to the commission last month, he insisted that he paid their value to the treasury when he received them.

Certain top government officials in Pakistan are legally obliged to declare all gifts but are allowed to keep those below a certain value. More expensive items must go to a special office called Toshakhana, but in some cases, the recipient can buy them back at around half their value.

October 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

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