Sen. Marco Rubio equates boycott of Israel with “un-American activity”
By Kathryn Shihadah | If Americans Knew | October 6, 2021
US Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) has introduced a bill, the Mind Your Own Business Act (S.2829), that would hold corporate officers personally liable when actions they take on behalf of the corporation are considered political, “un-American,” or in some other way not in the best interests of the shareholders.
Among other things, Mind Your Own Business would hold corporate officers personally liable for the act of “boycotting a state” – undermining their freedom to boycott Israel over its endemic human rights abuses. This is in spite of the fact that Americans in general are very supportive of boycotts: only about 1 in 5 agree with the anti-BDS legislation of the type that Rubio and others (including many Democrats) have been trying to pass. The BDS movement (boycott, divest, and sanctions) is based on “the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.”
The practice of boycott in the 1990s was instrumental in the toppling of apartheid in South Africa, and is a growing movement today. Numerous experts have documented Israel’s profoundly discriminatory system, which amounts to apartheid.
The BDS Movement has declared that “states have a legal responsibility to end complicity and dismantle apartheid” in Israel; all over the US, universities, local governments, and unions are considering BDS actions.
Israeli impunity
Interestingly, while laws in 32 states forbid the boycotting of Israeli companies, these same states are in favor of boycotting under different circumstances.
That is, businesses (and in some cases, individuals) that participate in boycotts of Israel are often themselves boycotted. The difference is simply that in the first case, the action is taken on moral grounds (for example, in protest of Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians); the second is merely punishment for the entity’s exercise of free speech.
Last month, several states boycotted Unilever, parent company of Ben & Jerry’s, when the ice cream company decided to stop selling its products inside illegal Israeli settlements.
Human rights organizations argue that penalizing those that oppose Israel’s policies has enabled Israel to continue violating international law. Human Rights Watch maintains that “States should encourage, not sanction, companies that avoid contributing to rights abuses.”
Supporting Israel is damaging to Americans on many levels.
In addition to providing arms to a country that abuses human rights (and that in turns provides arms to other human rights abusers), the US has lost respect globally for its complicity; foreign agents are controlling much of our country’s foreign policy; pro-Israel donors hold many politicians hostage; and American freedoms are being eroded in the name of protecting Israel from criticism. Israel also often spies on Americans and steals our technology.
Congressional impunity
Sen. Rubio himself, like many other senators, refuses to take responsibility for his actions in Congress that are not in the best interest of his constituents: his support for Israel (and Israel partisans’ support for him) is well-known; Rubio has prioritized Israel over his own country, and worked against American free speech.
Only a quarter of Americans consider themselves Zionists, yet the vast majority of our Congress members vote pro-Israel.
In addition, Americans are increasingly in favor of limiting and/or conditioning aid to Israel, while the majority of our legislators are willing to send Israel $10 million a day (and much more besides) with no strings attached – even though we have laws that prohibit such aid to countries that commit large-scale human rights abuses.
This would suggest that perhaps these Congress members – not corporations wanting to boycott Israel – may be acting in an un-American way, not according our best interests.
Our Congress is failing its shareholders.
The real story behind Facebook’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | October 6, 2021
Facebook suffered a massive outage on Monday. At the same time a high profile “whistleblower” has come forward to dish the FB dirt. These two things have combined to create a perfect storm of narrative portraying Mark Zuckerberg’s company as a monster in desperate need of slaying by some deft government intervention.
But to what extent is that story contrived? Is Facebook willingly going along with it? And what does it mean for the rest of the internet?
WHAT HAPPENED?
For several hours on Monday afternoon Facebook – and its subsidiaries Instagram and Whatsapp – were completely offline. Rumours circulated that large portions of the social media giant had been totally deleted. Others suggested it was a cyber attack.
Facebook itself insists there was no attack, and that it was purely an engineering error, but of course no tech company would ever admit to being vulnerable to a hack.
There’s always the possibility the whole event was staged of course. Either way, the timing is very suspicious.
WHY DO YOU SAY THAT?
For weeks an anonymous “whistleblower” has been “leaking” documents to the Wall Street Journal allegedly showing Facebook is utilising highly unethical business practices.
The leaker of the so-called “Facebook Files” finally revealed her true identity as Frances Haugen, a data scientist, in an interview with 60 Minutes this past Sunday.
The massive Facebook outage then happened on Monday, with Ms Haugen’s scheduled testimony in front of Congress happening the following morning on Tuesday.
If it is all a coincidence, then Facebook has had a very unfortunate week.
SO WHAT DID THE “WHISTLEBLOWER” SAY?
What didn’t she say? In her hours of testimony on Tuesday, she tore the company apart. Alleging everything from being a danger to children’s mental health to outright breaking the law.
In her 60 Minutes interview, she told the reporter “again and again Facebook has chosen profits over safety”.
Drug cartels, hate speech, genocide, anorexia… Haugen laid the blame for all of that and more at Facebook’s feet.
FACEBOOK IS A MONSTER… SO ISN’T THIS A GOOD THING?
No, not at all.
For one thing, we should always be sceptical in the face of any narrative so meticulously planned and rolled out.
An ‘anonymous whistleblower’ coming forward with a team of lawyers, and coordinated interviews on primetime TV just before her testimony to congress looks a lot too much like a glitzy PR campaign or a promo for a new movie.
For another, consider what Facebook is actually being accused of. It’s not mass surveillance, censorship or abuse of its monopoly that’s making the headlines, but rather being too lax in what it allows people to say and see.
