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Dr. Birx Praises Herself While Revealing Ignorance, Treachery, and Deceit

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | July 16, 2022

The December 2020 resignation of Dr. Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under Trump, revealed predictable hypocrisy. Like so many other government officials around the world, she was caught violating her own stay-at-home order. Therefore she finally left her post following nine months of causing unfathomable amounts of damage to life, liberty, property, and the very idea of hope for the future.

Even if Anthony Fauci had been the front man for the media, it was Birx who was the main influence in the White House behind the nationwide lockdowns that did not stop or control the pathogen but have caused immense suffering and continue to roil and wreck the world. So it was significant that she would not and could not comply with her own dictates, even as her fellow citizens were being hunted down for the same infractions against “public health.”

In the days before Thanksgiving 2020, she had warned Americans to “assume you’re infected” and to restrict gatherings to “your immediate household.” Then she packed her bags and headed to Fenwick Island in Delaware where she met with four generations for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, as if she were free to make normal choices and live a normal life while everyone else had to shelter in place.

The Associated Press was first out with the report on December 20, 2020.

Birx acknowledged in a statement that she went to her Delaware property. She declined to be interviewed.

She insisted the purpose of the roughly 50-hour visit was to deal with the winterization of the property before a potential sale — something she says she previously hadn’t had time to do because of her busy schedule.

“I did not go to Delaware for the purpose of celebrating Thanksgiving,” Birx said in her statement, adding that her family shared a meal together while in Delaware.

Birx said that everyone on her Delaware trip belongs to her “immediate household,” even as she acknowledged they live in two different homes. She initially called the Potomac home a “3 generation household (formerly 4 generations).” White House officials later said it continues to be a four-generation household, a distinction that would include Birx as part of the home.

So it was all a sleight-of-hand: she was staying home; it’s just that she has several homes! This is how the power elite comply, one supposes.

The BBC then quoted her defense, which echo the pain experienced by hundreds of millions:

“My daughter hasn’t left that house in 10 months, my parents have been isolated for 10 months. They’ve become deeply depressed as I’m sure many elderly have as they’ve not been able to see their sons, their granddaughters. My parents have not been able to see their surviving son for over a year. These are all very difficult things.”

Indeed. However, she was the major voice for the better part of 2020 for requiring exactly that. No one should blame her for wanting to get together with family; that she worked so hard for so long to prevent others from doing so is what is at issue.

The press piled on and she announced that she would be leaving her post and not seeking a position at the Biden White House. Trump tweeted that she will be missed. It was the final discrediting – or should have been – of a person that many in the White House and many around the country had come to see as an obvious fanatic and fake, a person whose influence wrecked the liberties and health of an entire country.

It was a fitting end to a catastrophic career. So it would make sense that people might pick up her new book to find out what it was like to go through that kind of media storm, the real reasons for her visit, what it was like to know for sure that she must violate her own rules in order to bring comfort to her family, and the difficult decision she made to throw in the towel knowing that she has compromised the integrity of her entire program.

One slogs through her entire book only to find this incredible fact: she never mentions this. The incident is missing entirely from her book.

Instead at the moment in the narrative at which she would be expected to recount the affair she says almost in passing that “When former vice president Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, I’d set a goal for myself—to hand over responsibility for the pandemic response, with all its many elements, in the best possible place.”

At that point, the book skips immediately to the new year. Done. It’s like Orwell, the story, even though it was reported for days in the world press and became a defining moment in her career, is just wiped out from the history book of her own authorship.

Somehow it makes sense that she would neglect to mention this. Reading her book is a very painful experience (all credit to Michael Senger’s review) simply because it seems to be weaving fables on page after page, strewn with bromides, completely lacking in self awareness, punctuated by revealing comments that make the opposite point of what she is seeking. Reading it is truly a surreal experience, astonishing especially because she is able to maintain her delusionary pose for 525 pages.

Recall that it was she who was tasked – by Anthony Fauci – with doing the really crucial thing of talking Donald Trump into green-lighting the lockdowns that began on March 12, 2020, and continued to their final hard-core deployment on March 16. This was the “15 Days to Flatten the Curve” that turned into two years in many parts of the country.

Her book admits that it was a two-level lie from the beginning.

“We had to make these palatable to the administration by avoiding the obvious appearance of a full Italian lockdown,” she writes. “At the same time, we needed the measures to be effective at slowing the spread, which meant matching as closely as possible what Italy had done—a tall order. We were playing a game of chess in which the success of each move was predicated on the one before it.”

Further:

“At this point, I wasn’t about to use the words lockdown or shutdown. If I had uttered either of those in early March, after being at the White House only one week, the political, nonmedical members of the task force would have dismissed me as too alarmist, too doom-and-gloom, too reliant on feelings and not facts. They would have campaigned to lock me down and shut me up.”

In other words, she wanted to go full CCP just like Italy but didn’t want to say that. Crucially, she knew for sure that two weeks was not the real plan. “I left the rest unstated: that this was just a starting point.”

“No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it,” she admits.

“Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them. However hard it had been to get the fifteen-day shutdown approved, getting another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude. In the meantime, I waited for the blowback, for someone from the economic team to call me to the principal’s office or confront me at a task force meeting. None of this happened.”

It was a solution in search of evidence she did not have. She told Trump that the evidence was there anyway. She actually tricked him into believing that locking down a whole population of people was somehow magically going to make a virus to which everyone would inevitably be exposed somehow vanish as a threat.

Meanwhile, the economy was wrecked domestically and then all over the world, as most governments in the world followed what the US did.

Where did she come up with the idea of lockdowns? By her own report, her only real experience with infectious disease came from her work on AIDS, a very different disease from a respiratory virus that everyone would eventually get but which would only be fatal or even severe for a small cohort, a fact that was known since late January. Still, her experience counted for more than science.

“In any health crisis, it is crucial to work at the personal behavior level,” she says with the presumption that avoidance at all costs was the only goal. “With HIV/AIDS, this meant convincing asymptomatic people to get tested, to seek treatment if they were HIV-positive, and to take preventative measures, including wearing condoms; or to employ other pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) if they were negative.”

