Ottawa police promise “unprecedented” response to Canada Day demonstrations
By Keean Bexte | The Counter Signal | June 17, 2022
With several freedom demonstrations planned for this year’s Canada Day in Ottawa, Ottawa police are gearing up and say they will have an “unprecedented” response.
According to the Canadian Press, “An Ottawa police officer says this Canada Day will be “unprecedented and unique” with a never-before-seen security posture as the main events take place off Parliament Hill, and protests are planned throughout the day.”
“Police are aware of the demonstrations and are “planning accordingly,” said the officer.”
Additionally, Canadian Heritage says they’re working with police, having held a technical briefing today for their Canada Day plans. Journalists were only allowed to attend the briefing on the condition that the names of officials involved not be disclosed.
Ottawa police have further stated that they stand for Canadians’ right to protest but will “not allow for the conditions that led to the unlawful protests in February to reoccur.”
Canada Heritage previously announced that they would not allow Canadians to participate in the annual Canada Day celebration at Parliament Hill due to construction after two years of cancelling it due to COVID.
They added that the Canada Day party, which usually sees thousands flock to Ottawa, is being moved to the LeBreton Flats approximately 1.5km Westwards.
As it stands, there are several protests against the remaining COVID mandates planned for Canada Day, which are expected to be attended by many Freedom Convoy protesters from February.
Additionally, this is the same day CAF veteran James Topp will complete his cross-country march to the capital city.
Journalist Andy Lee has also stated she plans to camp on Parliament Hill despite the ban and has given police a heads up.
Fauci Finally Gets Covid: The Significance
BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | JUNE 17, 2022
What precisely happened in the month of February 2020, when Anthony Fauci and cohorts were plotting their pandemic response, is still a mystery. Jeremy Farrar, of the Wellcome Trust, in his book on the topic says that during these weeks, they went to burner phones, clandestine video calls, and warned family members that something terrible could happen to them.
Their top concern was the possibility of the lab leak from Wuhan. They needed to get to the bottom of it and prepare the spin. We know that the initial draft of the academic article denying the lab leak came out February 4, 2020, later published in the Lancet on March 16. But what happened in these three weeks – apart from the mid-February NIH junket to China to learn how to control a virus – remains foggy.
But this much we do know: by March 2, 2020, Fauci had his game plan lined up. Michael Gerson of the Washington Post wrote him on that day and asked about the purpose of social distancing. This was weeks before most Americans had even heard this euphemism for forced human separation. Was the idea to wait for a vaccine, Gerson asked?
Fauci answered in a private email as follows:
“Social distancing is not really geared to wait for a vaccine. The major point is to prevent easy spread of infections in schools (closing them), crowded events such as theaters, stadiums (cancel events), work places (do teleworking where possible… The goal of social distancing is to prevent a single person who is infected to readily spread to several others, which is facilitated by close contact in crowds. Close proximity of people will keep the R0 higher than 1 and even as high as 2 to 3. If we can get the R0 to less than 1, the epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.”
There we have it: the Fauci theory of how we get rid of the virus. We don’t need a vaccine. Just close things. Stay away from people. Don’t gather. Shut schools. Lock businesses and churches. All people stay away from all people. The R-naught will drop.
Then the virus will… and this is where the theory gets murky. Does it just vanish? Get bored? Get frustrated, give up, and vanish into the ether? And how long does this new social system of “social distancing” have to last? Years? Forever? And what happens once people start acting normally again?
This is very clearly crank science, one that confuses ex post data collection with causation itself and also seems to deny the workability of the human immune system. That such things would be written by a person in Fauci’s position is truly mind boggling. But the press went along, and still does after all this time.
What Fauci was imagining – and very few people picked up on it at the time – was the construction of a new social system. It was not just about this virus. It was about all pathogens and the whole functioning of society. He believed – or he decided to come to believe – that a re-engineering of the social order could successfully beat back common pathogens and bring about universal health.
He finally revealed this in his August 15, 2020, article for Cell that received very little attention at all. He was on his own attempting to implement an entire new social system based on a new ideology.
Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues. In such a transformation we will need to prioritize changes in those human behaviors that constitute risks for the emergence of infectious diseases. Chief among them are reducing crowding at home, work, and in public places as well as minimizing environmental perturbations such as deforestation, intense urbanization, and intensive animal farming.
This article reveals the most important point. The pandemic response was not just about this one pathogen. It was about what amounts to a political, economic, social, and cultural revolution.
It’s not socialism or capitalism. It’s something else entirely, something very strange, like a Rousseauian technocracy, simultaneously primitive and high tech, as managed by a scientific elite, an untested dystopia worthy of the most terrifying literature in the English language.
No one has voted for such a thing. It is something Fauci and his friends dreamed up on their own and deployed all their enormous power to enact just as a test, until it fell apart. The US and many parts of the world were in their grip for the better part of a year and two years in some places.
This is a scandal for the ages, one that far outstrips issues of tax-funded gain-of-function research, as important as that is. It’s even more important than reports that Fauci has been earning personal royalty payments from pharmaceutical companies that receive grants that he has personally approved. The real problem comes down to his power and the ability of elected representatives and courts to control him for many decades.
Regardless of Fauci’s millenarian vision, the course of the virus took the usual path but for one major exception: the waves of infection occurred based on class rank in society. There was a political hierarchy of infection that started with the working classes, moved to the bourgeoisie, hit the professional classes, then high-end journalists, and finally, at the very end came for the elite ruling class itself – Trudeau, Psaki, Ardern, Gates, and finally Fauci – regardless of their multiple vaccines.
And here is why Fauci’s covid infection is significant, 28 months after the first lockdowns. It’s a sign and symbol that his entire theory of virus control was wrong. He got his way with policy and it did not work. The virus finally landed on him, as if to reenact Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional story of Prince Prospero in his castle that he believed would protect him.
And as a result of his exposure, Fauci will surely (unless his repeated injection of the same vaccine harmed the operation of his immune system) gain the natural immunity that is already possessed by 78 percent of kids and likely two thirds of the general population.
It should also alert us to three points of moral urgency:
- We need to replace Fauci-style feudalism with a new theory of how to reconcile the freely functioning society with the presence of infectious disease, so that neither he nor people in his pay or sway can attempt this again.
- We need to act to disable the unmitigated power of administrative-state bureaucrats to seize control of the machinery of government.
- We need a new system to decentralize science away from privileged elites so that they can never again have monopoly control over what is considered to be the science much less posses the power to censor dissent.
These are the lessons, at least the start of them. This virus is either endemic or at least almost so, but we are left with astonishing social, cultural, and economic destruction from Fauci’s attempt to implement an experimental plan on the whole population not only in the US but all over the world.
We will suffer for many years or generations from it. And yet, in the end, infection is individual and probably unavoidable for most people. The immune system adapts. That’s how we evolved to coexist. To pretend otherwise is the very essence of denying the science.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
Our Letter Putting Colleges on Notice
Presidents, senior leadership and trustees can’t say they didn’t know.
No College Mandates | June 12, 2022
No College Mandates has launched a major letter campaign to put colleges on notice that continued Covid-19 vaccination mandates put their students, their reputations, and potentially their endowments at risk. The purpose of the letter is to make these policy makers aware of new information they likely did not know existed and to prompt them to further investigate.
To date, more than 60 college presidents have received this letter via certified mail. Across those 60 colleges, approximately 1400 individuals were copied. Many more college letters are in process. By the time we are finished, thousands of college administrators and trustees will be notified.
No College Mandates is so proud to have the following organizations as signatories on our letter: Health Freedom Defense Fund, The Mendenhall Law Group, Health Freedom Counsel, and The Unity Project.
The letter is below. If you are interested in working on this effort, email us at info@nocollegemandates.com. We’ll set you up to fight this fight with us and make change.