Facebook “enables hate speech”, “can’t effectively police vaccine misinformation” and is “damaging democracy”.
These are all mainstream talking points designed to stifle debate and control the conversation.
Yes, many people hate Facebook (with good reason), but that hatred is now being deliberately cultivated so that people will cheer on its break up or regulation, without realising that other, smaller companies would be hit much harder by any new “standard rules for the internet”.
Like so many other testimonies before congress in the past, the entire event looks fake and probably is. A stage-managed exercise involving some “expert witness” telling a bunch of politicians exactly what they want to hear, so they can go ahead push the legislation they were going to push anyway.
It’s all leading up to loud bipartisan calls for “regulation”, and that’s not a good thing.
WHY NOT?
Let me answer that question with a couple of my own. Do think the political conversation on Facebook is too controlled? And do you think that will get better if it becomes subject to governmental oversight?
Of course not, “regulating” facebook will take what small amount of freedom still remains on the platform, and crush it entirely. And it won’t just be about Facebook, it’s not even really about Facebook now, it’s just that they’re being used as a stalking horse to come after the smaller, less controlled platforms.
There’s a good chance Facebook is actively playing heel here, and are willingly going along with this narrative. Just check what their spokesperson Lena Pietsch said on Tuesday [our emphasis]:
Today, a Senate Commerce subcommittee held a hearing with a former product manager at Facebook who worked for the company for less than two years, had no direct reports, never attended a decision-point meeting with C-level executives — and testified more than six times to not working on the subject matter in question. We don’t agree with her characterization of the many issues she testified about. Despite all this, we agree on one thing; it’s time to begin to create standard rules for the internet. It’s been 25 years since the rules for the internet have been updated, and instead of expecting the industry to make societal decisions that belong to legislators, it is time for Congress to act.”
Despite discrediting and disagreeing with absolutely everything the “whistleblower” said, they still concede Congress needs “to act” and produce “standard rules for the internet”. Why would they do that?
Facebook is clearly falling in line to bring in stricter regulation of the web.
OK, SO WHAT WILL THIS NEW “REGULATION” LOOK LIKE?
Well, that’s a harder question to answer. Having just been presented with the problem, the media are still very much in the reaction phase of the narrative (see this whiny specimen in the Guardian ) – “solutions” are being talked about but only in very vague terms.
An article on MSNBC headlines “Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are back up. But their outage is an opportunity.“ and echoes Ms Pietsch almost word for word: Regulators should do better, but Congress should also act. It ends with a link to an article from this May in Politico calling for a “public internet”.
A “public internet” means, essentially, breaking down the big tech firms and publicly funding “community guided” platforms that focus on more local concerns.
Or, more cynically, compartmentalizing the internet to limit the field of potential communication.
The supposed aim of a “public internet” would be to “bring us back together” and remove “hate”, but that will mean stopping people from disagreeing with the consensus.
The “public internet” might be the long-term goal, but it’s still only a foetus of an idea.
For the more immediate “regulation” ideas, we can turn back to Ms Haugen, who after so keenly defining the problem, enthusiastically recommended a list of solutions.
These include, but are not limited to, a new “independent” overseer for Facebook (perhaps a new government agency), and the “reform” of Article 230.
Article 230 is the law that says social media platforms have no liability for the content their users create, “reforming it” could open up social media companies to a lot of lawsuits.
Interestingly, some policy organizations have argued that “stripping this law away could entrench reigning tech giants because it would make it harder for smaller social media platforms with fewer content moderation resources to operate without facing costly lawsuits.”
So at least one of Ms Haugen’s proposed solutions would potentially benefit Facebook, whilst almost certainly crippling their smaller competitors.
Funny that.
CONCLUSION
Since its inception the internet has been a digital wild west and, despite numerous attempts to seize control of it, it remains a place of relative freedom.
Facebook, Google, Amazon and their ilk are corporate monsters, no question, but we still need to be careful when applauding calls for their regulation or break up. Especially if the companies themselves seem to actively cooperate.
Much of the time any mooted “regulation” is not aimed at the corporate giants, who have the connections and resources to survive it, but their smaller competitors. In that way it both secures the monopoly of a handful of gigantic businesses, and further centralises the power of the state.
Remember that corporate giants and the Deep State are not in opposition to one another, they work together in mutual self-interest.
Facebook might be notionally in the media crosshairs, but that is a pantomime. The real targets are alternate platforms like Telegram, Gab and Parler, or as yet unborn independent outlets.
More broadly, it’s part of an ongoing campaign against the ability of millions of people to freely communicate with each other, because that is a genuine threat to both the power of the state the and greed of corporate monoliths.
So, when big government and big tech fight, refuse to pick a side and don’t believe a word of it.
They like each other really, but they hate you.
Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer its Power to Censor
By Glenn Greenwald | October 5, 2021
Much is revealed by who is bestowed hero status by the corporate media. This week’s anointed avatar of stunning courage is Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager being widely hailed as a “whistleblower” for providing internal corporate documents to the Wall Street Journal relating to the various harms which Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp) are allegedly causing.