She immediately hops to the analogy with Covid. “I knew the government agencies would need to do the same thing to have a similar effect on the spread of this novel coronavirus. The most obvious parallel with the HIV/AIDS example was the message of wearing masks.”

Masks = condoms. Remarkable. This “obvious parallel” remark sums the whole depth of her thinking. Behavior is all that matters. Just stay apart. Cover your mouth. Don’t gather. Don’t travel. Close the schools. Close everything. Whatever happens, don’t get it. Nothing else matters. Keep your immune system as unexposed as possible.

I wish I could say her thought is more complex than that but it is not. This was the basis for lockdowns. For how long? In her mind, it seems like it would be forever. Nowhere in the book does she reveal an exit strategy. Not even vaccines qualify.

From the very beginning, she revealed her epidemiological views. On March 16, 2020 at her press conference with Trump, she summarized her position: “We really want people to be separated at this time.” People? All people? Everywhere? Not one reporter raised a question about this obviously ridiculous and outrageous statement that would essentially destroy life on earth.

But she was serious – seriously deluded not only about how society functions but also about infectious disease of this sort. Only one thing mattered as a metric to her: reducing infections through any means possible, as if she on her own could cobble together a new kind of society in which exposure to air-born pathogens was made illegal.

Here is an example. There was a controversy about how many people should be allowed to gather in one space, as in home, church, store, stadium, or community center. She addresses how she came up with the rules:

The real problem with this fifty-versus-ten distinction, for me, was that it revealed that the CDC simply didn’t believe to the degree that I did that SARS-CoV-2 was being spread through the air silently and undetected from symptomless individuals. The numbers really did matter. As the years since have confirmed, in times of active viral community spread, as many as fifty people gathered together indoors (unmasked at this point, of course) was way too high a number. It increased the chances of someone among that number being infected exponentially. I had settled on ten knowing that even that was too many, but I figured that ten would at least be palatable for most Americans—high enough to allow for most gatherings of immediate family but not enough for large dinner parties and, critically, large weddings, birthday parties, and other mass social events.

She puts a fine point on it: “if I pushed for zero (which was actually what I wanted and what was required), this would have been interpreted as a ‘lockdown’—the perception we were all working so hard to avoid.”

What does it mean for zero people to gather? A suicide cult?

In any case, just like that, from her own thinking and straight to enforcement, birthday parties, sports, weddings, and funerals came to be forbidden.

Here we gain insight into the sheer insanity of her vision. It is nothing short of a marvel that she somehow managed to gain the amount of influence she did.

Notice her above mention of her dogma that asymptomatic spread was the whole key to understanding pandemic. In other words, on her own and without any scientific support, she presumed that Covid was both extremely fatal and had a long latency period. To her way of thinking, this is why the usual tradeoff between severity and prevalence did not matter.

She was somehow certain that the longest estimates of latency were correct: 14 days. This is the reason for the “wait two weeks” obsession. She held onto this dogma throughout, almost like the fictional movie “Contagion” had been her only guide to understanding.

Later in the book, she writes that symptoms mean next to nothing because people can always carry around the virus in their nose without being sick. After all, this is what PCR tests have shown. Instead of seeing that as a failure of PCR, she saw this as a confirmation that everyone is a carrier no matter what and therefore everyone has to lock down because otherwise we’ll deal with a black plague.

Somehow, despite her astonishing lack of scientific curiosity and experience in this area, she gained all influence over the initial Trump administration response. Briefly, she was godlike.

But Trump was not and is not a fool. He must have had some sleepless nights wondering how and why he had approved the destruction of that which he had seen as his greatest achievement. The virus was long here (probably from October 2019), it presented a specific danger to a narrow cohort, but otherwise behaved like a textbook flu. Maybe, he must have wondered, his initial instincts from January and February 2020 were correct all along.

Still, he very reluctantly approved a 30-day extension of lockdowns, entirely on Birx’s urging and with a few other fools standing around. Having given in a second time – still, no one thought to drop an email or make a phonecall for a second opinion! – this seemed to be the turning point. Birx reports that by April 1, 2020, Trump had lost confidence in her. He might have intuited that he had been tricked. He stopped speaking to her.

It would still take another month before he would fully rethink everything that he had approved at her behest.

It made no difference. The bulk of her book is a brag fest about how she kept subverting the White House’s push to open up the economy – that is, allow people to exercise their rights and freedoms. Once Trump turned against her, and eventually found other people to provide good advice like the tremendously brave Scott Atlas – it was five months later when he arrived in an attempt to save the country from disaster – Birx turned to rallying around her inner circle (Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield, Matthew Pottinger, and a few others) plus assembling a realm of protection outside of her that included CNN reporter Sanjay Gupta and, very likely, the virus team at the New York Times (which gives her book a glowing review).

Recall that for the remainder of the year, the White House was urging normalcy while many states kept locking down. It was an incredible confusion. The CDC was all over the map. I gained the distinct impression of two separate regimes in charge: Trump’s vs. the administrative state he could not control. Trump would say one thing on the campaign trail but the regulations and disease panic kept pouring out of his own agencies.

Birx admits that she was a major part of the reason, due to her sneaky alternation of weekly reports to the states.

After the heavily edited documents were returned to me, I’d reinsert what they had objected to, but place it in those different locations. I’d also reorder and restructure the bullet points so the most salient—the points the administration objected to most—no longer fell at the start of the bullet points. I shared these strategies with the three members of the data team also writing these reports. Our Saturday and Sunday report-writing routine soon became: write, submit, revise, hide, resubmit. 

Fortunately, this strategic sleight-of-hand worked. That they never seemed to catch this subterfuge left me to conclude that, either they read the finished reports too quickly or they neglected to do the word search that would have revealed the language to which they objected. In slipping these changes past the gatekeepers and continuing to inform the governors of the need for the big-three mitigations—masks, sentinel testing, and limits on indoor social gatherings—I felt confident I was giving the states permission to escalate public health mitigation with the fall and winter coming.

