British journalists could face jail for publishing leak stories that embarrass the government
Chilling new proposals
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim the Net | July 20, 2021
As if there needed to be yet another threat to free speech in the UK, British journalists could face 14-year prison sentences for publishing stories embarrassing the government, under proposed reforms to the Official Secrets Act. According to the government, the new proposals will crack down on foreign spies but many fear it could even be used domestically.
The UK government, through the Home Office, has proposed reforms to the 1989 Official Secrets Act, to account for changes technology and the internet has enabled in the sharing of leaked data.
But critics have noted that with the proposed changes local journalists are not protected if charged under the new laws.
Critics further noted that if the new proposals were currently law, the journalists who revealed that former Health Secretary Matt Hancock broke his own COVID rules while having an affair with his aide would have been charged. The leak was newsworthy and the story broke through leaked CCTV footage.
Last week, the Information Commissioner’s Office came under fire when it emerged that it searched two homes while investigating how the CCTV footage leaked to The Sun, the news outlet that first broke Matt Hancock’s affair story.
Among the groups criticizing the new proposals is the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), which noted that the new law would treat whistleblowers and those who publish leaked content the same way foreign spies are treated.
A spokesperson for the organization said:
“Existing legislation distinguishes provisions and penalties between those who leak or whistleblow, those who receive leaked information, and foreign spies.
“The government proposes to eliminate or blur these distinctions. The government also wants to increase the maximum penalties that journalists might suffer for receiving leaked material from two to 14 years…
“The NUJ has long argued that where whistleblowers believe that they have acted in the public interest, they should be able to make this case in court, and if a jury agrees with them, be protected.”
But according to the Home Office:
“Since the passage of the Act in 1989, there have been unprecedented developments in communications technology (including data storage and rapid data transfer tools) which in our view, means that unauthorized disclosures are now capable of causing far more serious damage than would have been possible previously.
“As a result, we do not consider that there is necessarily a distinction in severity between espionage and the most serious unauthorized disclosures, in the same way that there was in 1989.
“Although there are differences in the mechanics of and motivations behind espionage and unauthorized disclosure offenses, there are cases where an unauthorized disclosure may be as or more serious, in terms of intent and/or damage.
“For example, documents made available online can now be accessed and utilized by a wide range of hostile actors simultaneously, whereas espionage will often only be to the benefit of a single state or actor.
“In severe cases, the unauthorized disclosure of the identities of agents working for the UK intelligence community, for example, could directly lead to imminent and serious threat to life.”
The Law Commission and the human rights organizations that helped draft the new proposals insist there should be a “public interest defense” in the amendment to protect journalists who receive leaked content.
However, the Home Office argues that such a provision would “undermine our efforts to prevent damaging unauthorized disclosures, which would not be in the public interest.”
A Home Office spokesman said:
“Freedom of press is an integral part of the UK’s democratic processes and the government is committed to protecting the rights and values that we hold so dear.
“It is wrong to claim the proposals will put journalists at risk of being treated like spies and they will, rightly, remain free to hold the government to account.
“We will introduce new legislation so security services and law enforcement agencies can tackle evolving state threats and protect sensitive data.
“However, this will be balanced to protect press freedom and the ability for whistleblowers to hold organizations to account when there are serious allegations of wrongdoing.”
Biden Doubles Down on Voters
Fraud in 2020 election is only a preview of what is coming
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • JULY 20, 2021
President Joe Biden has now declared that the United States is facing an existential crisis comparable to what it experienced during the Civil War, a struggle that will produce a truly democratic form of government with universal franchise or which will result in the denial of basic rights to many citizens. And he is quite willing to address the issue employing a maximum of emotion and fear mongering unmitigated by a minimum of reasonable suasion, saying “We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole. Since the Civil War — the Confederates back then never breached the Capitol as insurrectionists did on January the 6th. I’m not saying this to alarm you. I’m saying this because you should be alarmed.”
Of course, what may have occurred on January 6th has nothing to do with the issue currently in play, which is voting rights, though it is only one aspect of what is essentially a revolution sponsored by the Democratic Party to reorder the American political system in such a fashion as to guarantee its dominance for decades to come. Other steps will include greatly increased immigration, a war on so-called domestic terrorists and decriminalizing or choosing not to prosecute many felonies committed by party constituencies.
The voting rights legislation currently before Congress includes the interestingly named For the People Act and its successor the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, both of which would seek to restore certain unconstitutional aspects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Most important, they would eliminate the ability of the states to pass legislation that creates conditions on registering and voting. The text of the John Lewis Act now before Congress refers to these steps as “discriminatory laws, needless barriers, and partisan dirty tricks.”
At the heart of the push by the Democrats is the creation of a uniform national electoral system which will essentially make it much easier for people to vote, permitting block voting, ballot harvesting and both registration and voting itself by mail. If passed, the new legislation will compel each state to adopt “automatic and same-day voter registration, voting rights for felons, no-excuse absentee balloting, mandatory early voting, and taxpayer funding for political campaigns.”