The social media giant hurts America and the world, this narrative maintains, by permitting misinformation to spread (presumably more so than cable outlets and mainstream newspapers do virtually every week); fostering body image neurosis in young girls through Instagram (presumably more so than fashion magazines, Hollywood and the music industry do with their glorification of young and perfectly-sculpted bodies); promoting polarizing political content in order to keep the citizenry enraged, balkanized and resentful and therefore more eager to stay engaged (presumably in contrast to corporate media outlets, which would never do such a thing); and, worst of all, by failing to sufficiently censor political content that contradicts liberal orthodoxies and diverges from decreed liberal Truth. On Tuesday, Haugen’s star turn took her to Washington, where she spent the day testifying before the Senate about Facebook’s dangerous refusal to censor even more content and ban even more users than they already do.
There is no doubt, at least to me, that Facebook and Google are both grave menaces. Through consolidation, mergers and purchases of any potential competitors, their power far exceeds what is compatible with a healthy democracy. A bipartisan consensus has emerged on the House Antitrust Committee that these two corporate giants — along with Amazon and Apple — are all classic monopolies in violation of long-standing but rarely enforced antitrust laws. Their control over multiple huge platforms that they purchased enables them to punish and even destroy competitors, as we saw when Apple, Google and Amazon united to remove Parler from the internet forty-eight hours after leading Democrats demanded that action, right as Parler became the most-downloaded app in the country, or as Google suppresses Rumble videos in its dominant search feature as punishment for competing with Google’s YouTube platform. Facebook and Twitter both suppressed reporting on the authentic documents about Joe Biden’s business activities reported by The New York Post just weeks before the 2020 election. These social media giants also united to effectively remove the sitting elected President of the United States from the internet, prompting grave warnings from leaders across the democratic world about how anti-democratic their consolidated censorship power has become.
But none of the swooning over this new Facebook heroine nor any of the other media assaults on Facebook have anything remotely to do with a concern over those genuine dangers. Congress has taken no steps to curb the influence of these Silicon Valley giants because Facebook and Google drown the establishment wings of both parties with enormous amounts of cash and pay well-connected lobbyists who are friends and former colleagues of key lawmakers to use their D.C. influence to block reform. With the exception of a few stalwarts, neither party’s ruling wing really has any objection to this monopolistic power as long as it is exercised to advance their own interests.
And that is Facebook’s only real political problem: not that they are too powerful but that they are not using that power to censor enough content from the internet that offends the sensibilities and beliefs of Democratic Party leaders and their liberal followers, who now control the White House, the entire executive branch and both houses of Congress. Haugen herself, now guided by long-time Obama operative Bill Burton, has made explicitly clear that her grievance with her former employer is its refusal to censor more of what she regards as “hate, violence and misinformation.” In a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday night, Haugen summarized her complaint about CEO Mark Zuckerberg this way: he “has allowed choices to be made where the side effects of those choices are that hateful and polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach.” Haugen, gushed The New York Times’ censorship-desperate tech unit as she testified on Tuesday, is “calling for regulation of the technology and business model that amplifies hate and she’s not shy about comparing Facebook to tobacco.”
Agitating for more online censorship has been a leading priority for the Democratic Party ever since they blamed social media platforms (along with WikiLeaks, Russia, Jill Stein, James Comey, The New York Times, and Bernie Bros) for the 2016 defeat of the rightful heir to the White House throne, Hillary Clinton. And this craving for censorship has been elevated into an even more urgent priority for their corporate media allies, due to the same belief that Facebook helped elect Trump but also because free speech on social media prevents them from maintaining a stranglehold on the flow of information by allowing ordinary, uncredentialed serfs to challenge, question and dispute their decrees or build a large audience that they cannot control. Destroying alternatives to their failing platforms is thus a means of self-preservation: realizing that they cannot convince audiences to trust their work or pay attention to it, they seek instead to create captive audiences by destroying or at least controlling any competitors to their pieties.
As I have been reporting for more than a year, Democrats do not make any secret of their intent to co-opt Silicon Valley power to police political discourse and silence their enemies. Congressional Democrats have summoned the CEO’s of Google, Facebook and Twitter four times in the last year to demand they censor more political speech. At the last Congressional inquisition in March, one Democrat after the next explicitly threatened the companies with legal and regulatory reprisals if they did not immediately start censoring more.
A Pew survey from August shows that Democrats now overwhelmingly support internet censorship not only by tech giants but also by the government which their party now controls. In the name of “restricting misinformation,” more than 3/4 of Democrats want tech companies “to restrict false info online, even if it limits freedom of information,” and just under 2/3 of Democrats want the U.S. Government to control that flow of information over the internet:
The prevailing pro-censorship mindset of the Democratic Party is reflected not only by that definitive polling data but also by the increasingly brash and explicit statements of their leaders. At the end of 2020, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), newly elected after young leftist activists worked tirelessly on his behalf to fend off a primary challenge from the more centrist Rep. Joseph Kennedy III (D-MA), told Facebook’s Zuckerberg exactly what the Democratic Party wanted. In sum, they demand more censorship:
This, and this alone, is the sole reason why there is so much adoration being constructed around the cult of this new disgruntled Facebook employee. What she provides, above all else, is a telegenic and seemingly informed “insider” face to tell Americans that Facebook is destroying their country and their world by allowing too much content to go uncensored, by permitting too many conversations among ordinary people that are, in the immortal worlds of the NYT‘s tech reporter Taylor Lorenz, “unfettered.”
When Facebook, Google, Twitter and other Silicon Valley social media companies were created, they did not set out to become the nation’s discourse police. Indeed, they affirmatively wanted not to do that. Their desire to avoid that role was due in part to the prevailing libertarian ideology of a free internet in that sub-culture. But it was also due to self-interest: the last thing social media companies wanted to be doing is looking for ways to remove and block people from using their product and, worse, inserting themselves into the middle of inflammatory political controversies. Corporations seek to avoid angering potential customers and users over political stances, not courting that anger.