To College and University Presidents, Senior Leadership and Trustees:
We are writing to notify you of recently available information prompting concern that fraud has been committed by Pfizer and by the FDA in the development and continued distribution of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine. Given that your institution mandates Covid-19 vaccination for students as a condition of enrollment, it is incumbent upon you to be fully informed about the safety and efficacy of these vaccines and the claims of fraud that call both into question.
If fraud or willful misconduct is proven, the manufacturers and those involved in the distribution or mandating of the vaccines will lose immunity from liability granted to them under the existing EUA and the PREP act.
We urge you to further investigate. We believe that once you do, you will see how continued Covid-19 vaccine mandates jeopardize the safety of your students and the reputation of your institution.
The new information consists of Pfizer’s biological product file used to obtain FDA approval of Comirnaty and data from the insurance industry showing a huge rise in excess deaths in Millennial and Gen X populations concurrent with the implementation of vaccine approvals and mandates. The excess death data is raising concerns in the insurance industry and on Wall Street. We are also including timely news about product safety, given the FDA’s recent restriction of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine due to blood clotting concerns.
Following is a brief overview of each category and starting points for further inquiry. We are standing by to provide you with additional information or to connect you to scientists, lawyers and investors who are reviewing the current and evolving data.
Pfizer Biological Product File – background and highlights:
The Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT) is a nonprofit group made up of public health professionals, medical professionals, scientists, and journalists. The group exists solely to obtain and disseminate the data relied upon by the FDA to license Covid-19 vaccines. Four days after the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine was approved for children over 16, this group submitted a Freedom of Information Act for all data within Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine biological product file. When the FDA asked for 75 years to release that data, PHMPT sued to obtain it and won. Beginning in March 2022, the public has access to Pfizer’s clinical trial data, which is being downloaded in batches monthly. You can find the document releases to-date here.
Thousands of volunteers including scientists, statisticians, doctors, and lawyers continue to examine these downloads and publish their findings. For ready reference, below are just a few of the findings of greatest concern that call into question the safety and efficacy of the Pfizer product and support a thesis of fraud:
- Pfizer failed the all-cause mortality endpoint in their unprecedentedly short 28-day clinical trial. In brief, more people died in the vaccinated group than in the placebo group. This was known yet has still not been widely disclosed to the public.
- The CDC talking point that vaccines stopped transmission was based on no data, as this metric was not evaluated during Pfizer’s clinical trials. Pfizer and the FDA knew this yet did not disclose it to the public.
- Pfizer and the FDA knew as early as November 2020 that Pfizer’s clinical trials showed:
- Vaccine failure
- Waning vaccine efficacy
A baseline condition for granting a product Emergency Use Authorization is that it must be safe and effective. The data showed that the products are not effective. Yet, based on FDA approval, the CDC promoted them as such. From the initial roll-out in December 2020 through April 1, 2021, the public health messaging was that if you received the shot, you could not get infected and could not transmit the virus. The Pfizer documents are proof that they and the FDA colluded to lie to the American people and the CDC created false public health narratives based on these lies.
- Pfizer and the FDA most likely knew in May 2021 that the vaccines caused heart damage in teenagers based on a paper that was already in peer review at that time. The FDA approved the product for teenagers in June 2021 yet did not disclose this risk factor to consumers until August. During that time, all those who received this product did not have informed consent. Parents were not made aware of this known potential risk to their children.
- Brook Jackson, a regional director employed by Pfizer sub-contractor Ventavia Research Group, came forward in September 2020 with documented evidence that the company falsified data, unblinded patients and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial conducted by Ventavia. Her findings call into question the integrity of not only Ventavia’s results but of all of the results from Pfizer’s other trial sites and the entire clinical trial. Further information is available in The British Medical Journal.
Excess death data and the insurance industry:
In December 2021, Midwest insurer One America CEO Scott Davidson disclosed a 40% increase in excess deaths over pre-pandemic levels in the working-age (18-64) population in the third quarter. Putting the number into context Davidson said, “The data is consistent across every player in this business . . . Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be a 10 percent increase over pre-pandemic. So 40 percent is just unheard of”. Other major insurers have subsequently reported increases in death claims ranging from 21–57 % over expected levels. Most of these deaths are not Covid-19 deaths. Long-term disability claims are also seeing an uptick.