The key objections to the new voting procedure being promoted by Biden are several, largely related to its lack of any requirement for potential voters to provide information or show documentation confirming citizenship and residency or even one’s identity. The Democrats are denouncing their Republican opponents who are raising these issues as guilty of “voter suppression.” If the Democrats win the debate, it will be possible for anyone to vote in elections without having any human contact whatsoever using the mail-in ballots which are potentially susceptible to large scale fraud.
Another problem with the Biden program to nationalize voting procedures is that the there are four amendments to the United States Constitution that make it clear that it is left to the states to determine the modalities of voting. That means that even if the new voting act passes through Congress and is signed by the president there still would certainly be challenges based on its unconstitutionality. While Blue states will presumably go along with the guidance from Washington, those states still leaning Red will undoubtedly resist any nationalization of voting procedures.
It is not as if the current voting system is fraud-resistant. All too often it is not, which is why state legislatures in Georgia, Texas and several other Republican controlled states have passed new voting laws that actually require in many cases one’s physical presence to vote as well as production of documentation or information confirming citizenship and residency. They also include the purging of electoral rolls of voters who have died or moved. The new laws come as close as is reasonably possible to creating a system where voting security and integrity will be greatly enhanced, but the fact is that the Democrats are not at all interested in reducing criminal voting. They are interested in creating a permissive environment where all their presumed supporters will be able to vote without having to make any effort to do so or even be compelled to demonstrate who they really are and that they are citizens.
Prior to the recent national election, I examined the procedures to register and vote in my home state of Virginia and determined that one could both register and vote without any human contact at all. The registration process can be accomplished by filling out an online form, which is linked here. Note particularly the following: the form requires one to check the box indicating US citizenship. It then asks for name and address as well as social security number, date of birth and whether one has a criminal record or is otherwise disqualified to vote. You then have to sign and date the document and mail it off. Within ten days, you should receive a voter’s registration card for Virginia which you can present if you vote in person, though even that is not required.
It is important to realize that no documents have to actually be presented to support the application, which means that all the information can be false. You can even opt out of providing a social security number by checking the box indicating that you have never been issued one, even though the form indicates that you must have one to be registered, and you can also submit a temporary address by claiming you are “homeless.” Even date of birth information is useless as the form does not ask where you were born, which is how birth records are filed by state and local governments. Ultimately, it is only the social security number that validates the document and that is what also appears on the Voter’s ID Card, but even that can be false or completely fabricated, as many illegal immigrant workers in the US have discovered.
Prior to the November election my wife and I received unsolicited four mail-in ballots, all of which were sent to us anonymously. I examined the ballots carefully and noted that they bore no serial numbers or other forms of validation that could conceivably be used to limit the potential for fraud. In a state like Virginia, the actual mail-in ballot only requires your signature and that of a witness, who can be anyone. That is also true in six other states. Thirty-one states require only your own signature on the ballot while just three states require that the document be notarized, a good safeguard since it requires the voter to actually produce some documentation and identification. Seven states require your additional signature on the ballot envelope and two states require that a photocopy of the voter ID accompany the ballot. Some of these procedures may have been changed since the November allegation but it appears that only the handful of Republican states that are in the process of passing new voting laws are taking the problem seriously. In other words, the safeguards in the system continue at this time to vary from state to state but in most cases, fraud would be relatively easy if one is using mail-in voting. In fact, former President Jimmy Carter’s headed a bipartisan commission in 2005 that concluded that mail-in ballots constitute the “largest source of potential voter fraud” of any voting system.
Joe Biden is of course right about a crisis developing comparable to the Civil War, but what he is choosing to ignore is that his White House is carelessly feeding into what has become a growing chorus of dissent. He and his colleagues in Congress are deliberately and with malice pushing an agenda that, if successful, will lead to something like one party rule in the United States. Combine that with impending legislation and executive action to pursue “domestic extremists,” whom the Administration has also defined as “white supremacists,” it is not hard to imagine what kind of trouble is brewing.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
Appellate Court Puts Back in Force CDC’s Vaccine Passports Requirement and Other Mandates on Cruises
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | July 19, 2021
There was some great news last month when the state of Florida won, in a United States district court, a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) mandates, including for vaccine passports, under the CDC’s draconian and unprecedented “conditional sailing order” imposed on cruises in the name of countering coronavirus. I provided details about the court decision in an article here.
Unfortunately, late Saturday night — before the district court’s preliminary injunction was set to take effect on Sunday, a panel of three judges of the 11th Circuit decided by a two to one vote to stay the preliminary injunction pending appeal. The appellate court’s decision thus dictates that the CDC’s mandates on cruises, and cruise ship crews and passengers, remain enforceable for the time being.
Responding to news of the appellate court’s decision, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is pledging to continue the fight in the courts to remove the CDC mandates on cruises. In a Monday Orlando Weekly article by Tom Urban and Jim Saunders, DeSantis is quoted as follows:
‘We are absolutely going to pursue getting the stay removed, either at the full 11th Circuit or at the U.S. Supreme Court. I think probably to the full 11th Circuit en banc,’ DeSantis said during an appearance in Central Florida.