This censorship role was not one they so much sought as one that was foisted on them. It was not really until the 2016 election, when Democrats were obsessed with blaming social media giants (and pretty much everyone else except themselves) for their humiliating defeat, that pressure began escalating on these executives to start deleting content liberals deemed dangerous or false and banning their adversaries from using the platforms at all. As it always does, the censorship began by targeting widely disliked figures — Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones and others deemed “dangerous” — so that few complained (and those who did could be vilified as sympathizers of the early offenders). Once entrenched, the censorship net then predictably and rapidly spread inward (as it invariably does) to encompass all sorts of anti-establishment dissidents on the right, the left, and everything in between. And no matter how much it widens, the complaints that it is not enough intensify. For those with the mentality of a censor, there can never be enough repression of dissent. And this plot to escalate censorship pressures found the perfect vessel in this stunningly brave and noble Facebook heretic who emerged this week from the shadows into the glaring spotlight. She became a cudgel that Washington politicians and their media allies could use to beat Facebook into submission to their censorship demands.
In this dynamic we find what the tech and culture writer Curtis Yarvin calls “power leak.” This is a crucial concept for understanding how power is exercised in American oligarchy, and Yarvin’s brilliant essay illuminates this reality as well as it can be described. Hyperbolically arguing that “Mark Zuckerberg has no power at all,” Yarvin points out that it may appear that the billionaire Facebook CEO is powerful because he can decide what will and will not be heard on the largest information distribution platform in the world. But in reality, Zuckerberg is no more powerful than the low-paid content moderators whom Facebook employs to hit the “delete” or “ban” button, since it is neither the Facebook moderators nor Zuckerberg himself who is truly making these decisions. They are just censoring as they are told, in obedience to rules handed down from on high. It is the corporate press and powerful Washington elites who are coercing Facebook and Google to censor in accordance with their wishes and ideology upon pain of punishment in the form of shame, stigma and even official legal and regulatory retaliation. Yarvin puts it this way:
However, if Zuck is subject to some kind of oligarchic power, he is in exactly the same position as his own moderators. He exercises power, but it is not his power, because it is not his will. The power does not flow from him; it flows through him. This is why we can say honestly and seriously that he has no power. It is not his, but someone else’s. . . .
Zuck doesn’t want to do any of this. Nor do his users particularly want it. Rather, he is doing it because he is under pressure from the press. Duh. He cannot even admit that he is under duress—or his Vietcong guards might just snap, and shoot him like the Western running-dog capitalist he is….
And what grants the press this terrifying power? The pure and beautiful power of the logos? What distinguishes a well-written post, like this one, from an equally well-written Times op-ed? Nothing at all but prestige. In normal times, every sane CEO will comply unhesitatingly with the slightest whim of the legitimate press, just as they will comply unhesitatingly with a court order. That’s just how it is. To not call this power government is—just playing with words.
As I have written before, this problem — whereby the government coerces private actors to censor for them — is not one that Yarvin was the first to recognize. The U.S. Supreme Court has held, since at least 1963, that the First Amendment’s “free speech” clause is violated when state officials issue enough threats and other forms of pressure that essentially leave the private actor with no real choice but to censor in accordance with the demands of state officials. Whether we are legally at the point where that constitutional line has been crossed by the increasingly blunt bullying tactics of Democratic lawmakers and executive branch officials is a question likely to be resolved in the courts. But whatever else is true, this pressure is very real and stark and reveals that the real goal of Democrats is not to weaken Facebook but to capture its vast power for their own nefarious ends.
There is another issue raised by this week’s events that requires ample caution as well. The canonized Facebook whistleblower and her journalist supporters are claiming that what Facebook fears most is repeal or reform of Section 230, the legislative provision that provides immunity to social media companies for defamatory or other harmful material published by their users. That section means that if a Facebook user or YouTube host publishes legally actionable content, the social media companies themselves cannot be held liable. There may be ways to reform Section 230 that can reduce the incentive to impose censorship, such as denying that valuable protection to any platform that censors, instead making it available only to those who truly allow an unmoderated platform to thrive. But such a proposal has little support in Washington. What is far more likely is that Section 230 will be “modified” to impose greater content moderation obligations on all social media companies.
Far from threatening Facebook and Google, such a legal change could be the greatest gift one can give them, which is why their executives are often seen calling on Congress to regulate the social media industry. Any legal scheme that requires every post and comment to be moderated would demand enormous resources — gigantic teams of paid experts and consultants to assess “misinformation” and “hate speech” and veritable armies of employees to carry out their decrees. Only the established giants such as Facebook and Google would be able to comply with such a regimen, while other competitors — including large but still-smaller ones such as Twitter — would drown in those requirements. And still-smaller challengers to the hegemony of Facebook and Google, such as Substack and Rumble, could never survive. In other words, any attempt by Congress to impose greater content moderation obligations — which is exactly what they are threatening — would destroy whatever possibility remains for competitors to arise and would, in particular, destroy any platforms seeking to protect free discourse. That would be the consequence by design, which is why one should be very wary of any attempt to pretend that Facebook and Google fear such legislative adjustments.