As another example, once Scott Atlas came to the rescue in August to introduce some good sense into this wacky world, he worked with others to dial back the CDC’s fanatical attachment to universal and constant testing. Atlas knew that “track, trace, and isolate” was both a fantasy and a massive invasion of people’s liberties that would yield no positive public-health outcome. He put together a new recommendation that was only for those who were sick to test – just as one might expect in normal life.

After a week-long media frenzy, the regulations flipped in the other direction.

Birx reveals that it was her doing:

This wasn’t the only bit of subterfuge I had to engage in. Immediately after the Atlas-influenced revised CDC testing guidance went up in late August, I contacted Bob Redfield… Less than a week later, Bob [Redfield] and I had finished our rewrite of the guidance and surreptitiously posted it. We had restored the emphasis on testing to detect areas where silent spread was occurring. It was a risky move, and we hoped everyone in the White House would be too busy campaigning to realize what Bob and I had done. We weren’t being transparent with the powers that be in the White House…

One might ask how the heck she got away with this. She explains:

[T]he guidance gambit was only the tip of the iceberg of my transgressions in my effort to subvert Scott Atlas’s dangerous positions. Ever since Vice President Pence told me to do what I needed to do, I’d engaged in very blunt conversations with the governors. I spoke the truth that some White House senior advisors weren’t willing to acknowledge. Censoring my reports and putting up guidance that negated the known solutions was only going to perpetuate Covid-19’s vicious circle. What I couldn’t sneak past the gatekeepers in my reports, I said in person.

Most of the book consists of her explaining how she headed a kind of shadow White House dedicated to keeping the country in some form of lockdown for as long as possible. In her telling, she was the center of everything, the only person truly correct about all things, given cover by the VP and assisted by a handful of co-conspirators.

Largely missing from the narrative is any discussion of the science gathering outside the bubble she so carefully cultivated. Whereas anyone could have noted the studies pouring out from February onward that threw cold water on her entire paradigm – not to mention 15 years, or make that 50 years, or perhaps 100 years of warnings against such a reaction – from scientists all over the world with vastly more experience and knowledge than she. She cared nothing about it, and evidently still does not.

It’s very clear that Birx had almost no contact with any serious scientist who disputed the draconian response, not even John Iaonnidis who explained as early as March 17, 2020, that this approach was madness. But she didn’t care: she was convinced that she was in the right, or, at least, was acting on behalf of people and interests who would keep her safe from persecution or prosecution.

For those interested, Chapter 8 provides a weird look into her first real scientific challenge: the seroprevalence study by Jayanta Bhattacharya published April 22, 2020. It demonstrated that the infection fatality rate – because infections and recovery was far more prevalent than Birx and Fauci were saying – was more in line with what one might expect from a severe flu but with a much more focused demographic impact. Bhattacharya’s paper revealed that the pathogen eluded all controls and would likely become endemic as every respiratory virus before. She took one look and concluded that he had unnamed “fundamental flaws in logic and methodology” and “damaged the cause of public health at this crucial moment in the pandemic.”

And that’s it: that’s Birx grappling with science. Meanwhile, the article was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology and has over 700 citations. She saw all differences of opinion as an opportunity to go on the attack in order to intensify her cherished commitment to the lockdown paradigm.

Even now, with scientists the world over in outrage, with citizens furious at their governments, with governments falling, with regimes toppling and anger reaching a fevered pitch, while studies pour out by the day showing that lockdowns made no difference and that open societies at least protected their educational systems and economies, she is unmoved. It’s not even clear she is aware.

Birx dismisses all contrary cases such as Sweden: Americans could not take that route because we are too unhealthy. South Dakota: rural and backwater (Birx is still mad that the brave Governor Kristi Noem refused to meet with her). Florida: oddly and without evidence she dismisses that case as a killing field, even though its results were better than California while the population influx to the state sets new records.

Nor is she shaken by the reality that there is not one single country or territory anywhere on the planet earth that benefitted from her approach, not even her beloved China which still pursues a zero-Covid approach. As for New Zealand and Australia: she (probably wisely) doesn’t mention them at all, even though they followed the Birx approach exactly.

The story of the lockdowns is a tale of Biblical proportions, at once evil and desperately sad and tragic, a story of power, scientific failure, intellectual insularity and insanity, outrageous arrogance, feudalistic impulses, mass delusion, plus political treachery and conspiracy. It is real-life horror for the ages, a tale of how the land of the free became a depostic hellscape so quickly and unexpectedly. Birx was at the center of it, confirming all of your worst fears right here in a book anyone can buy. She is so proud of her role that she dares to take all credit, fully convinced that the Trump-hating media will love and protect her perfidies from exposure and condemnation.

There is no getting around Trump’s own culpability here. He never should have let her have her way. Never. It was a case of fallibility matched by ego (he has still not admitted error), but it is a case of enormous betrayal that played off presidential character flaws (like many in his income class, Trump had always been a germaphobe) that ended up wrecking hope and prosperity for billions of people for many years to come.

I’ve tried for two years to put myself in that scene at the White House that day. It’s a hothouse with only trusted souls in small rooms, and the people there in a crisis have the sense that they are running the world. Trump might have drawn on his experience running a casino in Atlantic City. The weather forecasters come to say a hurricane is on the way, so he needs to shut it down. He doesn’t want to but agrees in order to do the right thing.

Was this his thinking? Perhaps. Perhaps too someone told him that China’s President Xi Jinping managed to crush the virus with lockdowns so he can too, just as the WHO said in its February 26 report. It’s also difficult in that environment to avoid the rush of omnipotence, temporarily oblivious to the reality that your decision would affect life from Maine to Florida to California. It was a catastrophic and lawless decision based on pretense and folly.

What followed seems inevitable in retrospect. The economic crisis, inflation, the broken lives, the desperation, the lost rights and lost hopes, and now the growing hunger and demoralization and educational losses and cultural destruction, all of it came in the wake of these fateful days. Every day in this country, even two and a half years later, judges are struggling to regain control and revitalize the Constitution after this disaster.