These reports prompted a former institutional investor who was a #1 ranked Wall Street sell-side insurance analyst to confirm the numbers using CDC reported data. His findings, independently confirmed by others, show the spikes in excess deaths are related to the timing of vaccine approvals and mandates. This data is prompting concern at insurance and reinsurance companies, who will bear the financial brunt of this unexpected and unprecedented rise in mortality. It is raising questions about the safety of the Covid-19 vaccines in the investment community and beyond.
Of related interest is Pfizer’s amendment in February of its business risk disclosures in its Q4 2021 earnings report. The changes from the Q3 2021 report language center around disclosures of unfavorable safety data and “further information regarding the quality of pre-clinical, clinical or safety data, including by audit or inspection”.
It is likely that neither Pfizer nor the FDA anticipated the court-compelled release of their clinical trial and post-marketing surveillance data and the subsequent public scrutiny of it.
Additional product safety concerns:
The FDA announced on May 5 that they were restricting use of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine due to the risk of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), a syndrome of rare and potentially life-threatening blood clots in combination with low levels of blood platelets. The decision to restrict was based on 60 reported cases and 9 fatalities. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines also have serious risks and fatalities associated with them including but not limited to blood clots and myocarditis in college-aged populations. These are shown in Pfizer’s post-marketing surveillance data and in the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Recording System (VAERS). As of April 29, 2022, there were approximately 1.2 million reports of adverse events following Covid-19 vaccination including more than 18,056 reports of deaths following the Pfizer vaccine, and 7,223 following the Moderna vaccine. Logic demands that Pfizer and Moderna products be restricted immediately as well. Why have they not been? Further, a recent Danish review of all three products in preprint in The Lancet showed that the J&J reduced all-cause mortality but that Pfizer and Moderna did not and may have increased it. Given all this, it is reasonable to think that Pfizer and Moderna products could be restricted or discontinued very soon due to safety concerns. This might well trigger a much higher level of scrutiny of the now-publicly available Pfizer data and the actions of our public health institutions. How would such a situation impact institutions such as yours that continue to mandate the products while knowing such risks exist?
One last thing to consider is the nature and associated secrecy of the contracts that Pfizer forced upon governments as conditions of sale and distribution of their Covid-19 vaccines in their respective countries. A review of some of these contracts can be found here. Terms included such things as the waiving of sovereign immunity, countries assuming full liability in the event that Pfizer was shown to have used another entity’s intellectual property, and that Pfizer be held harmless in the event of injury or death from the products. Why would a company require such terms if it knew its conduct and its products were sound?
We sincerely hope this information has been useful and that you will investigate this matter fully. We urge you to end your vaccine mandates to protect your institution’s students, reputation, and, in the event that fraud is proven, potentially your endowment.
Yours truly,
No College Mandates is a coalition of thousands of concerned students, parents, professors, staff, and community members working to end college Covid-19 vaccination mandates and restore medical choice on college campuses. Contact us at info@nocollegemandates.com
Health Freedom Defense Fund is a 501(c)(3) non-profit which seeks to protect and advance health freedom, educate Americans on informed consent, advocate for human rights and bodily autonomy for all people, and legally challenge unethical mandates, laws, and policies when necessary. (HealthFreedomDefense.org)
The Mendenhall Law Group is a mission-oriented practice focused on holding government, educational institutions and corporations accountable. The group is keenly interested in medical freedom and provides legal support for those concerned about Covid-19 mandates and policies. Mendenhall Law has offices in Ohio and Massachusetts and a national network of affiliated practices. (WarnerMendenhall.com)
Health Freedom Counsel believes in the right to medical choice and provides clients with the resources to stand up to mandates that infringe upon medical freedom. (HealthFreedomCounsel.com)
The Unity Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting the Covid-19 Vaccine Mandate for students, kindergarten through 12th grade. We have enlisted globally esteemed physicians, scientists and business leaders and more than 150 grassroots groups and concerned individuals focused on preserving medical freedom.