There are real dangers posed by allowing companies such as Facebook and Google to amass the power they have now consolidated. But very little of the activism and anger from the media and Washington toward these companies is designed to fracture or limit that power. It is designed, instead, to transfer that power to other authorities who can then wield it for their own interests. The only thing more alarming than Facebook and Google controlling and policing our political discourse is allowing elites from one of the political parties in Washington and their corporate media outlets to assume the role of overseer, as they are absolutely committed to doing. Far from being some noble whistleblower, Frances Haugen is just their latest tool to exploit for their scheme to use the power of social media giants to control political discourse in accordance with their own views and interests.
Businesses push back against Scotland’s vaccine passport
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | October 5, 2021
Resistance to the introduction of vaccine passes, based on various grounds and gaining momentum for different reasons – is not present only among the general population and customers. In Scotland, owners of businesses have joined those who are opposed to a mandated COVID passport system by announcing a weekend boycott of the program.
Their argument is that the scheme Scotland launched via an app is so technically flawed that it is causing chaos and harming their businesses, as it keeps customers and visitors to places like night clubs and football stadiums away by simply not working.
This seems to be yet another in UK’s botched schemes rolled out over the course of the pandemic, and besides being riddled with technical problems, another thing these have in common is that they cost a lot of taxpayers’ money – although the latest Scottish “omnishambles” as some are calling the app is “cheap” compared to some other UK COVID fiascos – it cost a “mere” £600,000 ($816,520) to develop, although that’s probably £600,000 too much, considering that it doesn’t appear to work.
The first to defiantly pull out of the scheme once it became apparent it was useless were football clubs, who have been hard-hit by COVID restrictions that kept fans out of stadiums and seriously undermined their revenues for months on end.
The app was officially put in practice last Friday morning, with the SNP-led government announcing people would need to show proof of vaccination to be let into this type of venue. But the very same day, realizing the app wasn’t working, Aberdeen FC simply abandoned this requirement for its fans to attend the game upcoming on Sunday.
“Nobody will be asked to show proof of vaccine,” the club announced on Friday, reacting to fans being unable to buy tickets because the app could not be used to prove their vaccination status. Other Scottish clubs, like Rangers and Hearts, soon followed suit, while owners of nightclubs and others in the hospitality industry did the same, saying the confusion was “farcical.”
What followed was Health Secretary Humza Yousaf having to reverse previous policy, saying that “nobody should be denied entry this weekend if they failed to show proof of vaccination, and admitted the widespread technical problems may take ‘days’ to fix,” the Telegraph reported.
This week’s elections could pave way for Prague to Czech out of EU
By Paul A. Nuttall | RT | October 4, 2021
The elections in the Czech Republic later this week have largely been ignored, but the political situation in the country is not only compelling, it could have ramifications for the rest of Europe, and in particular for the EU.
Czechs go to the polls on Friday and Saturday in legislative elections that will determine who will lead the country for the next four years. These elections have been getting little attention in the international press, mainly because the focus has been on the elections taking place in Germany.
The Czech Republic has been led by a coalition government since 2017. The senior partner in the coalition is the ANO 2011 party, and its leader is the current Prime Minister Andrej Babis.
Babis’ party is described as ‘populist’. An ally of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, he recently attended the Demographic Summit in Budapest, where Babis and his counterparts from Poland, Serbia and Slovenia announced their intention to oppose further mass immigration in Europe.
Babis is also opposed to further EU integration and determined not to see the euro replacing the country’s current official currency, the koruna. He claims his party “will not hand over the sovereignty of the Czech Republic to the European Parliament or the European Commission.”
Recent polls put the ANO 2011 party in the lead with 27%. The main opposition parties, SPOLU (an alliance of liberals and conservatives) and the bizarrely named Pirates and Mayors party are polling around 21%. Both are committed to combining their votes in an alliance to force Babis from power.
Indeed, some commentators, who it must be said are firmly opposed to Babis’ politics, are predicting that the Czech Republic could be heading towards a constitutional crisis. However, it is expected that President Milos Zeman will use his constitutional powers to appoint the leader of the largest party as prime minister.
In all likelihood, this will be Babis, and it will give him the first opportunity to form a coalition. However, even if this is the case, he will be facing a big problem, as his current coalition partners have seen their support fall off a cliff recently.
The Social Democrats, who share power with Babis, are only polling between 4% and 6% and may not even make the 5% threshold to have candidates elected to parliament. And this puts Babis in a difficult position because, devoid of his main coalition partner, he will be forced to look elsewhere.
The ‘elsewhere’ in this case is most likely to be the Freedom and Direct Democracy Party (SPD), which is the most Eurosceptic political party in the country and is polling around 11%. The SPD is committed to a direct democracy law that will allow citizens to force referendums, and the one the party wants most is a referendum on Czech membership of the European Union.
SPD leader Tomio Okamura has made it clear that any negotiations for his party to join a future coalition will be conditional on holding such a referendum: “One of the fundamental conditions is for the government manifesto… to include a referendum law including the possibility of a referendum on leaving the EU or potentially NATO.”
Now this places Babis in a difficult position because, although he is a Eurosceptic, he does not envisage the Czech Republic leaving the EU anytime soon. Moreover, he is opposed to the idea of citizen-led referendums, or at least he would like prohibitive barriers implemented, such as a requirement for a huge number of signatories to force a referendum.
Another problem is that a direct democracy law would require the support of a three-fifths majority in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. However, the upper house, which is elected for a six-year term, is dominated by a pro-EU majority.