En banc consideration would involve all judges of the circuit court weighing in on the matter, a process that could yield a different result than was obtained in the split three judge panel decision.
Further quoted in the Orlando Weekly article, DeSantis expresses optimism that the state of Florida will ultimately be successful in its court battle against the CDC’s mandates for cruises:
‘I think most courts at this point have had their limit of the CDC issuing these dictates without a firm statutory basis,’ DeSantis said. ‘I am confident we’d win on the merits at the full 11th Circuit, and obviously I am confident we would win at the U.S. Supreme Court.’
Hopefully, DeSantis’ prediction of victory proves correct.
Copyright © 2021 by RonPaul Institute.
Britain has a choice on Freedom Day: Embrace liberty or slide into total biosecurity tyranny
By Neil Clark | RT | July 19, 2021
Domestic Covid restrictions have ended in England, but the threat to our freedoms remains, with the government urging businesses to adopt vaccine passports. The nightclub industry’s opposition to the scheme shows the way forward.
Freedom has been restored in Merrie England after 16 months of unremitting grimness the likes of which we’ve not seen since the days of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth and Matthew Hopkins’ witch-hunting. Well, sort of. No more state-mandated face masks. No more state-mandated restrictions on crowd sizes at sports venues. No more ‘social distancing’. All good things in themselves – except the message from the government has been massively confused, given that it has spent the past seven days encouraging businesses to maintain restrictions. And, having ruled out vaccine passports not so long ago, the government is now very keen on them again.
Not just for the autumn and winter, but now. Check out the new Step 4 policy document released last week. It states, “The government will work with organisations that operate large, crowded settings, where people are likely to be in close proximity to others outside their household to encourage the use of the NHS COVID Pass. If sufficient measures are not taken to limit infection, the Government may consider mandating the NHS COVID Pass in certain venues at a later date.”
That’s quite a threat, isn’t it? Basically, the government is saying, “If you don’t introduce Covid certification now, we’ll do it for you.” We’ve already had a ‘Whitehall source’ informing the Daily Mail that the scheme could be used to “keep open a much wider range of venues” over the winter, when we always get an increase of people coming down ill with flu and flu-like symptoms.
The source said, “The reason we are trialling Covid certification this summer is partly to get mass events open more safely with bigger crowds, but also partly to get people used to the idea.” Nudge nudge, wink, wink, as Monty Python might have said.
Of course, another lockdown would be ruinous for the hospitality and events sector. But business now needs to call the government’s bluff. The paradox is that rejecting Covid certification won’t make another lockdown more likely, but much less so. Because at the end of the day, this is a ‘compliance test’ and has been for the past 16 months. You defeat people who threaten to close you down, not by doing what they want but by defying them – and making them back down. Otherwise you’ll only face fresh demands.
The nightclub industry shows us the way to go. Full marks to Peter Marks, the CEO of REKOM UK, which owns 42 nightclubs and who said his venues would be operating at full capacity without the need to show a negative Covid test. Marks said that would provide a ‘barrier’ to customer enjoyment. Another big player, Tokyo Industries, has also stated it won’t be going down the Covid certification route. And there’s been rejection from the pub and hospitality industry too.
Just about the only body that seems to be enthusiastically embracing the prospect of Covid passes is football’s Premier League.
It was revealed last week that the EPL was ‘working closely’ with the government and drawing up its own plans for Covid certification. What a terrible own goal that would be. A reminder: the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee report on Covid passports was absolutely damning. The cross-party group of MPs held there was “no justification” for Covid passports and that the government had failed to make the scientific case for them.
The case for Covid passports was weak enough in June, when the report came out, but is even weaker now, as almost daily we are reading of people who have had both jabs becoming ill, or even hospitalised with Covid. If the vaccine doesn’t stop transmission – which the government admits – why are vaccine passports being promoted? Answer: there is obviously another agenda. The passports are a gateway. To something very sinister indeed.
It should set everyone’s alarm bells ringing very loudly that the most prominent public promoter of the Covid certification scheme is one Anthony Linton Blair. Last September, the man who assured us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which could be assembled and launched within 45 minutes, said it was “common sense” to move in the direction of digitalised IDs to fight coronavirus.
In June, ‘The Blair Creature’ – to use Peter Hitchens’ memorable description – declared, “The world will move to biometric ID and they will do it because in the end, it is better for people.” But which people? The vast majority of humanity, or those who meet at Davos each year and wish to control us? A ‘temporary’ Covid pass could quite easily morph into a permanent biometric ID system – which is clearly what Blair wants. And we know what that could morph into. A ‘restricted access’ social credit system, in which behaviour which is regarded as ‘good’ by the state authorities is rewarded and that which is ‘bad’ is penalised. Imagine being denied entry to a football ground or railway station, not just because you don’t have the latest Covid booster jab, but also because your ‘social credit’ score is too low after you refused to attend a ‘training course’ on ‘Good Citizenship’?