Ontario ends daily COVID reports
By Thomas Lambert | The Counter Signal | June 16, 2022
Perhaps a sign of the times, Ontario has finally taken a step forward by ending its schizophrenic daily reports on COVID.
Indeed, it wasn’t so long ago that Premier Doug Ford was making daily appearances to warn those in the province of the dangers of COVID and to push getting vaccinated. However, just weeks after the Freedom Convoy protest began its cross-country trip to Ottawa, Ford made noticeable changes to his rhetoric, saying it was time to get back to normal.
However, while it’s undoubtedly a good sign the Ford government doesn’t feel the need to provide daily reports on COVID anymore, the decision isn’t without caveat, as the province will continue providing COVID data weekly.
“As of June 16, all COVID-19 datasets will be updated weekly on Thursdays by 2 pm,” the Ontario Data Catalogue reads.
This policy change comes only five days after Ontario ended nearly all remaining mask requirements, including those that applied to public transit.
Besides returning to normal, another motivation for moving away from daily COVID reports on vaccination status, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths may be due to what recent data has shown.
As previously reported by The Counter Signal, the per capita case rate, hospitalization rate, and death rate by vaccination status all show that the vaccine makes almost no difference.
Moreover, those who have received a booster dose appear to be the worst off, having the highest rates of infection, hospitalization, and death per capita of any vaccination group, both in the province and Canada.
This reality completely shatters the ongoing mainstream narrative regarding the necessity of continued vaccination, with natural immunity appearing to be more than adequate — if not better — at preventing transmission and severe illness.
Either way, Ontarians and Canadians more generally might not be done with COVID quite yet, as both the federal and provincial governments have indicated that they’re more than willing to bring restrictions and mandates back in the Fall during flu season.
WHO Pandemic Treaty a “Power Grab at behest of Big Pharma and Big Donors”: Former UN Asst. Secretary-General
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JUNE 16, 2022
Former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Thakur has warned in the Spectator of the coming massive expansion of the international pandemic bureaucracy and the powers of the WHO to press countries towards authoritarian public health measures. The WHO’s track record during COVID-19 hardly merits reward with further powers, he says.
Health includes mental health and wellbeing and is highly dependent on a robust economy, yet the WHO-backed package of measures to fight Covid has been damaging to health, children’s immunisation programs in developing countries, mental health, food security, economies, poverty reduction, social and educational wellbeing of peoples. Their worst effects were grievous assaults on human rights, civil liberties, individual autonomy and bodily integrity. To make it worse, in promoting these policies the WHO violated, without providing any justification beyond China’s example, (1) the guidance from its own report in October 2019 that summarised a century’s worth of worldwide experience and science; and (2) its own constitution which defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. The vaccine push has similarly ignored accumulating safety signals about the scale of adverse reactions, on the one hand, and rapidly dwindling efficacy after successive doses, on the other.
Euro-U.S. efforts, backed by Australia, to amend legally binding international health regulations and adopt a new pandemic convention would confer extraordinary powers on the WHO to declare public health emergencies of international/regional concern and command governments to implement their recommendations. WHO inspectors would have the right to enter countries without consent and check compliance with their directives. They would lock in the lockdowns-vaccines narrative and preempt rigorous independent retrospective reviews of their costs and efficacy. The ‘reforms’ amount to a WHO power grab at the behest of Big Pharma and Big Donors. Whether approved as two separate instruments or folded into one overarching new treaty, the changed architecture will greatly strengthen the WHO’s core capabilities on public health surveillance, monitoring, reporting, notification, verification and response. The rush to amend the existing international health regulations encountered significant pushback last month from developing countries, China and Russia but will come up again for discussion and approval shortly. The new treaty under negotiation will be presented to the World Health Assembly in 2024.
The proposed reforms to international health agreements will only make things worse, he says.