The plotters usually admit it in the end, taking credit, like criminals who cannot resist returning to the scene of the crime. This is what Dr. Birx has done in her book. But there are clearly limits to her transparency. She never explains the real reason for her resignation – even though it is known the world over – pretending like the entire Thanksgiving fiasco never happened and thus attempting to write it out of the history book that she wrote.

There is so much more to say and I hope this is one review of many because the book is absolutely packed with shocking passages. And yet her 525-page book, now selling at a 50% discount, does not contain a single citation to a single scientific study, paper, monograph, article, or book. It has zero footnotes. It offers no go-to authorities and displays not even a hint of humility that would normally be part of any actual scientific account.

And it nowhere offers an honest reckoning for what her influence over the White House and the states foisted on this country and on the world. As the country masks up yet again for a new variant, and is gradually being groomed for another round of disease panic, she can collect whatever royalties come from sales of her book while working at her new gig, a consultant to a company that makes air purifiers (ActivePure). In this latter role, she makes a greater contribution to public health than anything she did while she held the reins of power.

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. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises.

July 17, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

A blow for Brussels: Hungarians are the most satisfied with their government

Free West Media | July 16, 2022

The EU keeps trying to challenge the democratic legitimacy of the Hungarian government. But there is little reason for that: not only was the Orban government in Budapest able to clinch a convincing victory in the most recent parliamentary elections, but the Hungarian population is also happier with their conservative government than voters in other EU countries.

This has now been revealed by a survey by the Hungarian Nézöpont Institute in twelve Central European countries. Accordingly, people in Hungary and Serbia are the most satisfied with the performance of their government.

The percentage of “satisfied” is 61 percent in Hungary and 60 percent in Serbia. In both countries, dissatisfaction was 33 percent. According to the researchers, the fact that satisfaction is higher than the extent of electoral victories indicates that political stability is perceived as an asset by voters, which is by no means self-evident from the examples of other countries.

Dissatisfaction is at 52 percent in Austria, 54 percent in Montenegro, 59 percent in the Czech Republic, 66 percent in Croatia, 67 percent in Poland, 71 percent in Bulgaria and 72 percent in Slovenia. The least satisfied countries included Romania (73 percent) and the region’s leader, Slovakia (74 percent), where only 24 percent of people were satisfied with the government. The survey took place in May and June.

July 16, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics | , , | Leave a comment

Scotland to scan vehicle license plates to enforce “low emission” zones

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | July 13, 2022

In the cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, and Aberdeen, in Scotland, Low Emission Zones (LEZs) have been launched – however enforcement will not begin until June 1, 2024 for Aberdeen and Edinburgh, June 1 2023 for Glasgow, and May 30 2024 for Dundee.

Transport Scotland said the grace period will allow ample time for compliance. Enforcement of the LEZs will be facilitated by automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems.

Vehicles entering the LEZs will be required to meet the Euro VI standards. Those that do not meet the standards are not allowed in the LEZs.

Penalties for non-compliance will be cumulative. The first incident of non-compliance would result in a £60 fine. Subsequent violations will result in a fine double the previous one up to a maximum of £960. The fine is reduced by half if paid within two weeks. The starting fine is reset if there are no subsequent violations within a 90-day period.

There has been a low emission zone in Glasgow that applies to buses since 2018.

July 16, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , | Leave a comment

Hate “expert” dismisses free speech as a “rallying call for the far-right”

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | July 12, 2022

Following the release of a study on Canadians’ beliefs about free speech, an “expert on hate crime and right-wing extremism” dismissed freedom of speech as a “rallying call for the far-right.”

The study, conducted by the University of Saskatchewan, alleged that there is a direct relationship between someone’s views on free speech and their political leaning. Right-leaning Canadians feel there should be no limit on speech, even when the speech could be considered offensive.

Jason Disano, the research director, told CTV News that the purpose of the survey, which involved just 1,000 respondents from all over the country, was to get an idea of where Canadians stood on the issue of free speech “given the prominent role that the phrase ‘freedom’ has been playing in the current Conservative Party of Canada leadership campaign.”

80% of all respondents said that there is, or somewhat is, freedom of speech in Canada. A large percentage of respondents also said that online platforms have a responsibility to censor hate speech and the spread of “misinformation.”

“But when you break that down into one’s political leanings, that’s when you really see differences in Canadian views and opinions in the extent to which that freedom of speech should be [limited],” said Disano.

About 25% of right-leaning respondents said that there is limited to no free speech in Canada. Only 3% of left-leaning respondents gave the same response.

Director of Center for Hate, Bias, and Extremism at Ontario Tech University Barbara Perry, who is an “expert on hate crime and right-wing extremism” chimed in and said that free speech is now “a rallying call for the far-right,” especially for the alt-right.

“If we look at the narrative over the past few years, there has been an emphasis on cancel culture. Free speech has become a rallying call for the far-right. It’s always been there, but I think it was really amplified by the emergence of the alt-right in particular,” she said.

July 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

UK Government considered tearing ‘Covid positive’ people from their homes

By Michael Curzon | Bournbrook | July 12, 2022

‘Boris’ Johnson loyalist Nadine Dorries appears to have admitted that the Government, which now prides itself on having imposed restrictions more lightly than others, considered tearing “mothers and fathers and families and children” from their homes if they ‘tested positive’ for Covid during lockdowns to be sent to isolation centres.

A health minister at the time, Ms Dorries was approached by former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and told to adopt this ‘zero Covid’ approach, she told GB News.

The now-Culture Secretary told Dan Wootton, who decided not to dig deeper into the claims:

“[Jeremy] said ‘you’ve got to speak to Matt [Hancock]’. It was at the time Nightingale hospitals were being built. ‘You’ve got to tell him that you don’t put sick people in the hospitals, you follow a “zero Covid” policy… When someone tests positive, you take them from their home and you take them to an isolation centre and you leave them there… That’s the only way you can beat Covid.’”