Nevertheless, the fact that an EU referendum is on the agenda could be seen as an outlier to where the Czech Republic is eventually headed. And let us not forget, the Czechs are not alone here. Recently, there have been noises in Budapest about the need for a referendum on EU membership in Hungary.
Although largely ignored, the elections in the Czech Republic this weekend will be fascinating, but even more enthralling could be the political “horse trading” that follows – the outcome of which could have ramifications for the rest of the EU.
Paul A. Nuttall is a historian, author and a former politician. He was a Member of the European Parliament between 2009 and 2019 and was a prominent campaigner for Brexit.
Twitter backtracks after censoring a mother’s obituary
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | October 4, 2021
Twitter’s fact-checkers appended a “misleading” alert to an obituary about a young woman who allegedly died after contracting a rare blood-clotting condition provoked by the COVID-19 vaccine.
After being accused of going so far with its censorship that it would resort to censoring an obituary, Twitter relented to the backlash and reversed the censorship.
The woman in question, Jessica Berg Wilson, a 37-year-old mother of two, died in the first week of September from Vaccine-Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia, a rare blood disorder in which small clots grow throughout the body, damaging platelets and preventing blood from reaching key organs. According to her obituary, Wilson’s greatest life ambition was to “be the best mother possible” to her daughters Bridget and Clara.
“She had been vehemently opposed to taking the vaccine, knowing she was in good health and of a young age and thus not at risk for serious illness. In her mind, the known and unknown risks of the unproven vaccine were more of a threat,” it read.
Kelly Bee, a Twitter user, posted Jessica Berg Wilson’s obituary with the statement, “an ‘exceptionally healthy and vibrant 37-year-old young mother with no underlying health conditions,’ passed away from COVID Vaccine-Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia. She did not want to get vaccinated.”
However, Twitter flagged the post as “misleading” and blocked it from being replied to, shared, or liked.
The majority of critics were outraged that Twitter was censoring an obituary and they responded by urging their followers to help the tweet go viral in violation of the company’s warning. Twitter has since removed the “misleading” designation and revoked the shadowban.
Additionally, several bloggers, including Ben Domenech of The Federalist, retweeted the obituary. Ben’s tweet reads: Who @Twitter decided it was okay to say an OBITUARY is ‘misleading’ ?”
Another tweet said “Twitter is now censoring obituaries,” – posted by Sean Davis.
Furthermore, Sebastian Gorka, who worked in the Trump administration’s Department of Defense, tagged Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a tweet asking what aspect of the obituary was incorrect or “misleading.”
“Hey @jack, Jessica was healthy and died. Why are you censoring that fact as ‘misleading??” he said.
“My name is Bill Gates, King of Kings”
Source: The next outbreak? We’re not ready | Bill Gates | INTIDOMAIN
By Richard Hugus | October 4, 2021
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
The evidence is in. Gene-manipulating injections advertised as a “vaccine for covid 19” have killed and injured many thousands of people. Instead of providing immunity to an alleged virus, the shots actually harm the immune system and turn it against us. The spike proteins created by the shots spread out to attack major organs in the body, leading to a thousand and one different health problems, including heart attacks, myocarditis, pericarditis, strokes, blood clots, spontaneous abortions, neurological disorders, depression, and death. Yet the medical establishment is urging everyone, including pregnant women and children, to get the jab. The ghost standing in as US President recently decreed that if people refuse the shot they will lose their job. This is coercion to accept a medical intervention known to be a danger to human health — a crime against humanity. Half the population of the country is now facing this coercion.
This only makes sense if we reason that the authorities want to harm us, or that there is something so important in the injection that they don’t mind harming us, as long as we get the injection. Bill Gates said early in 2020 that everyone on the planet should be “vaccinated.” Perhaps his dream was that when that is accomplished there will be no one left who will not be genetically modified (to Gates’s secret specifications) and thus no one left to hold him to account.
One of the most insidious arguments put forward by the authorities is that we are facing a health crisis so serious that individual freedom must be sacrificed for the common good, and therefore no one has a moral right to refuse the Frankenshot. This argument quickly comes down to whether human beings have inalienable rights — rights given to us by God, which the state does not have the power to take away or overrule. To accept or reject any substance being given to us is obviously such a right. And after this we can discuss the details — that the purpose of the “vaccine” is unclear, that its contents are unknown, that it has proven harmful to thousands of people, that we were not informed of adverse effects, that natural immunity should be recognized, that tests establishing the alleged disease were fraudulent, that there is no emergency, that there are safe alternative treatments, et cetera. But if we understand that the state is a lesser power, then we understand that it does not have the authority to order substances injected into our bodies.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
-U.S. Declaration of Independence
The cabal behind the medical tyranny we are facing doesn’t believe we have God-given rights because they don’t believe there’s a God in the first place. They apparently think that since they are billionaires, and billionaires have a lot of weight to throw around, that they can be gods. They also seem to believe there is nothing they are forbidden to do to other people because other people do not have souls — they are just biological entities evolved through random nature which the rich, by virtue of their power, are free to manipulate and improve upon. To technocrats, nothing is sacred. So it makes sense to them to risk injuring pregnant women and children and even experiment on the whole human race (beside their chosen few). Those who resist are now being segregated and punished, like Palestinians in their own land. Perhaps occupied Palestine is the oligarchs’ model for our future.