New technology means that governments have the means to control us in a way that the worst dictators in history could only dream of. It might sound a cliché, but today, on July 19, in England we really are at a crossroads. One path is marked ‘freedom’; the other takes us to a new digital servitude from which it will be very hard, if not impossible, to escape.
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com.
I’ve Absolutely No Obligation To The So-Called Vulnerable
By Richie Allen | July 19, 2021
The vulnerable are out in force this morning. Today is July 19th. It’s Freedom Day apparently. The government has removed the legal requirement to wear a mask and to maintain social distancing. The vulnerable are worried.
BBC Breakfast and SKY News have been speaking to vulnerable people this morning. These are people with various illnesses that have left them immunosuppressed. They’re not happy about opening up, at least the ones on tv and radio this morning.
One young woman who has aplastic anemia, told SKY’s Kay Burley that the removal of restrictions puts her in danger. She said that people who ditch their masks today, are selfish.
Last week, a man called in to LBC radio to say that his wife was recovering from cancer and that she was vulnerable. He said that as she needed to use the underground to commute, people should continue to wear face coverings on her behalf and on behalf of other vulnerable people.
I had a heated argument with a wheelchair-bound woman in May of last year. Don’t laugh. It wasn’t my finest hour. The woman has cerebral palsy. She works for a local company. I like her, but we got into it over lockdown.
As she saw it, I had a moral responsibility to stay indoors as much as I could tolerate, to lessen her chances of catching covid-19. She said that I was selfish and irresponsible for doing as I liked and not wearing a mask.
I asked her if she was prepared to engage in a bit of quid pro quo and help me pay my mortgage. She looked at me as if I’d gone mad. Game over. By the way, when I say heated, I don’t mean shouting and swearing. It was a robust exchange.
I bet you that most so-called vulnerable folk couldn’t name their next door neighbours if you asked them. I bet you their eyes would glaze over if you asked them when was the last time they had a neighbour over for dinner.
Funny that isn’t it? Those who are demanding that strangers turn their lives upside-down so that they can feel protected, most probably couldn’t give a shit about the people who live around them.
It’s crazy when you really think about it. How dare you ask people to commit financial suicide and incidentally, make themselves physically and mentally unwell, so that you can feel safe? How bloody dare you insist that people have a potentially deadly injection just because you can’t?
If you want to live in perpetual fear and choose to view your fellow citizens as biological weapons, then have at it. That’s your personal choice. But I won’t indulge your fantasy.
Neither will I commit self harm to assuage your irrational fears. I owe you nothing. I have no obligation to you whatsoever.
I’m a very good neighbour. My philosophy is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I turn my music off at 8pm. I turn down the telly. Our dog is trained, meaning that she is quiet. I’m out and about at dawn, when most people are in bed. I don’t make a sound.
I do not engage in any activity that has a negative impact on others. I am selfless by nature.
But I will not wear a facemask in public, just in case there is an immunosuppressed person nearby. Nor will I confine myself to my home. That is preposterous. I accept no responsibility for your wellbeing whatsoever, the exception being when I am behind the wheel of my car.
If you’re unfortunate enough to be so ill that you are vulnerable to infection, you have my genuine sympathy. But tough shit Paddy. Those are the breaks. That’s life. You and you alone are responsible for your health. If you think it’s a bit too risky to go outside or jump on a train, you act accordingly. But don’t expect me to walk on eggshells for the rest of my life. It ain’t a rehearsal you know.
A Brighter Future
Brighter Future – Oil on Linen – 40×72 inches.
A child assists her father in blocking the New Normal. If left unobstructed the New Normal would shut out their pathway to a brighter future.
By Jordan Henderson | OffGuardian | July 18, 2021
The worldwide push towards authoritarianism under the pretext of a faux pandemic is coercing nearly every aspect of society into its respective pen, which means that nearly everyone is in a position to become a wrench in the gears.
This is what inspired me to create this painting; it celebrates the revolutionary spirit being demonstrated by all manner of people, from grandmothers refusing to shop at mask enforcing stores, to parents exploring alternative ways to educate their children rather than letting them be muzzled and injected by the state.
To represent the New Normal crowd on the right and left of the painting, I elaborated on an idea that I established in an earlier painting Safe and Sanitized with skulls gagged by facemasks and held by their handcuffed hands (lockdowns), plus vaccine syringes stuck half haphazardly into them.
The building towering over the crowd on the left is Building 21, one of the CDC’s most iconic structures in their headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.
On the right is the United States Capitol Building, with the bronze Statue of Freedom that crowns the Capitol dome having been replaced in my painting by a statue of the Caduceus (serpents twined around a winged rod ). The Caduceus is an ancient symbol with various interpretations including commerce, though used in the USA as a symbol of medicine. Here it represents freedom displaced for “medicine” with the added irony that “medicine” is really just business and is actually being represented by a commerce symbol.
Also on the right is the ancient symbol of medicine still widely used, The Rod of Asclepius (a single serpent twined around a staff ). Here the serpent rises above its “patients” which it terrorizes, and the knob on the top of the rod is a human skull impaled on a large vaccine syringe. This rendition of The Rod of Asclepius more accurately captures the spirit of modern medicine.