Ms Dorries said she responded:

“‘The British public will not stand for mothers and fathers and families and children being removed from their family and their home and put in isolation.’ He said: ‘Who said they won’t?’ I said: ‘The behaviour and insights team who I’ve discussed this with. They won’t wear it.’” (My emphasis – video below)

This is quite revealing. Anyone with an ounce of humanity would have rejected this outright, whether they thought the public would accept it or not.

Remember, also, that those officials in SAGE believed the British people wouldn’t accept being ‘locked down’ at all until Italy made it clear that they would.

Professor Neil Ferguson told The Times in December 2020:

“[China] is a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”

So has Ms Dorries revealed that the only reason we weren’t pulled away from our families after seeing two red lines was because other Europeans weren’t first?

July 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Judge says it’s legally okay to deny unvaccinated an organ transplant

By Thomas Lambert | The Counter Signal | July 13, 2022

Justice Paul Belzil just decided that it was legally okay for doctors to remove Canadians from organ transplant waitlists if they’re unvaccinated.

As reported by the Westphalian Times’s Marie Oakes, Belzil filed his decision on Tuesday in a case concerning Annette Lewis, who was essentially given the choice of ‘comply or die’ after doctors changed the rules surrounding organ transplant waitlists to require being fully vaccinated.

According to Lewis, a doctor “told me if I did not take the COVID-19 vaccine, I would not get the transplant, and if I did not get the transplant, I would die.”

She added, “I ought to have the choice about what goes into my body, and a life-saving treatment cannot be denied to me because I chose not to take an experimental treatment for a condition — COVID-19 — which I do not have and which I may never have.”

But judge Belzil disagreed, arguing that “her beliefs and desire to protect her bodily integrity [do not] entitle her to impact the rights of other patients or the integrity of the [transplant program] generally.”

He ultimately ruled that the charter doesn’t apply to clinical treatment decisions and that Lewis’s rights, therefore, had not been violated.

Lewis isn’t alone in her struggle either. As previously reported by The Counter Signal, hospitals and health networks across the country have chosen to deny the unvaccinated organ transplants even when prospective patients are healthy and have found a donor.

In October 2021, Toronto’s University Health Network (UHN) (the largest health research organization in Canada and Canada’s largest transplant centre) adopted a policy requiring all organ transplant patients to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 before doctors operate on them.

The decision immediately affected roughly 4,300 Canadians awaiting life-saving care, some of whom have likely passed away by now.

July 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Hong Kong unveils Covid quarantine bracelets

Samizdat | July 13, 2022

Hong Kong is set to introduce electronic tracking bracelets for citizens who decide to quarantine at home after testing positive for Covid-19, the health chief has announced. Violators of the isolation rules face hefty fines and possibly even jail time.

The territory’s secretary for health, Lo Chung-mau, announced the move during a Monday press briefing, saying the bracelets are meant to stop infected people from spreading the illness further and will operate on the ‘Leave Home Safe’ app rolled out last year.

“We have to make sure that home isolation is more precise while being humane,” Lo said, adding that the trackers will be introduced on Friday.

Breaching Hong Kong’s quarantine order could result in fines up to $3,200 and a maximum of six months behind bars. Individuals who are able to isolate at home must do so for two weeks, though will be allowed to leave if they test negative for two days in a row and have their first pair of vaccine doses.

While the territory previously required overseas arrivals to use bracelets with unique QR codes to check in and account for their movements, the gadgets were later replaced with genuine tracking tech. The system is set to be expanded, though the government has not said what type of bracelet it will use for the latest initiative.

The health secretary also noted that Hong Kong will implement a color-coded system similar to the one in place in mainland China, which labels different levels of infection risk as yellow or red. Those with the red designation will face heavy restrictions on their movement, including outright bans on entering public venues, while yellow entails lesser limits.

However, the city’s recently inaugurated chief executive, John Lee, has since stressed that the traffic light system would only apply to “a specific and small number of people,” but nonetheless argued that Hong Kong needs “some identification method” to distinguish citizens with active infections from those quarantining as a precaution.

Local officials continue to warn that Hong Kong’s Covid-19 outbreak remains “very serious,” urging residents to minimize travel and observe social distancing rules, which were just extended for another two weeks on Tuesday.

The Department of Health said it recorded 2,558 new local coronavirus cases on Tuesday, as well as another 211 infections among travelers from abroad. It did not offer a daily update for fatalities, but noted the territory had tallied 9,420 deaths in total throughout the pandemic, most of them occurring this year.

July 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Search of Sputnik Estonia Office Was Illegal, Local Court Rules

Samizdat – 13.07.2022

Sputnik International’s Estonia-based sister portal Sputnik Meedia was forced to shut down in March amid unprecedented pressure from Estonian authorities and banks, and a wave of personal threats against employees. But the outlet’s persecution by local authorities goes all the way back to 2019.

An Estonian court has ruled authorities’ April search of the former editorial office of Sputnik Meedia and former Sputnik Meedia editor-in-chief Elena Cherysheva’s home illegal, Cherysheva has informed Sputnik.

Cherysheva, who was detained on April 6 for alleged “crimes against peace” and purported “violations of international sanctions,” had her house searched. Her husband was taken to the former office of Sputnik Meedia, and it too was searched. After 16 hours of rummaging, authorities sent Cherysheva to a detention center, but was later released on bail. The ex-Sputnik Meedia employee said the searches were authorized by Estonian State Prosecutor’s Office lead prosecutor Taavi Pern.

“On April 8, the Prosecutor’s Office sent a search warrant and additional documents to the preliminary investigation judge in Harju County Court requesting that the search warrant be recognized as admissible and justified. The judge did not do so. As the court clarified, a person whose activities are related to the processing of information for journalistic purposes can be searched only on the basis of a ruling by a preliminary investigation judge or a court decision,” Cherysheva explained.

She added that the Prosecutor’s Office filed a complaint with the Tallinn District Court challenging the Harju County Court’s decision, but the higher court upheld the ruling.
Cherysheva further revealed the Harju County Court had also ruled in her favor to return her part of the personal property which authorities seized in April, after the State Prosecutor’s Office refused to do so.