On January 24th, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said an urgent priority was to “strengthen WHO as the leading and directing authority on global health”, for: “We are one world, we have one health, we are one WHO.” On April 12th, he said the Covid crisis had “exposed serious gaps in the global health security architecture”; the new treaty would be “a generational agreement” and “a gamechanger” for global health security. If adopted, it will consolidate the gains of those who have benefitted from COVID-19, concentrating private wealth, increasing national debts and decelerating poverty reduction; expand the international health bureaucracy under the WHO; shift the centre of gravity from common endemic diseases to relatively rare pandemic outbreaks; create a self-perpetuating global biopharmaceutical complex; shift the locus of health policy authority, decision-making and resources from the state to an enlarged corps of international technocrats, creating and empowering an international analogue of the administrative state that has already thinned national democracies. It will create a perverse incentive: the rise of an international bureaucracy whose defining purpose, existence, powers and budgets will depend on outbreaks of pandemics, the more the better.
Google, Twitter, Meta, TikTok and more just signed the EU’s “anti-disinformation” code
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | June 16, 2022
Big Tech companies have signed a new version of the European Union’s “anti-disinformation” code. Some of the companies that signed include Google, Twitter, Meta, TikTok, and Twitch – but also smaller players such as Vimeo and Clubhouse.
There are 34 signatories in total:
- Adobe
- Avaaz
- Clubhouse
- Crisp Thinking
- Demagog
- DOT Europe
- European Association of Communication Agencies (EACA)
- Faktograf
- Globsec
- Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB Europe
- Kinzen
- Kreativitet & Kommunikation
- Logically
- Maldita.es
- MediaMath
- Meta
- Microsoft
- Neeva
- Newsback
- NewsGuard
- PagellaPoltica
- Reporters without Borders (RSF)
- Seznam
- The Bright App
- The GARM Initiative
- TikTok
- Twitch
- Vimeo
- VOST Europe
- WhoTargetsMe
- World Federation of Advertisers (WFA)
Apple declined to sign.
The “code of practice on disinformation,” will require online platforms to show how they are tackling “harmful content.”
It will also require platforms to fight “harmful misinformation” by forming partnerships with fact-checkers and developing tools. They will be forced to include “indicators of trustworthiness” on information verified independently on hot-button issues like COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Perhaps the most notable requirement is providing their efforts to tackle harmful content and disinformation on a country-by-country basis. The move was opposed by online platforms, but national regulators demanded that they need more specific data to better address the spread of disinformation.
The EU’s vice president for values and transparency Věra Jourová, who is in charge of the code, said “to respond to disinformation effectively, there is a need for the country- and language-specific data. We know disinformation is different in every country, and the big platforms will now have to provide meaningful data that would allow to understand better the situation on the country level.”
“Russia’s actions have informed to shape the anti-disinformation code,” she said. “Once the code is operational, we will be better prepared to address disinformation, also coming from Russia.”
The new code also requires online platforms to provide other data, including the AI systems deployed to tackle “disinformation,” number of bots removed, and the number of content moderators in each country.
The code applies immediately but allows for a six-month implementation period for platforms to adhere to the strict rules.
Senators want DHS chief Mayorkas to answer for “misleading” testimony about disinformation board
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | June 15, 2022
In a letter to Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Gary Peters, senate Republicans are demanding that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas answer for his testimony about the paused Disinformation Governance Board that contradicts newly-discovered documents.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
According to the letter, Senators Josh Hawley and Chuck Grassley obtained documents from a whistleblower with detailed information about the disinformation board that contradicts what Mayorkas testified.
According to the documents, the disinformation board was created to to monitor online speech about “conspiracy theories about the validity of elections” and “disinformation related to the origins of effects of COVID-19 vaccines or the efficacy of masks.” It also said that the controversial board wanted to partner with Twitter to suppress certain speech and wanted to meet with Twitter executives to determine how this could be done.