The landscape that can be seen through the center is set both in autumn and in the evening to emphasize that it is the past, which is why our protagonists cannot go back that way.
They must push back against the New Normal, thereby maintaining open a doorway to a brighter future.
Mental ‘virus’ or real, governments can’t just censor and imprison their way out of immunity debt
By Helen Buyniski | RT | July 16, 2021
Covid-fearing parents may think they’re doing their kids a favor by keeping them inside, masked and encased in a bubble of hand sanitizer. But as humans we need pathogens to function – literally and metaphorically.
Evolution, it turns out, isn’t stupid. There’s a reason our guts are swarming with bacteria, and while we’ve been taught to recoil at the very concept (especially after a year and a half of plague-talk in which bacteria are regularly brutally assaulted with jets of hand sanitizer for nothing more than existing), those microscopic creatures actually digest our food for us. If it weren’t for them, we’d starve.
The bacterial colonies that call us home also need to interact with one another, which means once in a while touching a doorknob (or even a subway pole) and not immediately dousing your microscopic hitchhikers in caustic death-juice; sneezing on public transit without having to worry you’ll be lynched; and letting your kid play in the mud with other kids. Their lives could depend on it, as several countries previously praised for their ability to control their citizens are being reminded.
Under Covid-19’s new abnormal, we think nothing of going weeks without seeing friends, months without seeing family, long periods without so much as touching another person, and are told that this is not only healthy – if you don’t do it, you could die! So we learn to run across the street when we spot an old friend coming in for a hug, and to almost preemptively say “no” when our kids ask if they can for once play with their friends in real life instead of through an endless series of screens.
Turns out this is a great way to guarantee future epidemics. New Zealand, a global media darling for its 26 (reported) Covid deaths, is experiencing a major spike in a normally non-threatening childhood illness, since – while kids remain all but unaffected by Covid-19 – the same doesn’t hold true for other common respiratory diseases. Nearly 1,000 cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) have been diagnosed in just five weeks in the country, more than half of the number usually reported in an entire 29-week winter, according to the Guardian, which quoted public health experts placing the blame squarely on the “immunity debt” incurred from the country’s prolonged, stringent Covid lockdowns. In other words, “two weeks to flatten the curve” was one thing, but 18 months later, the curve is flattening us.
This problem wasn’t exactly unknown to medical science, and NZ’s willingness to go down this path rather than, say, encourage residents to come out of their homes and behave like normal humans when the worst danger of Covid-19 had passed, speaks to a pattern of martyrdom and virtue signaling that President Jacinda Ardern has capitalized on expertly. Her government postponed elections, forced new arrivals into “quarantine camps” for a period of not less than two weeks even with negative test results (positive results, or worse a refusal to be tested, could have you locked up even longer), and has all but smothered the independent press. The economy imploded, posting its largest quarterly decline in history, and housing costs remained unmanageable for many.
Yet she and her party got a historic mandate to rule (in October’s delayed election, with unprecedented numbers of mail-in ballots, after Facebook shut down one of the opposing parties’ pages right before Election Day, and other asterisks that went unmentioned by the press as they dined on her fiance’s cooking during the vote count). Turns out democracy is a risk factor for Covid-19, too. Who knew?
The phenomenon of “immunity debt” translates well to information, and Wellington isn’t the only government long overdue for a reckoning regarding the censorship it’s been forcing down its citizens’ throats, supposedly in the name of protecting them from infectious bad ideas. Kiwis were already resigned to being shut out of the global conversation after the Christchurch mosque shooting made it OK – nay, expected! – for an emergency to require termination of non-approved communications – and 10-year prison sentences for anyone who wouldn’t comply and delete the wrongthink. For a “democratic” country to enact such censorship would have elicited screams if it had come from Trump’s America, but Ardern was doing it in the name of Safety. With literally no way to test the success of such measures other than an absurd “X number of days without another mass shooting,” the silencing campaign was preemptively declared a success and governments around the world signed on, elevating censorship to the chief crime (and protest)-fighting method. Object? What are you, a terrorist?
Applying analogous measures while the world panicked over Covid-19 was a no-brainer, and in many countries it has been effectively – if not literally – forbidden to question the official story of the virus’ arrival and spread, even though the World Health Organization and its national counterparts were changing that “official story” on a monthly, if not weekly basis. Context-free videos of people dropping to the ground and convulsing in China, even without an implication those people even had the virus, put the fear into the rest of the world and, by the time American news networks were getting caught rerunning footage of packed Italian hospitals as “Covid-hit New York City,” even dissenting voices had largely shied away from questioning the “facts” the government was putting out. Only in cases where the government was not pushing total fear was it acceptable to mock the orders one was given, because not wanting us to live in fear could only mean they didn’t really care about us.