“In its decision, the Harju County Court emphasized that given the decision of the Tallinn District Court of May 10 on the groundlessness and illegality of the search, it is not clear to the court on what basis the investigator continues to withhold funds found and seized during the search,” she said.

Sputnik’s Estonian sister agency has been hounded by the Baltic country’s authorities for years. Sputnik Meedia itself was created in early 2020 by former employees of Sputnik Estonia, which was forced to shutter its doors amid threats of criminal charges against its journalists by police, and after Estonian banks suspended Sputnik-related accounts in late 2019.

Sputnik Meedia was forced to terminate its operations in early March of this year, with banks freezing salaries and closing the media outlet’s accounts amid alleged suspicions of “money laundering, terrorist financing and the illegal sale of alcohol.” On top of that, the agency’s editor-in-chief and staff received regular threats against their life and safety.

July 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

After extending the vaccine passport program, Canada threatens fines for those that don’t use it

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | July 12, 2022

After extending the use of the controversial vaccine passport program, the Canadian government has threatened those who do not have a vaccine passport, which reveals someone’s vaccination status for travel, with fines.

Though the government suspended a Covid travel vaccine mandate last month, it has insisted on keeping the more controversial ArriveCAN in use.

International travelers and returning Canadians have to use the ArriveCAN app to submit their contact and travel information and their COVID vaccination status.

The ArriveCAN website states that all travelers will still be “required to submit their mandatory information in ArriveCAN (free mobile app or website) before their arrival in Canada.”

“If you don’t submit your travel information and proof of vaccination using ArriveCAN you could be fined $5,000.”

“All travelers still need a valid #ArriveCAN receipt within 72 hours before their arrival to Canada and/or before boarding a plane or cruise ship destined for Canada, regardless of vaccination status,” tweeted the Public Health Agency of Canada in the last week.

“Failure to complete your ArriveCAN submission can impact your eligibility exemptions, may result in fines, and creates longer wait times for all arriving at the border.”

The Conservative Party has called for the removal of the app, which has been blamed for delays at Canadian airports and airlines.

“Canadians have dealt with enough chaos at the airports. The Liberals need to listen to the science and end the ArriveCan app,” CPC’s interim leader Candice Bergen wrote on Twitter on Monday.

Despite the complaints from users and the delays, the Canadian government extended the use of ArriveCAN until at least September 30.

July 12, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

The Administrative State Moves To Show Who’s Boss On Energy Policy

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian |  July 08, 2022

Last Thursday, June 30, the Supreme Court issued its decision in West Virginia v. EPA, holding that, absent a further explicit statute from the Congress, the EPA did not have the authority to orchestrate its planned fundamental restructuring of the electric power generation sector of the economy. More generally, the Supreme Court stated that in cases involving “major questions,” including regulations that affect large portions of the economy, the government must demonstrate “clear congressional authorization” to support a sweeping effort to regulate.

Do you think that such a Supreme Court decision might cause the various regulatory bureaucracies to slow down and reconsider a little before plowing ahead with other dubious plans for fundamental economic restructurings? That’s not how these bureaucracies work. And such is most particularly the case with regard to regulators of the energy sector, sometimes known as “climate change” arena, where the bureaucrats are burning with a righteous religious fervor that they believe entitles them to cast the evil sinners into the fires of hell.

And thus, contemporaneous with the Supreme Court’s decision, several agencies promptly doubled down on efforts to strangle the oil and gas industries with regulatory restrictions, essentially daring the courts or anyone else to stop them. Thousands of pages of statutes give them thousands of arguments to claim they have the “clear congressional authorization,” any one of which arguments might stick. They are now out to show who’s boss.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan wasted no time in getting a statement out on the afternoon of June 30. Excerpt:

[W]e are committed to using the full scope of EPA’s authorities to protect communities and reduce the pollution that is driving climate change. . . . EPA will move forward with lawfully setting and implementing environmental standards that meet our obligation to protect all people and all communities from environmental harm.

In other words, we will just have to find other ways to implement the restrictions that we want to implement. The very next day, July 1, David Blackmon at Forbes reported that “EPA Targets Permian Basin, Widening Biden’s War On Oil And Gas.” The Permian Basin is currently the most productive oil and gas region in the United States, providing about 40% of the oil production and 15% of the gas of the entire country. The Permian Basin is also the site of about 40% of the nation’s active drilling rigs. And so it seems that EPA is gearing up to declare the Permian Basin a so-called “non-attainment area” with respect to ozone. Blackmon:

[T]he Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced [this week that] it may soon issue a ruling declaring that vast parts of the Permian Basin are in “non-attainment” status under the agency’s ozone regulations. If such a declaration is made, it will constitute a direct governmental assault on what is by far America’s most active and productive oil-producing region and its second most-productive natural gas area.

What would be the effect of such a declaration on current and future U.S. domestic oil and gas production? Blackmon again:

Placing the Permian Basin in non-attainment status would force a significant reduction in the region’s rig count, severely limiting the domestic industry’s efforts to increase U.S. oil production at a time when the global oil market is already severely under-supplied.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott promptly called on the Biden Administration to back off, saying that an EPA “non-attainment declaration “could interfere in the production of oil in Texas which could lead to skyrocketing prices at the pump by reducing production, increase the cost of that production, or do both.” But Blackmon notes that the plan comes from an office headed by a Biden-appointed anti-fossil-fuel activist, and thus is likely a core element of the administration’s program:

Mr. Biden appointed Joe Goffman, another of the many anti-fossil fuel activists that now hold senior posts at his various agencies, to head up EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation on an acting basis. That appointment might have been made with this specific policy action in mind.

Meanwhile, over at the Interior Department, July 1 was also the day for issuance of a statutorily-mandated five-year off-shore oil and gas leasing plan. Nicholas Groom at Reuters has a summary here. The bottom line is, we’re going to completely shut down leasing off both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, but maybe we’ll allow a little in the Gulf of Mexico or the Cook Inlet (Alaska). The number of auctions over the five-year period will be in the range of “zero to eleven,” and supposedly we’ll take public input as to which way to go. But Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in a statement left no doubt as to where she wants and expects this to come out:

“From Day One, President Biden and I have made clear our commitment to transition to a clean energy economy,” Haaland said in a statement. “Today, we put forward an opportunity for the American people to consider and provide input on the future of offshore oil and gas leasing. The time for the public to weigh in on our future is now.”