Under oath on May 4, Mayorkas said that the disinformation board had not yet started working. Speaking to media outlets, Mayorkas said that the board would focus on cartels and foreign adversaries and would not spy on Americans, something that was contradicted by the leaked documents.
The letter demands that Mayorkas testify again to clear the contradictions between his previous testimony, his public statements, and the documents provided by the whistleblower.
The letter states: “We are deeply concerned that documents recently obtained by Senators Josh Hawley and Chuck Grassley contradict the Secretary’s testimony and public statements about the Board. The American public deserves transparency and honest answers to important questions about the true nature and purpose of the Disinformation Governance Board and it is clear that Secretary Mayorkas has not provided them – to the public or this Committee.
“Therefore, we request you hold a hearing with Secretary Mayorkas and join us in insisting that all records related to the Board be provided to the Committee prior to the hearing.”
‘Health misinformation’: the latest addition to the Online Safety Bill
Labour and the SNP are planning on a new amendment
By Mark Johnson | UnHerd | June 14, 2022
Civil libertarians often talk about a phenomenon known as the “ratcheting effect”. This is the idea that when it comes to the erosion of our liberties, the trajectory tends to head in one direction; in favour of state power at the expense of our rights and freedoms.
It is the reason why we draw red lines that should not be crossed. If you breach the principle of non-interference in people’s rights with a relatively minor incursion, what is to stop that minor incursion from escalating to something more significant in the future?
Yet with the Online Safety Bill, a censor’s charter, which has been so long in the making, the ratcheting effect is happening in real time. Last week, SNP and Labour politicians on the Committee currently scrutinising the Bill laid an amendment to include “health-related misinformation and disinformation’ as a recognised form of lawful but ‘harmful’” speech. This threatens to open a Pandora’s box of censorship.
The terms ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ have grown to become part of the political lexicon in recent years. The concepts of being incorrect or misleading have been left behind for alternative terms, with loaded connotations. Yet they are malleable terms, often deployed in ways to discredit or silence another individual’s argument in the course of public debate.
Stoked by these fears, we have seen Big Tech increasingly taking on the role of online speech police in recent years. During the coronavirus era, this reached new extremes. At the beginning of the pandemic, Facebook took the step of removing content which promoted face masks as a tool to combat the spread of Covid-19.
Yet within a short space of time, the medical consensus on masks changed. But rather than acknowledge that it was wrong, Facebook flipped its position and censored in the other direction. A high-profile example saw Facebook label, discredit and suppress an article in The Spectator, written by the Oxford academic Carl Heneghan, disputing the efficacy of masks. What grounds or competency Silicon Valley’s fact-checkers had to overrule reasoned arguments by a Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine remains to be seen.
This approach is a direct threat to the epistemic process, so central to the free and open development of knowledge and ideas in liberal democracies. The fact that not even academics can escape this kind of truth arbitration speaks volumes.
Proponents of the Online Safety Bill perform mental gymnastics in trying to defend the legislation by arguing that hard and soft censorship is already happening online. They fail to provide how an approach which sees the state support these systems and even designate some categories of free speech as ‘harmful’, will do anything but compound this issue.
All of this highlights a problem that the Government are yet to acknowledge; this Bill could end up strangling our rights and freedoms online. The misinformation amendment is unlikely to carry much traction for now, but it is a sign of things to come. We should all be concerned.
Missouri and Louisiana file motion against Biden for suppressing free speech on social media
Samizdat – 15.06.2022
WASHINGTON – Two US states have filed legal motions against President Joe Biden for allegedly colluding with giant social media corporations to suppress free speech, the Missouri Attorney General’s Office said in a press release.
“Today, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry filed a motion for preliminary injunction in their lawsuit against President Biden and other top-ranking government officials for allegedly colluding with social media giants such as Meta [banned in Russia as an extremist organization], Twitter, and YouTube to censor and suppress free speech,” the release said on Tuesday.
The motion argues that the US government-led online censorship affects enormous segments of the population and that it encompasses social-media accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, including many thousands of followers in Missouri and Louisiana, the release said.