With Trump safely out of the White House, though, the entire American power structure has presented a united front pushing the same stultifying and borderline-nonsensical message of fear on offer from Ardern. The Biden administration is no longer even covering up unconstitutional behaviors like “flagging misinformation” for Facebook to delete, and even the White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki seems to have been forced into arguing with herself as social media muffles all opposing voices. Pacified by deliveries of occasional helicopter money whose value is steadily declining – a fact they might understand if they hadn’t declared math racist – Americans have proudly stepped up to act as the guards in the narrative managers’ mental prison. Far from demanding more transparency from their government, Americans are demanding less, while dog piling on dissenters – aware at some basic level they’re being lied to but unwilling to admit who’s doing the lying.
New Zealand’s censorship may be more photogenic – certainly Ardern is easier on the eyes than the ever-stumbling gaffe-mummified Biden – but both countries are headed straight for a wall built up by years of unpaid epistemological “immunity debt.” One cannot simply stuff “offensive” ideas or “misinformation” down the pipes eternally unless one wants to experience a killer mental toilet backup. The more reality has diverged with whatever is believed by these increasingly-unhinged closed societies, the more of a mess that backup will leave. Neither country can afford such a meltdown, and both would be wise to start allowing reality to filter back into their media before it’s too late. That means ending knee-jerk social media censorship (which has been shown to make users more gullible when it comes to fake news, anyway), rolling back the ever-expanding definition of “hate speech,” and in general behaving like adults.
Instead, Wellington is trying to make “hate speech” itself a crime punishable by three years in prison, and continues to push absurd poll results in which “75% of New Zealanders feel like the country is heading in the right direction, and for the most part, Covid-19 is not impacting their future.” Washington is trying to take the Second Amendment away from its citizens even while still choking on the First. Meanwhile, over in the UK, the Johnson government is warning of an influenza “epidemic” even as citizens remain under lockdown from the last Covid wave. It’s hard to guess which of these three policies will fail first, but whichever one it is, I wouldn’t want to be in charge of the cleanup job.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Telegram
Canada’s Heritage Minister says free speech online ‘undermines democracy’
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim the Net | July 17, 2021
Offensive remarks on social media are legal, but Canada’s Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault says they “undermine democracy.”
The government is promoting the internet censorship bill C-36, which seeks to obligate social media platforms to mass censor.
In a briefing, reviewed by Blacklock’s Reporter, the Heritage Ministry argued for censorship of offensive Twitter messages because he says they prevent “a truly democratic debate.”
“This content steals and damages lives,” the briefing read. “It intimidates and obscures valuable voices, preventing a truly democratic debate.”
In late June, the cabinet introduced Bill C-36, which threatens social media users with house arrests and fines of up to $50,000 for sharing content that promotes “detestation or vilification.”
“Our objective is to ensure more accountability and transparency from online platforms while respecting the Canadian Charter Of Rights And Freedoms,” said the June 16 briefing note.
“The mandate of the Department of Canadian Heritage includes the promotion of a greater understanding of human rights.”
Under Canada’s Criminal Code, so-called “hate speech” (open to interpretation) is a crime. What Bill C-36 does is make hate speech illegal even when there is no evidence of a crime.
“Social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter are increasingly central to participation in democratic, cultural and public life,” said the briefing note.
“However, social media platforms can also be used to threaten, intimidate, bully and harass people or used to promote racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, misogynist and homophobic views that target communities, put people’s safety at risk and undermine Canada’s social cohesion or democracy.”
White House: If you’re banned for “misinformation” on one platform, you should be banned from ALL platforms
More calls for censorship from the Federal Government
By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | July 16, 2021
After making the shocking admission that the Federal Government is flagging content for Facebook to censor in yesterday’s White House Press Briefing, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki doubled down on the censorship rhetoric in today’s Press Briefing by calling for users to be banned from all platforms if they post “misinformation” and dismissing concerns that the Biden administration is acting as “Big Brother.”
During the Press Briefing, Psaki was asked to elaborate on the Biden administration’s flagging of misinformation to Facebook and to respond to a CNN report about the Biden administration’s “frustration with what they view as Facebook’s failures to uphold its own policies on vaccine misinformation.”
Psaki responded by framing the flagging issue as simply staying in “regular touch with social media platforms” to make them “aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health” and engaging with them to “better understand the enforcement of social platform policy.”
She insisted that the social media platforms make the decisions when it comes to content moderation.
Of course, Psaki failed to mention that while Facebook is technically free to make its own content moderation decisions, this outreach about so-called dangerous public health narratives is coming from the same Federal Government that is placing huge amounts of pressure on Facebook’s business through an antitrust lawsuit.
When pressed on whether Facebook’s censorship has been as proactive as the White House would like, Psaki said there are “more steps everyone can take” and suggested that one step that “could be constructive for public health” is for social media platforms to coordinate and implement cross-platform censorship when users post alleged misinformation.
“You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others…for providing misinformation,” Psaki added.
After she was told that Facebook had already removed 18 million pieces of “COVID misinformation” and connected more than two billion people to “reliable information,” Psaki was asked whether the White House finds this “sufficient.”