There is a 90 day period for public comment. You can be sure that environmental activist groups will flood the zone with thousands of comments to support the approach of the “zero” option of ceasing all further off-shore leases.

Other agencies were eerily silent in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s June 30 decision. Notable among those were the SEC and the Federal Reserve, both of which have recently ventured into adding “climate change” to their missions with only the most questionable of statutory support. Neither has given any indication of an intention to slow down.

And then on July 2, President Biden issued his now-famous tweet blaming the rising price of gas at the pump on gas station owners:

My message to the companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump is simple: this is a time of war and global peril. Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product. And do it now.

A bureaucracy-wide campaign is ongoing under this guy’s direction to suppress oil and gas production in any way they can think of, and yet he has the gall to blame high prices on “companies running gas stations,” the majority of which are small independent businesses. At this point Biden has become malicious.

July 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , | Leave a comment

WHO Wants To Run the World?

By Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, Michael Baker | Brownstone Institute | July 11, 2022

In Geneva in late May at the 75th meeting of the WHO’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly (WHA), amendments to its International Health Regulations (IHRs) were debated and voted upon. If passed, they would grant the WHO the right to exert unconscionable pressure on countries to accept the WHO’s authority and health policy actions if the WHO decides that there is a public health threat that might spread beyond a country’s borders.

As Ramesh Thakur, the second man at the UN for years, noted, the amendments would mean “the rise of an international bureaucracy whose defining purpose, existence, powers and budgets will depend on outbreaks of pandemics, the more the better.”

This is the first clear instance of a globalist coup attempt. It would subvert national sovereignty worldwide by putting real power into the hands of an international group of bureaucrats. It has long been suspected that the authoritarian elites arisen during covid times would try to strengthen their positions by undermining nation states, and the this 75th jamboree is the first solid evidence of this being true.

What an opportunity then to see who is in the conspiring club. Who drafted the amendments? What was in them? Which individuals supported them or spoke out against them?

WHO were the conspirators?

The amendments on the table at the May WHA meeting had been transmitted to the WHO by the US Department of Health and Human Services on January 18, circulated by WHO to its member states (‘States Parties’) on January 20 and formally introduced to the WHA on April 12.

The proposals, according to an announcement on January 26, were co-sponsored by 19 countries plus the European Union. Even if some co-sponsors had little direct involvement in drafting them, they all would have approved in principle the overarching goal of tightening up the WHO’s authority over member states in the face of a public health event.

Loyce Pace, the HHS’s Assistant Secretary for Global Affairs – the leading US official nominally responsible for the proposed amendments – arrived at the Biden administration fresh from a stint as executive director of an advocacy organization called the Global Health Council.

That council receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its members include Eli Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, Abbott Labs, and Johnson & Johnson. You get the idea. Via one of the foxes-turned-chicken-guard, it appears the HHS ‘worked closely’ on these amendments with large pharmaceutical companies, who will be chomping at the bit for a more proactive (read: profitable) response to any public health emergency, real or imagined.

So the conspiring club consists primarily of the US government and its Western allies in lockstep with Big Pharma, and they are looking to undermine both the sovereignty of their own governments and that of other countries, presumably with the idea that the Western elites would do the running.

What was in them? A blizzard of acronyms and euphemisms

To understand what the US proposed at the WHA, we need first to understand how things have worked in the WHO to this point.

The IHRs in their current form have been in force as international law since June 2007. Among other things, they impose requirements on countries to detect, report and respond to ‘public health events of international concern,’ or PHEICs. The WHO Director-General consults with the state where a possible public health event has occurred, and within 48 hours they are meant to come to a mutual agreement on whether or not it actually is a PHEIC, whether or not it needs to be announced to the world as such, and what counter-measures, if any, should be taken. It’s essentially an early-warning system on major health crises. This is a good thing if it’s run by people you can trust and if it has checks and balances to rein in expansionary tendencies.

The proposed amendments would greatly strengthen the power of the WHO relative to this baseline, in a number of ways.

First, they lower the threshold for the WHO to declare a public health emergency by empowering its Regional Directors to declare a ‘public health event of regional concern’ (PHERC, italics ours) and for the WHO to put out a new thing called an ‘intermediate public health alert.’

Second, they permit the WHO to consider allegations about a public health event from non-official sources, meaning sources other than the government of the state concerned, and allow that government only 24 hours to confirm the allegations and a further 24 hours to accept the WHO’s offer of ‘collaboration.’

Collaboration is essentially a euphemism for on-site assessment by teams of WHO investigators, and concomitant pressure at the whim of WHO personnel to enact potentially far-reaching measures such as lockdowns, movement restrictions, school closures, consumption of medicines, administration of vaccines and any or all of the other social, economic, and health paraphernalia that we have come to associate with the covid circus.

Should the state’s government acceptance of the WHO’s ‘offer’ not be forthcoming, the WHO is empowered to disclose the information it has to the other 194 WHO countries, while continuing to pressure the state to yield to the WHO’s invitation to ‘collaborate.’ A non-collaborating country would risk becoming a pariah.

Third, the proposal includes a new Chapter IV, which would establish a ‘Compliance Committee’ consisting of six government-appointed experts from each WHO region tasked with permanently nosing around to ensure the member states are complying with IHR regulations.

There are more crossings-out of the existing IHR language and new language added in, but the flavour of what the US-led alliance is shooting for is a WHO that can unilaterally decide whether there is a problem and what to do about it, and can isolate countries that disagree.

Compliant WHO member states could act as a supporting cast in the isolation effort, through the distribution of their own health budgets and their ‘health-related’ policies, which would include travel and trade restrictions. The WHO would become a kind of command-and-control center for globalist agendas, pushing the produce of (Western) Big Pharma.

Why and how would this work?

We learned during covid times why it would make sense that the US and its allies are insisting on these amendments.

