US Supreme Court Backs Grand Theft Election 2020
By Stephen Lendman | February 23, 2021
On Monday, the US Supreme Court refused to hear legitimate challenges to the 2020 presidential election outcome.
In January ahead of Biden’s inauguration, the court denied requests by Trump and GOP supporters to hear and rule on lawsuits claiming brazen fraud in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Some lawsuits justifiably claimed unconstitutional changes to state election procedures.
In Pennsylvania, the state’s Supreme Court allowed election officials to count mail ballots that arrived up to three days after Election Day 2020.
The US Supreme Court voted 4-4 on whether to issue a stay of its ruling, short of a majority needed to block it.
In December 2020, GOP Senator Ted Cruz argued the following:
“The Pennsylvania Constitution requires in-person voting, except in narrow and defined circumstances,” adding:
“Late last year, the Pennsylvania Legislature passed a law that purported to allow universal mail-in voting, notwithstanding the Pennsylvania Constitution’s express prohibition.”
“This appeal argues that Pennsylvania cannot change the rules in the middle of the game.”
Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch agreed, one vote shy of four votes needed to grant a writ of certiorari — an order by the Supreme Court for a lower court to send up the record of a case in question for review.
Reviewing cases doesn’t automatically mean they’ll be heard and ruled on.
Of around 7,000 cases it asks to review annually, the High Court accepts 100 – 150.
In dissenting from the majority on the Pennsylvania case, Justice Thomas said the following:
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s “decision to rewrite the rules seems to have affected too few ballots to change the outcome of any federal election.”
“But that may not be the case in the future. These cases provide us with an ideal opportunity to address just what authority non-legislative officials have to set election rules, and to do so well before the next election cycle. The refusal to do so is inexplicable.”
“One wonders what this Court waits for. We failed to settle this dispute before the election, and thus provide clear rules.”
“Now we again fail to provide clear rules for future elections.”
“The decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt is baffling.”
“By doing nothing, we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence.”
“Our fellow citizens deserve better and expect more of us.”
In his dissent, Alito (joined by Gorsuch) said the following:
“Now, the election is over, and there is no reason for refusing to decide the important question that these cases pose.”
“Some respondents contend that the completion of the 2020 election rendered these cases moot and that they do not fall within the mootness exception for cases that present questions that are ‘capable of repetition’ but would otherwise evade review.”
That argument fails (because the issue in the case) is surely capable of repetition in future elections.”
Long before election day 2020, US dark forces decided the outcome. Voters had no say.
Trump challenged the system so was denied a second term.
Orchestrated January 6 events on Capitol Hill settled things, an anti-Trump false flag.
Wrongfully blaming him for what happened smoothed the way for Biden/Harris to replace him — illegitimately by brazen election fraud in key swing states.
Things worked as planned. The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear legitimate challenges to the election outcome closed the books on the issue.
As long as Biden/Harris remain in office, they’ll serve illegitimately, not the other way around.
Election 2020 bears testimony to US fantasy democracy.
It’s by no means the only example.
US dirty politics and election rigging date from at least the early 19th century — at the federal, state and local levels.
Election 2020 perhaps was the most brazen example.
Trump won. Biden lost. DJT returned to private life. Selected, nor elected, Biden replaced him.
By refusing to rule on this core issue, the Supreme Court effectively OK’d election fraud over a free, fair and open system according to the rule of law.
North Dakota House Votes To Make Mask Mandates Illegal
By Steve Watson | Summit News | February 23, 2021
The House of Representatives in North Dakota has voted to make mandates on wearing face masks illegal.
The bill was sponsored by Rep. Jeff Hoverson who labelled the mask mandate instituted by the State governor last year as “diabolical silliness,” adding that “Our state is not a prison camp.”
The legislation outlines that “A state or local elected official, the state, or a political subdivision of the state may not mandate an individual in this state use a face mask, face shield, or other face covering.”
It also “prohibits making use of a face mask, shield, or covering a condition for entry, education, employment, or services.”
The bill also notes that “If a state or local elected official, the state, or a political subdivision of the state recommends an individual in this state use a face mask, shield, or covering, the official or entity shall provide notice the recommendation is not mandatory.”
Hoverson said that the mask mandates are being enforced by “unelected, wealthy bureaucrats who are robbing our freedoms and perpetuating lies.”
The bill was approved 50-44 and will now advance to the state Senate.
Several states, including Iowa, Montana, and Mississippi have begun lifting mask mandates, despite Joe Biden’s attempts to instigate a nation-wide mask mandate, which he recently said could extend ‘through the next year’.
Dr Anthony Fauci also said Sunday he sees it as entirely possible that everyone will have to keep wearing face coverings throughout the entirety of 2021 and into 2022, prompting backlash.
Signs of life: Are the masses awakening from COVID psychosis?
By Jordan Schachtel | February 23, 2021
Over the course of the past year, a coalition including the corporate media, international “health” institutions, a maniacal mega billionaire, Big Pharma oligarchs, and power drunk governments consumed massive amounts of power left and right, with little to no observed resistance in sight.
With COVID mania in full swing, they moved the goalposts as they pleased. Free of any science, data, or logical reasoning, the ruling class had the terrified masses completely under their thumb. Under the spell of a mass social psychosis, we willingly surrendered our liberties and even happily enforced draconian edicts on our own peers, despite the global trampling of our basic rights.
The ruling class moved seamlessly from “15 days to stop the spread” to “30 days to stop the spread” to “Zero COVID.”
From “everyone needs to wear a mask” to “everyone needs to wear two masks” to “maybe we should wear three masks.”
From “lockdown to preserve healthcare capacity” to “lockdown to slow/stop the spread” to “lockdown until we have a vaccine.”
All of these aforementioned restrictions and guidelines were abided by without resistance. Across the globe, citizens remained firmly trapped in perhaps the most self-destructive mass social psychosis in human history, convinced that a respiratory virus (that causes a disease with a 99.8% recovery rate) was responsible for their economic and societal devastation. The authoritarians did as they wished, without a hint of pushback.
However, it seems we have finally reached one particular narrative that has been met with firm resistance.
Once you’ve gotten any COVID-19 vaccine, you still need to wear a mask, get tested, and watch your distance. Isolate if you have tested positive/have symptoms, and quarantine if you are a close contact or have traveled to another state or country. Visit c19vaccineri.org.
People are rightfully outraged by another ongoing narrative shift attempt led by the likes of Dr. Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, countless government health bureaucracies, and other leaders of the corona hysteria movement. We’re now being told that the vaccine is not in fact a ticket to normalcy. Instead, we’ve been told that even with the vaccine, people still need to wear a mask, social distance, and act as if fellow human beings are nothing more than mere vectors of disease.
They initially told us lockdowns would solve our COVID problem. They then told us masks would end the pandemic. Soon after, the “experts” went all in on the vaccine narrative. It seems that the new narrative is one of “forever COVID,” or a permanent safety regime that stresses prioritizing avoidance of a virus over anything else in life. Fauci and the gang is now demoting the vaccine’s status as no longer a way out, but just another tool to help you mitigate the threat posed by the “deadly virus.”
WATCH: We spoke with @BillGates about the looming climate crisis and why research he funds suggests we may need a third vaccine dose to fight against new coronavirus variants More tonight on the @CBSEveningNews, watch at 6:30 p.m. ET 
And many finally seem to be pushing back against the ruling class plan for a permanent COVID state.
Excellent column by @karol deploring the rise of “forever pandemic” thinking, in which our lives will continue to be smothered in the name of overhyped public health threats. 
Will the vaccine rug pull attempt awaken the masses to the reality that they’ve been conned for an entire year? That is too soon to tell, but we are finally seeing signs of widespread pushback against the latest demands from the ruling class. Many of us wished this hopeful revival of rational thought had occurred a full year ago, but it’s more important right now to build a coalition around restoring our rights and quashing the power grab, even if that coalition includes the same individuals and groups that were once on the side of the totalitarians.
The Vaccine (Dis)Information War
By CJ Hopkins | Consent Factory Inc. | February 23, 2021
So, good news, folks! It appears that GloboCap’s Genetic Modification Division has come up with a miracle vaccine for Covid! It’s an absolutely safe, non-experimental, messenger-RNA vaccine that teaches your cells to produce a protein that triggers an immune response, just like your body’s immune-system response, only better, because it’s made by corporations!
OK, technically, it hasn’t been approved for use — that process normally takes several years — so I guess it’s slightly “experimental,” but the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency have issued “Emergency Use Authorizations,” and it has been “tested extensively for safety and effectiveness,” according to Facebook’s anonymous “fact checkers,” so there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.
This non-experimental experimental vaccine is truly a historic development, because apart from saving the world from a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms (or, more commonly, no symptoms whatsoever) in roughly 95% of those infected, and that over 99% of those infected survive, the possibilities for future applications of messenger-RNA technology, and the genetic modification of humans, generally, is virtually unlimited at this point.
Imagine all the diseases we can cure, and all the genetic “mistakes” we can fix, now that we can reprogram people’s genes to do whatever we want … cancer, heart disease, dementia, blindness, not to mention the common cold! We could even cure psychiatric disorders, like “antisocial personality disorder,” “oppositional defiant disorder,” and other “conduct disorders” and “personality disorders.” Who knows? In another hundred years, we will probably be able to genetically cleanse the human species of age-old scourges, like racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, etcetera, by reprogramming everyone’s defective alleles, or implanting some kind of nanotechnological neurosynaptic chips into our brains. The only thing standing in our way is people’s totally irrational resistance to letting corporations redesign the human organism, which, clearly, was rather poorly designed, and thus is vulnerable to all these horrible diseases, and emotional and behavioral disorders.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. The important thing at the moment is to defeat this common-flu-like pestilence that has no significant effect on age-adjusted death rates, and the mortality profile of which is more or less identical to the normal mortality profile, but which has nonetheless left the global corporatocracy no choice but to “lock down” the entire planet, plunge millions into desperate poverty, order everyone to wear medical-looking masks, unleash armed goon squads to raid people’s homes, and otherwise transform society into a pathologized-totalitarian nightmare. And, of course, the only way to do that (i.e., save humanity from a flu-like bug) is to coercively vaccinate every single human being on the planet Earth!
OK, you’re probably thinking that doesn’t make much sense, this crusade to vaccinate the entire species against a relatively standard respiratory virus, but that’s just because you are still thinking critically. You really need to stop thinking like that. As The New York Times just pointed out, “critical thinking isn’t helping.” In fact, it might be symptomatic of one of those “disorders” I just mentioned above. Critical thinking leads to “vaccine hesitancy,” which is why corporations are working with governments to immediately censor any and all content that deviates from the official Covid-19 narrative and deplatform the authors of such content, or discredit them as “anti-vax disinformationists.”
For example, Children’s Health Defense, which has been reporting on so-called “adverse events” and deaths in connection with the Covid vaccines, despite the fact that, according to the authorities, “there are no safety problems with the vaccines” and “there is no link between Covid-19 vaccines and those who die after receiving them.” In fact, according to the “fact-checkers” at Reuters, these purported “reports of adverse events” “may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable!”
Yes, you’re reading between the lines right. The corporate media can’t come right out and say it, but it appears the “anti-vax disinformationists” are fabricating “adverse events” out of whole cloth and hacking them into the VAERS database and other such systems around the world. Worse, they are somehow infiltrating these made-up stories into the mainstream media in order to lure people into “vaccine hesitancy” and stop us from vaccinating every man, woman, and child in the physical universe, repeatedly, on an ongoing basis, for as long as the “medical experts” deem necessary.
Here are just a few examples of their handiwork …
- In Norway, 23 elderly people died after receiving the Pfizer vaccine. However, according to Reuters’ “fact-checkers,” it turns out, old people just die sometimes, especially in nursing homes, from a variety of causes … unless they haven’t been vaccinated, in which case they definitely died of Covid, regardless of what they actually died of. For example, a 99-year-old man suffering from dementia and emphysema, who tested negative for the virus three times, was added to the “Covid deaths” figures because a nursing home doctor “assumed” it was Covid (which GloboCap has expressly instructed him to do).
- In Germany, 13 of 40 residents of one nursing home died after being vaccinated, but this was just a “tragic coincidence,” which had absolutely nothing to do with the vaccine.
- In Spain, in another “tragic coincidence,” 46 nursing home residents who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine died within the course of one month. A further 28 of the 94 residents and 12 staff members subsequently tested positive.
- In Florida, a healthy middle-aged doctor died from an unusual blood disorder two weeks after receiving the vaccine, but, according to the experts, the sudden onset of this rare immunological blood disorder (i.e., immune thrombocytopenia) “should not be interpreted as linked to the vaccine,” and was probably just a total coincidence.
- In California, a 60-year-old X-ray technologist received a second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. A few hours later he had trouble breathing. He was hospitalized and died four days later. His widow says she’s not ready at this point to link her husband’s death to the vaccine. “I’m not putting any blame on Pfizer,” she said, “or on any other pharmaceutical company.” So, probably just another coincidence.
- A 78-year-old woman in California died immediately after being vaccinated, but her death was not related to the vaccine, health officials assured the public. “(She) received an injection of the Covid-19 vaccine manufactured by Pfizer around noon. While seated in the observation area after the injection, [she] complained of feeling discomfort and while being evaluated by medical personnel she lost consciousness.” Despite the sudden death of his wife, her husband intends to receive a second dose.
- A former Detroit news anchor died just one day after receiving the vaccine, but it was probably just a coincidental stroke, which the “normal side effects of the vaccine may have masked.”
- Also in Michigan, a 90-year-old man died the day after receiving the vaccine, but, again, this was just a tragic coincidence. As Dr. David Gorski explained, “the baseline death rate of 90-year-olds is high because they’re 90 years old,” which makes perfect sense … unless, of course, they died of Covid, in which case their age and underlying conditions make absolutely no difference whatsoever.
- In Kentucky, two nuns at a monastery died, and more than two dozen others tested positive, in a sudden “Covid-19 outbreak” that began two days after the nuns were vaccinated. The monastery had been completely closed to visitors and Covid-free up to that point, but the nuns were old and had “health issues,” and so on.
- In Virginia, a 58-year-old grandmother died within hours after receiving the vaccine, but, as Facebook’s “fact checkers” prominently pointed out, it had to be just another coincidence, because the “vaccines have been tested for safety extensively.”
And then there are all the people on Facebook sharing their stories of loved ones who have died shortly after receiving the Covid vaccine, who the Facebook “fact checkers” are doing their utmost to discredit with their official-looking “fact-check notices.” For example …
OK, I realize it’s uncomfortable to have to face things like that (i.e., global corporations like Facebook implying that these people are lying or are using the sudden deaths of their loved ones to discourage others from getting vaccinated), especially if you’re just trying to follow orders and parrot official propaganda … even the most fanatical Covidian Cultists probably still have a shred of human empathy buried deep in their cold little hearts. But there’s an information war on, folks! You’re either with the Corporatocracy or against it! This is no time to get squeamish, or, you know, publicly exhibit an ounce of compassion. What would your friends and colleagues think of you?!
No, report these anti-vaxxers to the authorities, shout them down on social media, switch off your critical-thinking faculties, and get in line to get your vaccination! The fate of the human species depends on it! And, if you’re lucky, maybe GloboCap will even give you one of these nifty numerical Covid-vaccine tattoos for free!
#
House Democrats, Targeting Right-Wing Cable Outlets, Are Assaulting Core Press Freedoms
By Glenn Greenwald | February 23, 2021
Not even two months into their reign as the majority party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress, key Democrats have made clear that one of their top priorities is censorship of divergent voices. On Saturday, I detailed how their escalating official campaign to coerce and threaten social media companies into more aggressively censoring views that they dislike — including by summoning social media CEOs to appear before them for the third time in less than five months — is implicating, if not already violating, core First Amendment rights of free speech.
Now they are going further — much further. The same Democratic House Committee that is demanding greater online censorship from social media companies now has its sights set on the removal of conservative cable outlets, including Fox News, from the airwaves.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday announced a February 24 hearing, convened by one of its sub-committees, entitled “Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media.” Claiming that “the spread of disinformation and extremism by traditional news media presents a tangible and destabilizing threat,” the Committee argues: “Some broadcasters’ and cable networks’ increasing reliance on conspiracy theories and misleading or patently false information raises questions about their devotion to journalistic integrity.”
Since when is it the role of the U.S. Government to arbitrate and enforce precepts of “journalistic integrity”? Unless you believe in the right of the government to regulate and control what the press says — a power which the First Amendment explicitly prohibits — how can anyone be comfortable with members of Congress arrogating unto themselves the power to dictate what media outlets are permitted to report and control how they discuss and analyze the news of the day?
But what House Democrats are doing here is far more insidious than what is revealed by that creepy official announcement. Two senior members of that Committee, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Silicon-Valley) and Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) also sent their own letters to seven of the nation’s largest cable providers — Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox and Altice — as well as to digital distributors of cable news (Roku, Amazon, Apple, Google and Hulu) demanding to know, among other things, what those cable distributors did to prevent conservative “disinformation” prior to the election and after — disinformation, they said, that just so happened to be spread by the only conservative cable outlets: Fox, Newsmax and OANN.
In case there was any doubt about their true goal — coercing these cable providers to remove all cable networks that feature conservative voices, including Fox (just as their counterparts on that Committee want to ban right-wing voices from social media) — the House Democrats in their letter said explicitly what they are after: namely, removal of those conservative outlets by these cable providers:
Congresswoman Eshoo boasted on her official site about these efforts, lauding herself and McNerney for “urging 12 cable, satellite, and streaming TV companies to combat the spread of misinformation and requesting more information about their actions to address misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies spread through channels they host.”
For the last four years, we were inundated with media messaging that Trump posed an unprecedented threat to press freedoms. The Washington Post even flamboyantly adopted a new motto to implicitly ratify that accusation (while claiming it was not Trump-specific). Other than the indictment of Julian Assange — which most Washington Democrats cheered — what did the Trump administration do in the way of attacking press freedoms that remotely compares to Democrats abusing their majoritarian power to force the removal of conservative cable outlets from the airwaves, just days after doing the same with dissident voices online?
There is not a peep of protest from any liberal journalists. Do any of the people who spent four years pretending to care so deeply about the vital role of press freedom have anything to say about this full frontal attack by the majority party in Washington on news outlets opposed to their political agenda and ideology?
Evidently not. While many conservative outlets are covering this story, it is difficult to find any liberal outlets writing about it at all. An article from The New York Times was one exception, though it largely attempted to justify these censorship efforts, with paragraph after paragraph purporting to demonstrate the dangerous misinformation spread by these channels. The only nods to the dangers for press freedoms in the article came from statements by Fox News and a GOP member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Revealingly, these same two members of Congress who sent this threatening letter to cable providers said during the Trump years that freedom of the press must be safeguarded at all costs. “The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making laws that abridge the freedom of the press, and we cherish our country’s culture of free expression,” they intoned when writing to the FCC in 2019 to complain that Russian news outlets were concealing their affiliation with the Kremlin. “We’re not requesting any press censorship,” they assured the FCC under Trump. Yet they are clearly doing exactly that now.
In a statement he emailed to me and publicly posted, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr denounced the Democrats’ actions as a “marked departure from First Amendment norms.” He said “it is a chilling transgression of the free speech rights that every media outlet in this country enjoys.” In response to my inquiries, Commissioner Carr added in a separate statement to me:
The greatest threat to free speech in America today is not any law passed by the government—the First Amendment stands as a strong bulwark against that form of censorship by state action. The threat comes in the form of legislating by letterhead. Politicians have realized that they can silence the speech of those with different political viewpoints by public bullying. The letter sent by two senior Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee to cable companies and other regulated entities, and the Committee’s own hearing this week on “disinformation in the media,” are the latest examples. They are singling out selected newsrooms for their coverage of political events and sending a clear message that these media outlets will pay a price if they do not align their viewpoints with Democrat orthodoxy. That is a chilling transgression of free speech and journalistic freedom. No government official has any business inquiring about the ‘moral principles’ that guide a private entity’s decision about what news to carry.
Carr’s GOP colleague on the FCC, Commissioner Nathan Simington, similarly accused House Democrats of seeking to “intimidate into silence those who would distribute on their platforms disfavored points of view.”
The way Democrats justify this to themselves is important to consider. They do not, of course, explicitly acknowledge that they are engaged in authoritarian assaults on free speech and a free press. Not even the most despotic tyrants like to think of themselves in that way. All tyrants concoct theories and excuses to justify their censorship as noble and necessary.
Indeed, the justifying script Democrats are using here is the one most commonly employed by autocrats around the world to silence their critics. Those they seek to silence are not merely expressing a different view, but are dangerous. They are not merely advocating alternative ideologies but are destabilizing society with lies, fake news, and speech that deliberately incites violence, subversion and domestic terrorism.
In her boastful posting, Rep. Eshoo says her efforts targeting these cable outlets are necessary because “misinformation on TV has led to our current polluted information environment that radicalizes individuals to commit seditious acts and rejects public health best practices, among other issues in our public discourse.” This is the rationale invoked by virtually every repressive state to imprison journalists and ban media outlets.
The Democrats sound a great deal like the Egyptian regime of Gen. Abdel el-Sisi. Just two weeks ago, Sisi’s regime finally released an Al Jazeera journalist who had been imprisoned for four years based on accusations that he had “spread false news” and was guilty of “incitement against state institutions and broadcasting false news with the aim of spreading chaos.” Sound familiar? It should, since that is precisely what House Democrats are saying to ennoble their multi-pronged assault on free expression.
International Federation of Journalists, Feb. 5, 2021
Accusing one’s domestic opponents of being subversives and domestic terrorists is by far the most common way that despots on every continent justify their censorship and silencing campaigns of oppositional media outlets. In 2014, the French journalist Valeria Costa-Kostritsky warned in the Index on Censorship that anti-terrorism laws and accusations of promoting subversion were becoming the primary means which authoritarian states from Turkey and Jordan to Russia and the UAE use to justify the silencing of journalists:
Anti-terror legislation seems to be the perfect tool for a state seeking to crack down on opposition. “It’s so elusive. You can [see] anything as terrorist propaganda. There needn’t be any evidence of violence, any praise of violence. Plus, if you blame someone for having a connection with the [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] the public buys that argument easily, especially in a country that is suffering from terrorism, as Turkey is,” said Sevgi Akarçeşme, former editor-in-chief of Turkey’s Today’s Zaman (the English-language edition of daily Zaman), who had her newspaper taken over by the government in March 2016.
A similar means used by repressive governments to silence disfavored media outlets is to claim they are promoting “extremism.” As Costa-Kostritsky detailed:
There’s another word one can use to browse through reports published on the [Mapping Media Freedom] map: “extremism”. Anti-extremism legislation is used to intimidate journalists in post-Soviet countries, particularly in Russia. On the map, of the 35 incidents flagged with “extremism”, 11 took place in Russia, and seven in Crimea, others include Belgium, Italy, Hungary, France and Spain. Five reports connecting the media to “extremism” took place during the first half of 2016. They include website closures and journalists being put on a list of extremists. In Russia, most cases using anti-extremism legislations against journalists happen via Roskomnadzor, the national media regulator.
When China arrests journalists it typically justifies its actions by accusing them of fomenting extremism that jeopardizes national security.
And accusing journalists of spreading “fake news” — always a dangerously vague term from its inception — is equally commonplace when government authorities want to silence media outlets. The Washington Post reported that “as 2019 draws to a close, there are 30 journalists in jail worldwide on charges of ‘false news’ — or, as it’s also called these days, ‘fake news.’” In sum:
It has now become commonplace to throw around fake-news accusations in the United States. But in other countries around the world — like Egypt, Turkey, Somalia and Cameroon — such charges can have very chilling and stifling impacts on the press, according to an annual report by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
In Egypt — where General-turned-President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi has been overseeing a crackdown that human rights groups say is harsher than any before — there are 21 journalists in jail for allegedly publishing “false news,” according to the CPJ’s data. In practice, press freedom advocates say, these charges stem from a simple fact: The journalists published news that Sisi didn’t like.
In a passage that the Post would only publish about foreign countries but never about House Democrats, even though it now applies equally, they observed: “There is a serious global problem of disinformation spreading online and sowing distrust and sectarianism. The problem, say press advocates, is that the laws regulating fake news all too often are a means of stifling the media rather than fostering a more transparent environment online.”
This framework is hardly rare in the west either. When the Obama administration collaborated with the UK Government in 2013 to detain my husband David Miranda at Heathrow Airport in connection with the work he was doing in the Snowden reporting, they cited an anti-terrorism law to justify his detention, and repeatedly threatened to prosecute him for terrorism if he did not cooperate by providing all of his passwords to them. He ultimately prevailed in his lawsuit against the U.K. Government on the ground that it constitutes an illegal assault on press freedoms and human rights to abuse anti-terrorism frameworks to intimidate or silence journalists.
Justifying the silencing of journalists by accusing them of inciting domestic terrorism and extremism is now the most common means used globally for censorsing the press. The Committee to Protect Journalists in 2013 said they had “tracked a significant rise in journalist imprisonments.” The culprit, said the group, was “the expansion of anti-terrorism and national security laws worldwide” after the 9/11 attack, which had been repeatedly abused to criminalize media outlets. “The number of journalists jailed worldwide hit 232 in 2012, 132 of whom were held on anti-terror or other national security charges.” In sum: “CPJ’s analysis has found that governments have exploited these laws to silence critical journalists.”
Are there conspiracy theories and disinformation sometimes found on the conservative cable outlets which House Democrats want taken off the air? Of course there are: all media outlets disseminate conspiracy theories and fake news at times. MSNBC and CNN spent four years endorsing the most deranged conspiracy theory imaginable, one with very toxic roots in the Cold War: namely, the McCarthyite script that the Kremlin had taken over control of key U.S. institutions through sexual blackmail over the President, invasions into the nation’s heating system and electric grid, and criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the Trump campaign to hack into Democrats’ emails.
All of that was false, just as the one-month tale told over and over by the media about a pro-Trump mob murdering Brian Sicknick by bludgeoning him to death with a fire extinguisher was false — a story which remains unretracted or corrected by most who spread it.
Just imagine if, during the Trump years, the GOP Senate had abused its power to bully cable outlets into removing MSNBC from their platforms, or banning liberal journalists and activists from using social media platforms, on the grounds that they were spreading conspiracy theories and fake news. It is hard to overstate how extreme the rhetoric would have been that Trump and the Republicans were engaged in authoritarian measures to destroy free speech and a free press.
And I would have joined in those denunciations (as I did with the Assange prosecution): as much as I loathe so much of what those outlets do, it is not the role of the government to regulate let alone silence them. The corrective is for journalists to rebuild trust and faith with the public by exposing their misinformation and proving to the public that they will do accurate and reliable reporting regardless of which faction is aggrandized or angered.
But corporate media outlets and Democrats (excuse the redundancy) who spent the last four years posturing as virulent defenders of press freedoms never meant it. Like so much of what they claimed to believe, it was fraudulent. The proof is that they are now mute, if not supportive, as Democrats use their status as majority party to launch an assault against press freedoms far more egregious than anything Trump got close to doing.
Florida Wins the Lockdown Science War – Hands Down
Ivor Cummins | February 18, 2021
Self explanatory: Florida is an exemplar of applied scientific thinking.
Please share widely to help the people understand the basics. Also please download the vid right here: https://we.tl/t-8A21PY5MM6 – and upload everywhere.
NOTE: My extensive research and interviewing / video/sound editing and much more does require support – please consider helping if you can with monthly donation to support me directly, or one-off payment: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_…
Alternatively join up with my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IvorCummins
Democrats ask cable operators why they don’t CENSOR Fox News, OAN & Newsmax
RT | February 22, 2021
In a move condemned by Republicans as a “troubling” attack on free press, Democrats have asked cable and digital operators to justify carrying Fox News, OAN and Newsmax ahead of a hearing on media “disinformation and extremism.”
“Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, OANN, and Newsmax on your platform both now and beyond the renewal date?” a letter sent Monday by California Democrats Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney asked major cable and digital TV providers in the US.
“If so, why?”
The letter was addressed to cable and satellite providers Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox and Altice, as well as digital carriers Amazon, Apple, Google, Hulu and Roku.
Eshoo and McNerney also asked what steps the providers took prior to and after the November 3, 2020 election and the January 6 Capitol riot “to monitor, respond to, and reduce the spread of disinformation, including encouragement or incitement of violence by channels your company disseminates to millions of Americans?”
This was a reference to the three networks giving space to President Donald Trump and his supporters to make accusations of irregularities in the 2020 election, which the Democrats have blamed for what they claim was an “insurrection” at the Capitol.
McNerney and Eshoo sit on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, whose subcommittee on Communications and Technology is scheduled to hold a hearing on “traditional media’s role in promoting disinformation and extremism” on Wednesday. While the subcommittee did not name any names, they said the “increasing reliance on conspiracy theories and misleading or patently false information” at some networks “raises questions about their devotion to journalistic integrity.”
The letter attracted the attention of Brendan Carr, the lone Republican on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), who condemned it as “a chilling transgression” of free speech rights in the US.
Democrats are “sending a message that is as clear as it is troubling—these regulated entities will pay a price if the targeted newsrooms do not conform to Democrats’ preferred political narratives,” Carr added.
A newsroom’s decision about which stories to cover and how “should be beyond the reach of any government official, not targeted by them,” Carr argued, asking his FCC colleagues to “join me in publicly denouncing this attempt to stifle political speech and independent news judgment.” As of Monday afternoon, they have not done so.
Democrats are “saying it explicitly” that they want to “police and censor both social media and cable news,” journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted on Monday, as the issue came up during the Senate confirmation hearings of Merrick Garland, nominated to serve as attorney general in the Biden administration.
While the menacing letter to cable operators may not have said so explicitly, the lawmakers appeared to be contrasting their supposed inaction with the sweeping restrictions social media companies such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube imposed on their users prior and following the election, including the ban on President Trump and pre-labeling any claims about election results or integrity as false.
Reporting on the Eshoo-McNerney letter, the New York Times approvingly noted that while “defamation lawsuits filed by private companies have taken the lead in the fight against disinformation promoted on some cable channels,” pointing to Dominion Voting Systems suing Trump lawyers who appeared on the three networks, as well as pillow manufacturer Mike Lindell.
The First Amendment of the US Constitution explicitly prohibits Congress from restricting freedom of religion, speech, and press. Though this is presumably a fundamental American value, of the kind President Joe Biden said would guide his policies, the US embassy in Ukraine cheered earlier this month when the government in Kiev banned several local TV networks, saying it was a proper move to “counter Russia’s malign influence.”
Irish “Journalist” Calls For Martial Law To Achieve Zero Covid
By Richie Allen | February 22, 2021
Sunday Times columnist David Quinn Tweeted last night that Martial Law may be needed in Ireland, to achieve zero Covid. Quinn said;
Watching the very large numbers out and about and hearing anecdotal evidence of people starting to meet again in each other’s houses, I see no way short of martial law of us achieving zero-Covid.
Just to be clear, Quinn is suggesting that a military government may need to be imposed in Ireland and the law suspended in order to keep people in their homes. Yes, a journalist is mooting the idea of stationing troops on Ireland’s highways and byways, to force people into their homes and ensure they remain inside.
As of this morning, Ireland’s National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) says that Ireland has had a total of 215,000 coronavirus cases and 4,136 deaths. Three weeks ago (Friday January 29th), The Irish Times reported that:
… more than eight out of 10 people who have died as a result of Covid-19 have had an underlying condition, most commonly chronic heart disease…..
The most common underlying condition was chronic heart disease which accounted for 43 per cent of those fatalities or 967 cases in total.
This was followed by chronic neurological disease such as dementia (771), hypertension (520), chronic respiratory disease (450), chronic kidney disease (281), diabetes (389), chronic liver disease (46) and obesity (body-mass index above 40) 47…
Of those who died with an underlying condition, 66 per cent had one, 678 had two and 355 had three or more co-morbidities.
The mortality statistics underline the importance of vaccinating vulnerable cohorts in the population. More than 63 per cent of all deaths (1,720) were in people over 80.
The average age of someone dying with Covid in Ireland is somewhere between 83 and 86, depending on which newspaper you read. And of course we should never forget that dying with doesn’t mean dying of. This is a scam. There is no pandemic. It has been thoroughly debunked, using our collective governments own data.
Rather than eviscerate the Irish government and the medical goons advising it, David Quinn, who claims to be a journalist, would rather call for Martial Law. And the beat goes on.
UK Police Forced to Respond After Ad Claimed “Being Offensive is an Offence”
By Paul Joseph Watson | InfoWars | February 22nd 2021
Merseyside Police were forced to respond after officers took part in an electronic ad campaign outside a supermarket which claimed “being offensive is an offence,” with authorities later clarifying that it is in fact not an offence.
Over the weekend, the mobile electronic billboard was parked outside an Asda supermarket for a PR campaign.
“Being offensive is an offence” states the ad, which features a police badge superimposed over an LGBT rainbow flag.
“Merseyside Police stand with and support the LGBTQI+ community, we will not tolerate hate crime on any level. Come and speak to #TeamBeb,” states the text on the ad.
The billboard received a huge backlash, with many people pointing out that it is in fact not a criminal offence to be offensive.
Merseyside Police were forced to later clarify in a statement that “being an offensive is not in itself an offence.”
Maybe they should have realized that before putting it in big letters on the side of a van.
The force said that the ad was intended to “encourage people to report hate crime” and “although well intentioned was incorrect and we apologise for any confusion this may have caused.”
Although being “offensive” isn’t illegal in the UK, there is a crime of being “grossly offensive,” but that carries with it a high bar to reach court and is very hard to prove.
As a result of underfunding, police forces in the UK are struggling to keep up with rising crime rates. Back in 2015, the head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council said that officers would be unable to attend some burglaries.
This has led to widespread criticism that authorities are too fixated on policing thought crimes while actual crimes are being ignored.
“Are there no problems with gun or knife crime in Merseyside then?” asked Nigel Farage.
Biden Launches Campaign to Silence Critics of Killer Vaccine
By Mike Whitney | Unz Review | February 21, 2021
Imagine if an ordinary working man went on a rampage and killed 929 people and maimed 316 others. The media would naturally call such a man a serial killer or a homicidal maniac. Now imagine if a big pharmaceutical company did the same thing by releasing a vaccine that killed and maimed a similar number people. Would the drug company be treated the same as the working guy? Would their product be denounced as a “killer vaccine” and shunned by the public, or would they be praised on the cable news channels, provided lavish funding by the government, granted full immunity from liability for personal injury, waved through the regulatory process, and had the red carpet rolled out for their spectacular nationwide “Product Launch” extravaganza?
(NOTE: “According to new data released today, as of Feb. 12, 15,923 adverse reactions to COVID vaccines, including 929 deaths, have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) since Dec. 14, 2020.” Children’s Health Defense)
And what about the small number of critics who don’t see the vaccine as a life-saving wonder drug but who seriously believe it is a gene-altering experimental concoction that was not sufficiently tested, did not go through the normal protocols, has not met long-term safety standards, excluded critical animal testing trials, and uses toxic synthetics that can trigger anaphylaxis, Bell’s Palsy, miscarriage, Antibody-dependent Enhancement (ADE) and a score of other potentially-lethal or debilitating long-term ailments that have not yet been diagnosed since the vaccine was rushed into service at breakneck speed?
What about these vaccine critics, what rights do they have? Do they have the right to speak their minds and express their concerns on social media or should they be smeared, castigated, blacklisted, censored and dragged through the mud?
In a free country, it is the vaccine manufacturers that should be scrutinized, lambasted and taken to task for the shortcomings or lethality of their product, but not in America. In America, it is the vaccine critics that are being condemned and targeted by the state. According to an article in the New York Post, the Biden Administration is joining forces with Big Tech to actively seek out and eliminate those people who challenge the official narrative and who reject the idea of inoculating the entire population with a dodgy experimental vaccine that poses a clear threat to one’s safety and well-being. Here’s an excerpt from the article in the Post :
The White House is asking social media companies to clamp down on chatter that deviates from officially distributed COVID-19 information as part of President Biden’s “wartime effort” to vanquish the coronavirus.
A senior administration official tells Reuters that the Biden administration is asking Facebook, Twitter and Google to help prevent anti-vaccine fears from going viral, as distrust of the inoculations emerges as a major barrier in the fight against the deadly virus.
“Disinformation that causes vaccine hesitancy is going to be a huge obstacle to getting everyone vaccinated and there are no larger players in that than the social media platforms,” the White House source told the news agency.
The news out of Washington is the first sign that officials are directly engaged with Silicon Valley in censoring social media users; Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain previously said the administration would try to work with major media companies on the issue….
Social media leaders have vowed to squash anti-vaccine “disinformation” on their platforms, but the spreading of such content has persisted....
A Twitter spokesman said the company is “in regular communication with the White House on a number of critical issues including COVID-19 misinformation.” (White House working with social media giants to silence anti-vaxxers”, New York Post )
So, what’s going on here? Why has the government joined with big tech to actively target people who do not accept the ‘official doctrine’ regarding the new vaccines?
It’s simple, isn’t it? The government wants to control want you think by controlling what you read. You see, the oligarchs who control the government behind the mask of the political parties, assume you are an ignorant beast incapable of critical thinking. They believe that your opinions are shaped by the things you read, therefore, they want to control what you read in order to push and prod and coerce you into the behavior that helps them achieve their malign objectives. In this case, they want everyone to submit to vaccination so they can reduce global population in order to curtail carbon emissions that, they believe, are a dire threat to human survival. This, of course, is just my own lunatic conspiracy theory. Nevertheless, the question remains the same: Does the government have the right to shut me up or do I have the right to speak my mind?
According to the report above, I do not have the right to speak my mind, in fact, the government is now explicitly taking aim at people like me who–they feel– are undermining the strategic agenda of the big money elites they work for.
What are we to make of this? What are we to make of this new alliance between the State and big tech or the State and big pharma or the State and Wall Street? Are we no longer a country that is “of, by and for the people” or are we edging closer to Mussolini’s definition of “fascism” as “the merging of the state and the corporation?” It seems to me that Mussolini’s definition is much more applicable.
And what does this tell us about the way the Biden administration plans to conduct business in the future?
It tells us that Joe Biden is essentially the corporate meat-puppet that he’s been for the last 5 decades and, that now, he intends to cancel vast swaths of the Bill of Rights to accommodate his deep-pocket managers. No one should be surprised by this. Biden has always been the Establishment’s best friend.
But do the oligarchs and corporate honchos really gain anything by silencing their critics?
Perhaps, after all, China has experienced exponential growth in the last two decades and, presumably, that is the model of governance our rulers now seek; absolute dictatorial power that allows the people who own the primary industries and businesses to arbitrarily set policy and impose their own laws independent of any democratic process.
Are we there yet?
Well, if the state is able to shut us up and remove us from public platforms, we’re a helluva lot closer than anyone thought.
France: Macron Government Looks to Outlaw More Anti-Immigration Activist Groups
By Eric Striker | National Justice | February 20, 2021
Two Jewish organizations in France, CRIF (Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions) and LICRA (International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism), are lobbying the embattled Emmanuel Macron government into beginning the process of outlawing Generation Identitaire (GI), a group that uses art and symbolic gestures to protest against globalization and immigration.
According to French media, Macron and a wide variety of Jewish groups believe that outlawing GI and other “far-right” groups could be useful in undermining Marine Le Pen’s 2022 electoral prospects.
The government in France has been aggressively disbanding nationalist groups in recent years. In 2019, the CRIF pressured the Macron government into moving forward on banning Bastion Social, a patriotic group made up mostly of students that advocated for the ethnic French poor, after its members defended themselves from repeated attacks by criminals and anarchists. Bastion Social’s headquarters in Lyons, which sought to provide shelter to the homeless, was raided and closed down by the police.
While the media repeatedly links Le Pen to GI’s publicity efforts that bring attention to the immigration problem in Europe, she has prohibited members of her party, Le Rassemblement national (RN), from protesting in defense of GI’s right to advocacy. Her father, Jean Marie Le Pen, has publicly condemned her for the decision.
Starting in 2011, Le Pen has purged numerous members — including her own father — for opposing homosexuality, Zionism, or a variety of other positions. This has allowed her party to receive somewhat friendlier treatment in some circles of the French elite, most notably BFM TV which is controlled by the Jewish plutocrat Alain Weill.
Le Pen’s shift away from an ethnic grounded nationalism towards a more liberal type focused on the effects of Islamic culture has helped her party avoid banishment and state pressure, but Macron has cynically capitalized on this. Macron has been aggressively campaigning against Islam after the brutal murder of a liberal French teacher, leaving Le Pen vulnerable to being outflanked on her main issue in next year’s election.
As for GI, much of the commotion created around them is based on lies. The organization specifically bans “anti-Semites” from membership, but this did not stop Zionist groups from inventing a brazen lie, claiming that they were chanting “dirty Jews” at one of their events (video emerged showing that the people chanting this were counter-protesters).
While Macron and his supporters have recently condemned the influence of anti-white American culture in their educational system, there is no reason to believe they are sincere. In France, the native majority is regularly persecuted for advocating for their own interests, particularly when their interests clash with the local Jewish power structure.
Featured Video
Fat Fiction
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Anti-science
The infinite list
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | October 12, 2022
Almost three years ago science entered a new dark age.
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, seems to agree. He has been compiling a list of the examples of anti-science we have unfortunately become used to.
I have listed his thoughts so far but the list is continually expanding... continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Israel threatens Gaza flotilla activists with death after abduction
- Met refuses to probe British nationals accused of war crimes in Gaza
- Hezbollah denies activity in Syria amid persistent and false claims
- Melkite bishops concerned over Israeli demolitions in South Lebanon
- Israel’s Obliteration Ecocide from Gaza to Lebanon and Beyond
- UAE deports tens of thousands of Pakistanis, seizes their savings amid war on Iran: Report
- Wheels Down in Tbilisi: Was a Routine U.S. Military Stopover a Deliberate Signal to Iran?
- Trump’s second strike on Iran would be suicidal. But that’s not the reason why he won’t go ahead with it
- Palantir touts record expansion and ‘battlefield’ AI value
- Israeli telecom networks used for mass surveillance across countries
- If Americans Knew
- An All-American Retort to Israel’s Invasion of Lebanon
- How Dr. Adam Hamawy’s experience as a surgeon in Gaza inspired him to run for Congress
- Under Trump, Green Card Seekers Face New Scrutiny for Views on Israel
- With World Distracted by War, Extremist Settlers Intensify Attacks in West Bank
- Israel’s brutality toward Gaza flotilla activists – 3 articles
- “Spitting and humiliation are daily. People are afraid to walk in Jerusalem with Christian symbols.”
- How the US-Israel Relationship Weakens America and Harms the World
- 1 in 5 amputees in Gaza is a child, UN warns amid prosthetic care crisis
- 6,000 Gazans lack prosthetic and/or rehabilitation care – Daily Update
- As in Gaza, Israel is targeting rescue workers in South Lebanon, killing more than 100 since March
- No Tricks Zone
- 46 IPCC Scientists Break Rank, Publicly Challenge Long-Standing Dogmatic Climate Claims
- Another Study Links Warming To Cloud Forcing, Shortwave Radiation, Natural Atmospheric Circulation
- Wind Energy Is Toxic, Hazardous To Human Health, Scientific Review Shows
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
Aletho News 