“Clearly not,” Psaki responded.
She added: “They’re a private sector company, they’re gonna make decisions about additional steps they can take, it’s clear there are more that can be taken.”
Psaki also dismissed Fox News reporter Pete Doocy’s question about a lot of people on Facebook being concerned about “Big Brother watching you” now that they know the White House flags posts to Facebook to be censored.
“They’re more concerned about that than people dying across the country because of a pandemic where misinformation is traveling on social media platforms?” Psaki said. “That seems unlikely to me. If you have the data to back that up, I’m happy to discuss it.”
When Doocy raised the double standard with which The White House flags and censors so-called misinformation, Psaki again dismissed the concerns.
“There are videos of Dr. Fauci from 2020 before anybody had a vaccine and he’s out there saying there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” Doocy said. “So, is the administration going to contact Facebook and take that down?”
Psaki responded by arguing that Fauci said: “Science evolves, information evolves.”
But when she discussed other claims that she doesn’t approve of during the Press Briefing, such as claims that the vaccines cause infertility, Psaki framed it as “information that is irresponsibly traveling” and pushed social media platforms to let the White House know that they’re “taking steps to address it.”
The White House Press Secretary’s comments are yet another example of the increasing collaboration between public officials and private companies that are raising First Amendment violation flags.
Prior to Psaki’s recent statements, numerous reports have pointed to similar public-private sector censorship collaborations. These include a recent lawsuit showing that Democrats have worked with Twitter to flag tweets and get them taken down and a recent letter from Republicans accusing Fauci of advising Facebook to censor lab leak theories.
Non-Matching Ballot Totals, Duplicate Votes & Cyber Problems Cast Doubt on 2020 Election Results
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 17.07.2021
Republican lawmakers and non-partisan activists in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania are continuing to push for election integrity. This week a number of discrepancies have been found by independent auditors in Arizona and Georgia, raising new questions about the outcome of the 2020 election.
The alleged 2020 election fraud saga is far from being over in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania despite President Joe Biden and the US mainstream media decrying the “big lie” and downplaying vote irregularity claims.
Arizona
On 13 July, Senate President Karen Fann announced that vote counts do not match in the Maricopa County 2020 election audit. The announcement was followed by hearings in the Arizona Senate which were held on 15 July. Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the leading group of independent auditors, provided a preliminary overview of discrepancies found during the recount.
According to Logan, auditors could not find records concerning tens of thousands of mail-in ballots in Maricopa County: “We have 74,000 [mail-in ballots] that came back from individuals where we don’t have a clear indication that they were ever sent out to them,” he underscored.
The auditor further revealed that approximately 18,000 people voted but were removed from voter rolls “soon after the election”; there were 11,326 people who were not on the voter rolls on 7 November 2020, but appeared on the rolls on 4 December 2020; and there were 3,981 people who voted after registering after 15 October 2020.
CEO of CyFIR Ben Cotton, one of the subcontractors taking part in the recount, said that the analysis of the election management system and network exposed “severe cybersecurity problems.” The reported discrepancies have triggered concerns among the state GOP, given that President Joe Biden won Arizona by a razor-thin margin of 10,000 votes, or 0.3 percentage points.
Responding to the latest discoveries, Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers blasted the auditors as “incompetent”. “What we heard today represents an alternate reality that has veered out of control since the November General Election”, Sellers stated.
To clear up the issues, the audit team requested more items to complete their review, including ballot envelope images, router images, splunk logs, hard drives that contain information about the 2020 election, as well details on Maricopa County’s policies and procedures. However, the state’s Democratic Party and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors vocally opposed providing any material to whom they called “uncertified auditors”. The county officials have yet to provide the state Senate with previously subpoenaed items including routers or router images.
Former President Donald Trump has called the recent Arizona Senate hearings on the Maricopa County election audit “devastating news to the radical left Democrats”, suggesting that “there was no victory” for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in the state.
© PHOTO : YOUTUBE / DONALD J. TRUMP
Screenshot from the video allegedly showing election staffers in Fulton County, Atlanta, Georgia, staying behind and pulling out boxes of extra ballots
Georgia
New discrepancies have also been found in Fulton County, where most of Atlanta is located. A nonpartisan election integrity nonprofit called Voters Organised for Trusted Election Results in Georgia (VoterGA) reported on Wednesday that at least 36 batches of mail-in ballots containing 4,255 votes were redundantly reported in the Fulton County audit results for the 3 November election. This includes 3,400 extra votes for then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, 865 extra votes for Donald Trump and 43 extra votes for Jo Jorgenson.
The election integrity activists also believe that seven audit tally sheets were “falsified to contain fabricated vote totals”. Thus, for example, a batch containing 59 ballot images for Biden and 42 for Trump was reported as 100 for the Democratic candidate and zero for the ex-president, according to Voters GA. In addition to that, it turned out that nearly 200 ballots were scanned two times before a recount.