The ultimate goal may be the power that previous master-slave relationships were not able to achieve — a “read/write” capability in which the master has full surveillance power over the slaves and gives the orders for them to follow. Subtracted from the slave population, of course, will be those few billion dissidents and “useless eaters” who don’t fit in with the plan. They will be terminated. From this point of view it also follows that the genetic makeup of any living thing is just software which today’s sophisticated scientists can splice, delete, modify, or re-create as the masters see fit. From this point of view humans are no different than GM corn, soy, or cotton. GM humans can be used to bring in a nice profit as well because the masters will own their patents. Perhaps Monsanto agribusiness is another model for our future.
Taken to its logical extreme, reality itself is in the hands of our would-be masters. With proper control of the media, people can be made to believe anything, like that an illness similar to the flu is a “pandemic,” or that someone who has no symptoms of illness is actually sick, or that the unvaccinated are selfishly threatening everyone else with death, or that anyone who strays from the narrative is spreading “misinformation,” or that if someone goes into convulsions directly after getting jabbed it is not due to the poison that was just injected into them, or that a serum that injures and kills is “safe and effective.” In this world, the truth is what the powerful say it is, regardless of the facts. The powerful are a locomotive big enough to just run past any anomalies and contradictions, leaving us bewildered.
However, the ambitiousness of this insane program foretells its failure. History is full of great tyrants with grand plans who came in with spectacular fame but suddenly fell in disgrace, erased by time. The oligarchs’ main weakness is their lack of any sense of limits. Gaining some power, they then want it all. They reach too far, too soon, and expose themselves in the process. And then common humanity — always patient to a fault — finally decides to stand up and become a locomotive itself, running back over the entire plan and returning us to sanity.
If the world is going to see a great reset, it will not be the one Klaus Schwab and his Davos gangsters had in mind.
We should take heart. So much has been revealed! It’s as if the world’s worst criminals burst into the courtroom and offered up a horrendous public confession.
New Zealand Abandons Controversial ‘Zero COVID’ Policy
But lockdowns will remain until 90% of population is vaxxed
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | October 4, 2021
New Zealand has announced it is dropping its controversial ‘zero COVID’ policy after numerous critics pointed out that such an approach to eliminating the virus was impossible.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made the announcement earlier today during a press conference in which she acknowledged, “The return to zero has been extremely difficult.”
“What we have called a long tail has been more like a tentacle that has been difficult to shake,” she added, noting that the delta variant of the virus forced a change in policy.
Critics had repeatedly asked how the country expected to maintain a ‘zero COVID’ policy given the emergence of new variants of the virus and decreasing efficacy of the initial round of vaccinations.
However, with 48% of the population fully vaccinated, no return to normal is expected anytime soon given that Ardern has said 90% will need to be fully vaxxed before the lockdowns will end.
Kiwis have faced continuous lockdown measures almost as brutal as their Aussie neighbors since the beginning of the pandemic.
As we highlighted in August, Ardern mimicked Australia’s top public health official by telling citizens, “Don’t talk to your neighbors,” after the country went into full lockdown as a result of just a single COVID case being detected.
Authorities also previously announced that they would put all coronavirus infectees and their close family members in “quarantine facilities” even if they refuse.
“Natural Immunity” Is a Political Problem for the Regime
By Ryan McMaken – Mises Wire – 09/21/2021
Since 2020, public health technocrats and their allies among elected officials have clung to the position that absolutely every person who can possibly get a covid vaccine should get one.
Both the Mayo Clinic website and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, for example, insist that “research has not yet shown” that people who have recovered from covid have any sort of reliable protection. Moreover, the CDC page points to a single study from Kentucky claiming that people with natural immunity are more than twice as likely to contract covid again, compared to people who have been vaccinated.
This narrative is reflected in the fact that the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates are a one-size-fits-all policy insisting that virtually all adults, regardless of whether or not they’ve already had the disease, receive a covid vaccine. The official position is apparently this: nothing except the vaccine can provide any sort of resistance or immunity. So get a vaccine. No exceptions!
Health technocrats have repeatedly insisted that “the science” points unambiguously toward everyone receiving a vaccine, even to the point of pushing vaccines for children. All this in spite of the fact the risk to children from covid is far less than a dozen common daily risks, such as riding in an automobile.
The regime has attached itself closely to a vaccinate-everybody-no-matter-what policy, and a sudden u-turn would be politically problematic. So it’s no wonder there’s so little interest in the topic.
Indeed, in a September 10 interview, senior covid technocrat Anthony Fauci claimed that the matter of natural immunity was not even being discussed at government health agencies. Fauci’s response suggested that the facts of natural immunity warranted discussion at some point in the future. But the comment certainly fit the dominant regime narrative nonetheless: the facts of natural immunity don’t matter for now. Everyone should just get vaccinated:
CNN’s Sanjay Gupta asked if people who have already recovered from COVID-19 should still be required to get the vaccine.
“I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that,” [Fauci] said Thursday on CNN. “I think that is something that we need to sit down and discuss seriously.”
Maybe someday they’ll get to talking about it.
But some physicians aren’t as obsessed with pushing vaccine mandates as Anthony Fauci, and the evidence in favor of natural immunity is becoming so undeniable that even mainstream publications are starting to admit it.