“We may have forced the Biden Administration to forego its Disinformation Governance Board, but there is still a very real threat to Missourians and Americans’ right to free speech. The federal government must be halted from silencing any more Americans, and this motion for preliminary injunction intends to do just that,” Schmitt said in the release.
The motion also asserts that the censorship affects speech on matters of enormous public concern, including “unquestionably truthful speech,” such as speech relating to COVID-19 policies and speech about election security and election integrity, the release said.
HOLD THE LINE
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Red Flagged Nation: Gun Confiscation Laws Put a Target on the Back of Every American
By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | June 14, 2022
What we do not need is yet another pretext by which government officials can violate the Fourth Amendment at will under the guise of public health and safety.
Indeed, at a time when red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others) are gaining traction as a legislative means by which to allow police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats, it wouldn’t take much for police to be given the green light to enter a home without a warrant in order to seize lawfully-possessed firearms based on concerns that the guns might pose a danger.
Frankly, a person wouldn’t even need to own a gun to be subjected to such a home invasion.
SWAT teams have crashed through doors on lesser pretexts based on false information, mistaken identities and wrong addresses.
Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have adopted laws allowing the police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats. If Congress succeeds in passing the Federal Extreme Risk Protection Order, which would nationalize red flag laws, that number will grow.
As The Washington Post reports, these red flag gun laws “allow a family member, roommate, beau, law enforcement officer or any type of medical professional to file a petition [with a court] asking that a person’s home be temporarily cleared of firearms. It doesn’t require a mental-health diagnosis or an arrest.”
With these red flag gun laws, the stated intention is to disarm individuals who are potential threats… to “stop dangerous people before they act.”
Where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.
Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.
This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.
This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.
For instance, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.
Let that sink in a moment.
Now consider the ramifications of giving police that kind of authority: to preemptively raid homes in order to neutralize a potential threat.
It’s a powder keg waiting for a lit match.
Under these red flag laws, what happened to Duncan Lemp—who was gunned down in his bedroom during an early morning, no-knock SWAT team raid on his family’s home—could very well happen to more people.
At 4:30 a.m. on March 12, 2020, a masked SWAT team—deployed to execute a “high risk” search warrant for unauthorized firearms—stormed the suburban house where 21-year-old Duncan, a software engineer and Second Amendment advocate, lived with his parents and 19-year-old brother.
The entire household, including Lemp and his girlfriend, was reportedly asleep when the SWAT team directed flash bang grenades and gunfire through Lemp’s bedroom window.
Lemp was killed and his girlfriend injured.
No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, had a criminal record.
No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, was considered an “imminent threat” to law enforcement or the public, at least not according to the search warrant.
So what was so urgent that militarized police felt compelled to employ battlefield tactics in the pre-dawn hours of a day when most people are asleep in bed, not to mention stuck at home as part of a nationwide lockdown?
According to police, they were tipped off that Lemp was in possession of “firearms.”
Thus, rather than approaching the house by the front door at a reasonable hour in order to investigate this complaint—which is what the Fourth Amendment requires—police instead strapped on their guns, loaded up their flash bang grenades and carried out a no-knock raid on the household.
According to the county report, the no-knock raid was justified “due to Lemp being ‘anti-government,’ ‘anti-police,’ currently in possession of body armor, and an active member of the Three Percenters,” a far-right paramilitary group that discussed government resistance.
This is what happens when you adopt red flag gun laws, painting anyone who might be in possession of a gun—legal or otherwise—as a threat that must be neutralized.
Therein lies the danger of these red flag laws, specifically, and pre-crime laws such as these generally where the burden of proof is reversed and you are guilty before you are given any chance to prove you are innocent.
Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
Combine red flag laws with the government’s surveillance networks and its plan to establish an agency that will take the lead in identifying and targeting “signs” of mental illness or violent inclinations among the populace by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home, and you’ll understand why some might view gun control legislation with trepidation.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.
The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands.
No matter how well-intentioned, red flag gun laws will put a target on the back of every American whether or not they own a weapon.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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