The group is conducting an examination of digital ballot images following a months-long lawsuit filed last year. VoterGA particularly sought clearance to inspect all 147,000 absentee ballots cast in Fulton County last November, citing concerns about potential election fraud. Last fall, Joe Biden won the state by a thin margin of 12,670 votes.
Following the disclosure, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger called upon the Fulton County to fire Richard Barron, its elections director, and Ralph Jones, the county’s voter registration chief.
However, the secretary of state has also come under criticism from some of his Republican Party peers who insist that he and Governor of Georgia Brian Kemp should resign because they had apparently known about the irregularities but concealed them from the public.
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania, which was won by Joe Biden by a margin of 80,555 votes, has also become a new battleground for the GOP effort to review the 2020 elections results.
In June, a delegation of Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers visited the Arizona audit and signalled that they are interested in launching a similar recount effort. The initiative is being led by Pennsylvania state GOP Senator Doug Mastriano, who chairs the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee and is regarded as a potential future gubernatorial candidate.
On 7 July, Mastriano announced that he had sent letters to Philadelphia, York, and Tioga counties, asking them to turn over election materials by 31 July.
“The case for a forensic investigation of the 2020 general election is evident to any unbiased observer,” Mastriano wrote in an official statement. “This was the first election in Pennsylvania with ‘mass’ mail-in voting. In 2020, there were 2.7 million ballots cast by mail and absentee compared to about 263,000 absentee ballots cast in 2016. Many of these ballots were counted at offsite locations with little outside observation or oversight. Furthermore, mail ballots without signature verification were permitted to be counted across the Commonwealth.”
According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, the materials requested by Mastriano include ballots, voting machines, vote counting equipment, mail-in
However, it was reported on 15 July that Tioga County Commissioners would not provide access to their ballots and election equipment after receiving a directive from the Pennsylvania Department of State to withstand Mastriano’s effort and to not allow third parties to conduct a forensic audit of the 2020 election results. On 16 July, York County also refused to take part in the recount citing the legality of Mastriano’s request, the legality of his demand, the cost to the county and their lack of staff to complete the project. They also raised concerns over possible decertification of their election equipment by the Department of State.
The state’s GOP issued a statement denouncing the Department of State’s directives as “an attack on the General Assembly’s power to review, investigate, and legislate in matters within its legislative authority, which includes Pennsylvania’s election system.”
Social media misinformation ‘killing people,’ Biden says, as White House doubles down on private censorship
RT | July 16, 2021
US President Joe Biden claimed social media platforms are “killing people” with misinformation about Covid-19, as his press secretary Jen Psaki made a case for deplatforming ‘offenders’ across the ostensibly private networks.
“They’re killing people,” Biden told reporters who asked him to send a message to platforms like Facebook. “The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people,” he shouted, over the noise of a helicopter outside the White House on Friday.
On Thursday, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory against health “misinformation,” calling it “an imminent and insidious threat to our nation’s health.” He defined it as information that is “false, inaccurate, or misleading according to the best available evidence” and claimed 67% of unvaccinated Americans had heard at least one “myth” about Covid-19 vaccines.
At the same press conference, Psaki admitted the government was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook,” causing a stir among some civil libertarians.
Insisting that it was these ostensibly private companies doing the censorship and not the federal government – thereby trying to dodge the thorny issue of the First Amendment – Psaki then doubled down on Friday, saying that platforms should coordinate their rules and terms of service so that a person “shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others… for providing misinformation out there.”
Her announcement raised more than a few eyebrows across the political spectrum. Journalist Glenn Greenwald, responsible for publishing NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, called the entire line of White House thinking “pernicious.”
Psaki was “issuing decrees on who should and shouldn’t be allowed to use social media, then smugly scoffing at the notion that this should concern anyone on the ground that we’re going to die if we don’t submit to the White House’s orders,” Greenwald added, summarizing her exchange with Fox News’ Peter Doocy.
In a video making rounds on social media, Psaki tells Doocy that everyone, including journalists, ought to be more concerned about “the number of people who are dying around the country” due to misinformation rather than any Big Brother-like behavior by the government. When he argued the opposite, she replied, “That feels unlikely to me.”
“We don’t take anything down… Facebook makes decisions,” she insisted.
Asked politely by Philip Wegmann of RealClearPolitics to explain how often and how long the White House has been flagging “misinformation,” and if she could define it, Psaki responded with generalizations and claims that all this information is “publicly available” on social networks.
Psaki’s remarks amounted to an admission that the government is coordinating with private corporations to ban people from social media, podcast host Jack Murphy pointed out, calling it “literal fascism before our eyes.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was conspicuously silent about this threat to freedom of expression, Greenwald noted, and was instead tweeting about transgender issues.
Meanwhile, a UK-based nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) claimed the White House relied on their research in identifying the people producing alleged “misinformation,” and promoted their CEO Imran Ahmed’s TV appearance in which he spoke about online “superspreaders.”
CCDH first drew attention in June 2020, when NBC – one of the big three broadcast TV networks in the US – cited their research in a story trying to pressure Google into demonetizing the blog ZeroHedge and the conservative-leaning online magazine Federalist.
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