In an op-ed for the Washington Post last week, Marty Makary of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine argues that the medical profession has hurt its credibility in pretending that natural immunity is virtually irrelevant to the covid equation. Moreover, the dogmatic “get vaccinated” position constitutes a lack of honesty about the data. Rather, Makary concludes:
[W]e can encourage all Americans to get vaccinated while still being honest about the data. In my clinical experience, I have found patients to be extremely forgiving with evolving data if you are honest and transparent with them. Yet, when asked the common question, “I’ve recovered from covid, is it absolutely essential that I get vaccinated?” many public health officials have put aside the data and responded with a synchronized “yes,” even as studies have shown that reinfections are rare and often asymptomatic or mild when they do occur.
And what are these studies? Makary continues:
More than 15 studies have demonstrated the power of immunity acquired by previously having the virus. A 700,000-person study from Israel two weeks ago found that those who had experienced prior infections were 27 times less likely to get a second symptomatic covid infection than those who were vaccinated. This affirmed a June Cleveland Clinic study of health-care workers (who are often exposed to the virus), in which none who had previously tested positive for the coronavirus got reinfected. The study authors concluded that “individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from covid-19 vaccination.” And in May, a Washington University study found that even a mild covid infection resulted in long-lasting immunity.
The policy bias in favor of vaccines ignores many other facts as well, such as the relative risks of vaccines, especially for the young:
The current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention position about vaccinating children also dismisses the benefits of natural immunity. The Los Angeles County School District recently mandated vaccines for students ages 12 and up who want to learn in person. But young people are less likely to suffer severe or long-lasting symptoms from covid-19 than adults, and have experienced rare heart complications from the vaccines. In Israel, heart inflammation has been observed in between 1 in 3,000 and 1 in 6,000 males age 16 to 24; the CDC has confirmed 854 reports nationally in people age 30 and younger who got the vaccine.
A second dose of the two-shot mRNA vaccine like that produced by Pfizer and Moderna may not even be necessary in children who had covid. Since February, Israel’s Health Ministry has been recommending that anyone, adult or adolescent, who has recovered from covid-19 receive a only single mRNA vaccine dose, instead of two. Even though the risk of severe illness during a reinfection is exceedingly low, some data has demonstrated a slight benefit to one dose in this situation. Other countries use a similar approach. The United States could adopt this strategy now as a reasonable next step in transitioning from an overly rigid to a more flexible vaccine requirement policy. For comparison, the CDC has long recommended that kids do not get the chickenpox vaccine if they had chickenpox infection in the past.
The nonscientific, ideology-induced blind spot for natural immunity also prompted The BMJ (the journal of the British Medical Association) to note that “[w]hen the vaccine rollout began in mid-December 2020, more than one quarter of Americans—91 million—had been infected with SARS-CoV-2…. As of this May, that proportion had risen to more than a third of the population, including 44% of adults aged 18–59.”
And yet, the authors note this fact doesn’t appear to be a part of any policy discussion at all:
The substantial number of infections, coupled with the increasing scientific evidence that natural immunity was durable, led some medical observers to ask why natural immunity didn’t seem to be factored into decisions about prioritising vaccination.
This problem is reflected in the Biden administration’s drive for booster shots—announced in mid-August—even before there was any clinical research on booster shots at all. Even by mid-September, as one hospital’s chief medical officer put it, “the data is not compelling one way or another.”
But those sorts of details don’t trouble federal “public health” officials, and the Biden administration quickly moved toward pushing booster shots for everyone.
This Is Why There Should Be No Mandatory Medical Treatment
Of course, mandating vaccines—like mandating any medical treatment—would still be immoral even if we could list a dozen studies suggesting boosters are a boon and that natural immunity is no good.
What if there were twenty-five studies “proving” vaccines are better than natural immunity, but only twenty studies “proving” natural immunity is better? Would coercive vaccine mandates then suddenly be justified? Unfortunately, that’s exactly how many advocates for repressive covid policies think the world should work. For these people, policy is just a matter of adding up the number of studies “proving” their side is right, and then claiming this justifies forcing mandatory medications on millions of human beings.
(It never works in reverse, of course. The fact that there’s a lot of evidence—as Makary points out—against vaccines for those who have natural immunity, the dominant narrative is nonetheless that vaccines are “necessary” and “worth it” for everybody, always and everywhere.)
In the real world, however, many medications—including these new vaccines—come with risks that must be weighed against potential benefits. These decisions can only be made at the individual level, where patients must make their own decisions about what substances to put into their own bodies. In other words, blanket policies proclaiming “everyone must receive this medical treatment immediately, or else” contradicts the realities of the uncertainties and varying risk levels that affect individuals. The facts of uncertainty and informed consent were once considered a mainstay of medical ethics—and of any political ideology that actually respects self-determination and basic human rights. Unfortunately, the philosophy of “public health” appears to be uninterested in such trivialities.
At this point, it would be embarrassing for the regime to admit what actual scientific inquiry has shown: that natural immunity is generally superior to receiving the vaccine. The regime doesn’t like to be embarrassed, and neither do the countless doctors and nurses who have long toed the regime’s political line. So expect more of the same.
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A low-fat, high-carb diet has been the largest public health experiment in history. It’s past time for a rethink.
By Malcolm Kendrick | RT | November 25, 2020
New research suggests that four billion people globally will be overweight in 2050. This trend can be traced back to the ‘low-fat, high-carb’ guidelines first issued in the 70s, and should prompt a major U-turn on dietary advice.
A recent report from the Potsdam Institute predicts that by 2050 there will be four billion overweight people in the world, with one-and-a-half billion of them obese. This is not entirely surprising. The world has been getting fatter for years, and things do not seem to be slowing down.
Why is this happening? … continue
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