Lowering the bar for declaring a global (or regional) public health threat triggers a huge opportunity for Western pharmaceutical companies. As legal experts have observed: “WHO emergency declarations can trigger the fast-track development and subsequent global distribution and administration of unlicensed investigational diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines.

This is done via the WHO’s Emergency Use Listing Procedure (EULP). The introduction of an ‘intermediate public health alert’ in particular will also further incentivise the pharmaceutical industry’s move to activate domestic fast-track emergency trial protocols as well as for advance purchase, production and stockpile agreements with governments before the existence of a concrete health threat to the world’s population has been detected, as is already the case under WHO’s EULP via the procedures developed for a ‘pre-public health emergency phase’.”

You can bet that the WHO ‘expert teams’ sent in to make on-the-ground assessments, under the banner of ‘collaboration’ with the host country experiencing the health event, will be chock-a-block with operatives from the CDC and who knows what other Western agencies, all poking around potentially sensitive facilities that a host government might justifiably claim a sovereign right to keep to itself. Likewise with the ‘Compliance Committee’ proposed by the US under the new Chapter IV of the IHRs: its government-appointed members have an open-ended brief, enshrined in international law, to be busybodies.

In layman’s terms, the WHO would be turned into an international thug, with its member states offered the role of backyard gang members.

As a bonus for Western elites, the proposals are a sneaky form of rewriting history. By cementing authority within an international organisation to determine the existence of public health crises and direct potentially draconian emergency responses, Western governments would get to enshrine and legitimise their own extreme responses to the covid outbreak, as we have pointed out previously. Their backsides would thereby be given some protection from legal challenges.

The refusniks: Developing countries

The proposals were pushed primarily by Western countries: the US was joined by Australia, the UK and the EU in arguing for passage. The resistance was led by developing countries who saw it as a colonialist ambush in which their ability to set policy and respond to health threats in a manner commensurate with their domestic situations would be overridden.

Brazil reportedly went so far as to threaten to withdraw from the WHO, and the African group of almost 50 countries, along with India, argued that the amendments were being rushed through without adequate consultation. Russia, China and Iran also objected.

Failure on the first try, but the US and its allies in the West will get more shots to push it through.

How do we expect them to do this? Well, when a proposal gets bogged down inside a giant bureaucratic machine like the WHO, the inevitable response is to set up committees to work in the background and circle back with a new set of proposals to be presented at a future meeting. True to form, a ‘working group’ and ‘expert committee’ are being assembled to accept member state proposals on IHR reform by the end of September this year. These will be ‘sifted through’ and reports will be prepared for review by the WHO’s executive board in January next year. The objective is to have a fresh set of proposals on the table when the WHA convenes for the 77th time in 2024.

Not all was lost

Salvaging something from the fact that the WHA failed to get a consensus around its biggest agenda item, the US and its allies got a small victory on the point of when they can try again – though in their desperation they needed to violate the IHRs’ own rules to accomplish it. Article 55 of the IHRs states unambiguously that a four-month notice period is required for any amendments.

In this instance, revised amendments were presented on May 24, the same day that the first lot were rejected. These were discussed, further amended on May 27 and then adopted on the same day. The approved amendments halve the two-year period for any (further) approved amendments to the IHRs to take effect. (The IHRs that came into force in 2007 were agreed to in 2005 – but under the new resolution, anything agreed to in 2024 would come into effect in 2025 rather than 2026.)

Yet, what was achieved in terms of fast-tracking the force of new amendments was lost in slow-tracking their implementation. Nations would have up to 12 months – double the previous suggestion of six months – to implement any IHR amendments that newly enter into force of law.

State of play

Where is all this going?

If the WHO takes the reins on decisions about what constitutes a health crisis, and can pressure every country into a one-size-fits-all set of responses that it, the WHO, also determines, that’s bad enough. But what about if its invitation to ‘collaborate’ with countries is backed up with teeth, such as sanctions against those who demur? And what about if it then broadens the definition of ‘public health’ by, for example, declaring that climate change falls under that definition? Or racism? Or discrimination against LBTQIA+ people? The possibilities thereby opened up for running the world are endless.

A global ‘health’ empire would bring huge harms to humanity, but a lot of power and money is pushing for it. Don’t think it can’t happen.

Paul Frijters is a Professor of Wellbeing Economics at the London School of Economics: from 2016 through November 2019 at the Center for Economic Performance, thereafter at the Department of Social Policy

July 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Canada’s Heritage Minister panel: unregulated speech “erodes the foundations of democracy”

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | July 11, 2022

According to the Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety appointed by Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, “misleading political communications” should be regulated because unregulated political disinformation and discussion “erodes the foundations of democracy.”

Rodriguez has insisted multiple times that censorship bill, Bill C-11, also known as the Online Streaming Act, would not regulate user-generated content.

“We made it very clear in the Online Streaming Act that this does not apply to what individual Canadians and creators post online,” said Rodriguez. “No users, no online creators will be regulated. Only the companies themselves will have new responsibilities.”

However, that claim has been contradicted by the Canada Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and the Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety that he appointed. Online platforms would have to regulate based on the speech of its users.

“[Section] 4.2 allows the CRTC to prescribe by regulation user uploaded content subject to very explicit criteria. That is also in the Act,” said chair of CRTC Ian Scott in June 2022.

The same comments have been previously repeated severally by the Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety, whose role is to propose measures of regulating online content that it considers harmful, including, but not limited to “propaganda, false advertising and misleading political communications.”

Content that would be regulated includes Facebook posts, private Twitter DMs, Amazon listings, video games, and even listings on Airbnb.

“Many experts mentioned there is justification to look more widely at some interactive services like Airbnb and gaming platforms,” members of the group proposed in one meeting.

“Many experts supported the notion that private communications should be included under the scope of the legislative framework. Private messaging services should also be regulated.”

The advisory group also proposed the regulation of legal content, noting that legal but harmful content “poses unique challenges” and “it is difficult to reconcile the issue of disinformation with the freedom of expression.”

The Online Streaming Act passed in the House last month and is currently in the Senate.

July 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment