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Censorship-happy Twitter suddenly concerned about ‘public conversation’ as Russia cracks down on illegal content

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | March 11, 2021

Twitter’s complaints about Russian regulators slowing down its traffic would be a lot more credible if the platform hadn’t been so eager to turn into a partisan echo chamber and place itself above the law in its own homeland.

On Wednesday, Russia began throttling Twitter as a way of pressuring the San Francisco-based company to remove over 3,100 posts found to be in violation of Russian law. Specifically, this includes 450 instances of child pornography and more than 2,500 incitements to underage suicide.

Twitter responded by saying it was “deeply concerned by increased attempts to block and throttle online public conversation.”

It’s more than a bit disturbing that Twitter considers child porn and calls to suicide “public conversation.” The former is illegal in the US as well, and both are against their own terms of service.

Twitter might argue that it’s based in the US and that the First Amendment of the American Constitution protects the free speech of everyone on their platform – except we all know that for them to do so would be the height of hypocrisy.

Back in May 2018, a US federal judge defined Twitter as a “designated public forum,” ruling that then-President Donald Trump has no right to block hostile users, not even from the official presidential account but from his personal one. That would violate the law, and “no government official is above the law,” argued Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald.

Judge Buchwald was curiously silent when Twitter decided it was above the law, banning Trump’s account while he was still the sitting president in January 2021, on the basis of how his tweets might be “received and interpreted.”

Trump’s tweets “must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence,” Twitter argued, citing his “pattern of behavior” to argue that they amount to  “glorification of violence.”

Before removing the account and all its content altogether, Twitter – as well as Facebook and YouTube – outright deleted Trump’s video messages in which he called for his supporters to stay peaceful and respect law and order. Now that those are gone, the only narrative out there is the one pushed by mainstream media and Democrats, who claim Trump “incited insurrection” at the Capitol on January 6.

In the run-up to the 2020 US election, Twitter locked out the New York Post over a legitimate story about Hunter Biden and Ukraine; slapped a label insisting that massive changes to voting procedures were “safe and secure” – by sheer coincidence, in line with the effort to “fortify” the vote and ensure the “proper” outcome – and labeled any questions about the result as “disputed” before eventually banning those who asked them.

Twitter has since degenerated into a partisan echo chamber, where political trends are without exception the Democrat talking points of the day, often astroturfed by paid activists. Ostensibly a platform and not a publisher, their “What’s happening” sidebar editorializes constantly.

For example, earlier this week President Joe Biden seemed unable to remember the name or title of his defense secretary, who was standing right behind him. Through the lens of Twitter, that became the story of that one time Trump called the Apple CEO Tim Cook “Tim Apple,” as that’s what “people” were ostensibly talking about instead. Public square? More like loudspeakers blaring official propaganda from every lamppost.

They’re not the only Silicon Valley company to think itself above the law, or more powerful than entire countries. Witness the recent showdown between Facebook and Australia, in which Mark Zuckerberg sought to bully Canberra into abandoning plans to force online platforms to pay for news content. Perhaps Jack Dorsey is thinking he can do the same with Moscow.

Whatever the outcome of this showdown, don’t let anyone gaslight you into thinking it has anything to do with freedom of “online public conversation.” Free speech was a fundamental value of the American Republic, but that is manifestly no longer the case in the entity that has now replaced it, better known as Our Democracy. Silicon Valley supported this revolutionary change. It is now merely reaping what it has sown.

Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator

March 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

Feds Indict Own Informant As Gretchen Whitmer Kidnapping Case Unravels

By Eric Striker | National Justice | March 11, 2021

Federal prosecutors are charging a key informant in the case against a group of Michigan militia members who the FBI claims were plotting to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer last fall.

Stephen J. Robeson, a 58-year-old man from Wisconsin, was indicted on March 3rd by a grand jury for being a felon in possession of a .50 caliber sniper rifle. Robeson is known in political circles for his over the top violent rhetoric. He was recently exposed in court as a paid FBI asset that shows up to First and Second Amendment themed protests in the trademark “Boogaloo” Hawaiian shirt.

According to a report by Detroit News, Robeson was one of the main instigators behind the entrapment of members of the Wolverine Watchmen militia in a whimsical scheme to abduct Whitmer. The timing of the arrest was perceived in some circles to be a dirty political trick by federal agents wanting to create bad publicity for Donald Trump right before the 2020 election.

Court documents show that Robeson infiltrated the militia on orders of the FBI during a meeting of Second Amendment enthusiasts in Dublin, Ohio. It was at the Ohio meetup that, with heavy input from Robeson, more than a dozen men allegedly led by a mentally ill homeless man named Adam Fox began concocting their plan. Robeson then attended a subsequent tactical training camp in Northern Michigan that prosecutors say was in preparation for snatching Whitmer from her nearby vacation home.

Multiple informants and undercover agents were involved in pushing the defendants in the case to take part in the conspiracy as well as furthering it along. Robeson was singled out by Josh Blanchard, the defense attorney of Barry Croft, for using his material resources and heavy peer pressure to try and get the men to talk about storming Whitmer’s home and abducting her.

Generally speaking, FBI informants are given carte blanche to engage in crimes and dangerous activities. Most FBI informants are career criminals introduced into law-abiding political organizations in order to cause strife and gin up phony terror plots. Federal prosecutors are burning Robeson likely out of fear that he will burden their case at trial. While it may be a bit trickier, defense attorney’s can still call Robeson to the stand to undermine the Feds’ case even if they do not plan to use his testimony.

Last January, prosecutors were able to compel 25-year-old Ty Garbin to become a cooperating witness in exchange for a plea. This may be their best hope for salvaging the case.

Washington’s thirst for white terrorists has compelled the FBI and DoJ to lower their professional standards to an almost untenable degree. Representative Jamie Raskin, who is a Jewish activist, is ordering FBI Director Christopher Wray to provide a briefing on “white supremacists” in the police and military by this Tuesday, suggesting that government persecution of patriotic militia groups is about to intensify even further.

The case is scheduled to go to trial on October 12th.

March 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , | Leave a comment

Michigan health department hit with lawsuit over refusal to share nursing home data comparable to Cuomo’s cover-up

RT | March 11, 2021

A local reporter is suing Michigan’s health department after it denied repeat requests for its nursing home data amid the Covid-19 outbreak, piling pressure on the government as lawmakers demand a probe into its pandemic response.

Journalist Charlie LeDuff launched a Freedom of Information suit against the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday, accusing the agency of withholding data linked to coronavirus deaths in nursing homes without legal basis.

“Not only does the public have the right to know this information, we have the need to know,” said LeDuff, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting for the New York Times in 2001 and later returned to local coverage in Detroit. “If we’re going to fix end-of-life care moving forward, it’s going to require a hard look at how the state’s policies treated our most vulnerable population.”

Represented by the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, LeDuff says numerous FOIA requests to the state government have been denied without justification. The first inquiry, submitted in late January, was rejected only an hour after it was submitted on grounds that it would divulge sensitive health records – an argument the journalist rejects.

While LeDuff said the state had previously published “certain statistical information” related to Covid-19 deaths, he argued it is lacking in transparency. He drew parallels to the New York state government, which has also come under fire for unwillingness to share its nursing home statistics.

“The need for transparency in this particular area has already been established, in another state, thanks to recent revelations that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration had intentionally withheld data from disclosure due to concerns about the resulting political fallout,” LeDuff’s complaint said, noting that he saw “significant similarities” between Cuomo’s policies and those of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

Whitmer has also faced fierce criticism over her pandemic response, namely a directive early on in the outbreak that incentivized nursing homes to accept Covid-positive patients, despite the risk they posed to the facilities’ aging residents. Cuomo and several other Democratic governors imposed similar policies, which critics say contributed to thousands of unnecessary deaths in elderly populations most vulnerable to the virus.

Among the most vocal of Whitmer’s detractors is county prosecutor and former GOP state Senator Peter Lucido, who suggested on Monday that the governor could be slapped with criminal charges over her handling of nursing homes and “willful neglect of office.”

Whitmer later responded, castigating the prosecutor for “shameful political attacks based in neither fact nor reality” while insisting her administration “carefully tracked CDC guidance on nursing homes, and we prioritized testing of nursing home residents and staff to save lives.”

GOP lawmakers also called on Michigan AG Dana Nessel last week to investigate Whitmer’s nursing home policies in a formal letter to the state Department of Justice. Nessel, however, has signaled unwillingness to launch a probe, saying “bad policy” does not equate to “violations of the law.”

“I think oftentimes it is appropriate for the office to investigate. But not just when you say, ‘We don’t like what this policy is,’” she said of the request.

Whitmer’s administration was previously taken to court by Republicans alleging her “temporary” emergency pandemic powers had been extended indefinitely without approval from the legislature. While the state Supreme Court ultimately ruled against the governor, she simply sidestepped the decision by having her health director extend the orders instead, citing a legal loophole stemming from the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak.

March 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

COVID Kids: Protocol Demands TWO WEEKS With No Parental Contact

Rebel News | March 4, 2021

The Ezra Levant show reveals how children in Toronto, Canada who are banned from school with ‘asymptomatic’ COVID19 are being required to quarantine alone in their bedroom and have no access to their parents or siblings. ‘Solitary confinement’ for two weeks for having NO SYMPTOMS.

Moreover, all the other children in the family home are likewise forced to quarantine in the family home, no access to school or outsiders.

Why are people tolerating this nonsense? Are citizens really so fearful of out of control government diktat that they will roll over and follow every inhumane demand from politicians?

March 10, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

COVID: To Governors who are re-opening your States—how to defeat the attacks against you

By Jon Rappoport | NoMoreFakeNews | March 10, 2021

Governors:

Talk to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He understands the game.

In December, his office issued an order to all state labs processing COVID PCR tests. They must now report “the number of cycles” they deploy in every test they perform. [1] [1a]

Roughly speaking, a cycle is a quantum leap which increases the sensitivity of the test. As readily asserted by Anthony Fauci, any test using more than 35 cycles is meaningless. [2] [2a]

—Not only meaningless, but laden with false-positive results. The patient is falsely claimed to be “infected.”

However, the FDA and the CDC, since the launch of the COVID PCR test, have been recommending using 40 cycles; and therefore labs have been following this advice. [3] [3a] [3b]

The outcome, in terms of falsely inflated case numbers, has been a disaster.

Furthermore, as reported by the New York Times, testing labs never tell the patient or the doctor how many cycles they use in running the PCR. [4]

Governor DeSantis understood the massive testing problem. That’s why his office, and his state department of health, ordered the labs to report “numbers of cycles.”

Armed with this background, you governors can meet and overcome challenges as you re-open your states. Why do I say this? Because the attacks coming your way will be based on three statistics:

The number of COVID cases in your state; the number of COVID deaths; and the number of COVID hospitalizations.

“Well, these numbers are rising. The governors must lock down again. Otherwise, they are contributing to disease and death.”

But you see, all three statistical categories depend on a positive PCR test. And since the test, improperly run, has resulted in huge numbers of false-positives, you can restore sanity and more accurate data by following Governor DeSantis’ lead.

Once your state labs report how many cycles they are using for each PCR test they run, you can reject any test that deploys over 35 cycles. You can eliminate vast numbers of false-positives, and when you DO…

The number of COVID cases, COVID deaths, and COVID hospitalizations in your state will decline, as they should.

And those who would attack you, based on those numbers, will have no ability to make their case.

In a nutshell, a vast fraud has been perpetrated on The People, and you can stop it.

You can restore sanity, re-open your states, and make the stranglehold of COVID restrictions a thing of the past.

Readers of this article: you can perform a valuable service by forwarding the article to the governor’s office in your state.

SOURCES:

[1] https://www.flhealthsource.gov/files/Laboratory-Reporting-CT-Values-12032020.pdf

[1a] https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/12/08/florida-forces-labs-to-report-number-of-pcr-test-cycles/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_Vy6fgaBPE (starting at 3m50s)

[2a] https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/12/03/lockdowns-are-based-on-fraud-open-letter-to-people-who-want-freedom/

[3] https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download (page 37 (pdf page 38))

[3a] CDC-006-00019, Revision: 06, CDC/DDID/NCIRD/ Division of Viral Diseases, Effective: 12/01/2020; see: https://web.archive.org/web/20210102171026/https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download

[3b] CDC-006-00019, Revision: 05, CDC/DDID/NCIRD/ Division of Viral Diseases, Effective: 07/13/2020; see: https://web.archive.org/web/20200715004004/https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download

[4] nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html

March 10, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Dr Scott Jensen Announces Candidacy for Governor of Minnesota

21st Century Wire | March 10, 2021

Over the last 12 months, one of the leading voices opposing pandemic hysteria has been former Minnesota state senator Dr. Scott Jensen. According to a press release obtained by the Minnesota Reformer, Jensen is expected to announce his candidacy for governor of the state next week.

Dr. Jensen, 66, a qualified physician, gained global popularity after appearing on national TV and coming out challenging the government response to COVID-19 and explaining how reactionary policies are out of proportion in relation to the actual risk posed by this seasonal coronavirus. His popular testimonials have since been serialized in thousands of video presentations online.

Jensen also questioned his state’s Department of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines regarding how deaths from COVID-19 were being recorded.

He also took on the official ‘consensus’ of politicians and the medical community and exposed the scandal of how hospitals had a financial incentive in declaring a patient a COVID “case”, as well as financial incentives for hospitals to needlessly place people on ventilators – a dangerous procedure which many do not survive.


Based on the adversarial tone of the Reformer’s report, it seems that the political and medical establishment are afraid of Jensen: “His status as a physician could give him credibility to attack Walz on the governor’s COVID-19 response, except by the fall of 2022 the pandemic is likely to have evaporated. And, Jensen’s comments about the pandemic will likely face intense scrutiny.”

According to the their report, Dr. Jensen has confirmed the announcement with the headline “Jensen Announces Run for Minnesota Governor” had indeed been drafted, and is set to be released on March 16th.

Some of the text of the release includes:

“He will elevate thoughtful discourse, engage in difficult conversations, and will not allow pandering groupthink to impede the vital contributions science can provide,” the release reads. “Scott is excited to embark on this journey and looks forward to meeting with his fellow Minnesotans across the state and restoring their hope and freedom.”

Jensen, a Republican, would be the first candidate to run against first-term Democratic-Farmer-Labor Gov. Tim Walz.

March 10, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Palestinians are warning that Israel intends to grant citizenship to Jerusalemites

By Dr Adnan Abu Amer | MEMO | March 9, 2021

In recent weeks, Israel has circulated reports that tens of thousands of Palestinians residing in occupied Jerusalem may obtain Israeli citizenship, even though there are 330,000 of them in the eastern part of the city. The Israeli Interior Ministry has published guidelines to apply for citizenship under clause 4a of the Citizenship Law. It is worth noting that this is happening after almost 55 years of the Israeli occupation of the city, during which time only 15,000 Palestinians in the city have obtained citizenship.

A third of Palestinian Jerusalemites possess temporary Jordanian passports; the remainder have no citizenship, but their status in Israel is permanent residency. The use of the new procedure to implement an old legal clause may lead to a change in the relationship of the political forces within Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents and their relationship with the Israeli authorities, as the situation in this city is unique.

Since the occupation of Jerusalem in 1967, Israel has taken no steps to promote citizenship for the Palestinians living there, given their lack of interest and Israeli opposition to such a move. The Palestinians have generally refrained from applying for Israeli citizenship because it could be interpreted as recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the city.

International bodies have not demanded that Israel should grant citizenship to Palestinian residents of Jerusalem because, according to international law, the city is occupied territory and its annexation by the occupation state is not recognised. Hence, procedures expressing sovereignty, including granting citizenship, are not legally valid. Statelessness has not had a great impact on the lives of Jerusalemites with Jordanian passports, albeit not full citizenship, which allowed them to move around the world.

For many years, residents of East Jerusalem enjoyed the status of “adequate residency” despite the difficulty of maintaining such status, which prompted many to move to suburban neighbourhoods outside the municipality and remote villages. Until the 1990s, this did not have long-term consequences as there was a geographical connection between Israel and the West Bank that allowed Jerusalem’s residents to move freely between their homes and their places of work and study in the West Bank.

During the first Palestinian Intifada in 1987, Israel restricted movement between East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The building of the separation wall has since tightened restrictions on such movement. Living in the suburbs outside the municipality could lead to loss of residency rights, and then the loss of access to the city itself. This has led to a growing interest among residents of East Jerusalem to obtain Israeli citizenship as the only guarantee against losing the right to enter the city.

Israeli citizenship requires the renunciation of previous citizenship, fluency in Hebrew, and a permit from the security services because it is not only a request to enter Israel but also naturalisation for those who live there. Naturalisation is subject to the discretion of the Minister of the Interior who may impose political considerations. There is also a new clause stipulating that citizenship is granted to those born after the establishment of the state who have no other citizenship and have lived in Israel for five consecutive years.

Clause 4a in Israel’s Citizenship Law provides an opportunity for 20,000 Jerusalemites to obtain citizenship, and an additional 7,000 every year henceforth if this significant increase in the percentage of East Jerusalem citizens goes ahead. This will have a great impact on the identity and status of the Palestinian community in East Jerusalem.

If Israel grants citizenship to so many Palestinian Jerusalemites, it will strengthen the state’s claim of sovereignty over the occupied city. The problem for the Palestinians, of course, is the Israeli occupation, not the question of citizenship. Having more Jerusalemites with Israeli citizenship will reduce even further the possibility of East Jerusalem being the capital of an independent state of Palestine.

Since 1967, Israel’s control over Jerusalem has been based on the inferior status of the Palestinians in it, as residents, not citizens. In the past decade, petitions to the Supreme Court have forced the government to deal with citizenship requests. Three years ago, the Netanyahu government reduced a third of the population of Jerusalemites by shrinking the municipal border, stifling planning in Palestinian neighbourhoods, and increasing the number of demolitions of their homes.

Despite all of the Israeli policies to expel Palestinians from Jerusalem, the Palestinians remain determined to stay in their city. They may be weak and persecuted, but they have enough steadfastness to force the Israeli authorities to grant them their rights.

However, this is only part of the picture. There are also those in East Jerusalem who deny the legitimacy of the Israeli government and oppose citizenship because the right-wing in Israel sees Palestinian citizenship as evidence of the “unity of Jerusalem” but does not give all residents the same rights as the Jewish population.

The citizenship issue will not change the right-wing policy which is based on inequality in Jerusalem as elsewhere. Hence, it will not threaten the Israeli occupation, which is reassuring for right-wing Israelis.

Naturalisation in its current form serves the logic of Israeli sovereignty throughout occupied Jerusalem and contradicts the idea of demographic separation that characterises the Zionist left-wing. There are fears that the Jewish majority in the city will be at risk, which is a racist position that implies the arbitrary suppression of the Palestinians.

Israel has opted for the policy of occupation and apartheid towards Jerusalemites, after the failure of the two-state solution. Supporters of the state justify this at the expense of the basic rights of the Palestinian Jerusalemites. If the latter are fed up with waiting for a state of Palestine and want to see what they can achieve on an individual basis with Israeli citizenship, who is to argue?

The Jerusalemites have the right to live a “normal” life and be respected by the Israeli authorities, as well as have the freedom to choose the means to achieve their goals, even if they live under constant persecution. However, the reality is that they should be allowed to do so without having to submit to Israeli citizenship plans that serve a malicious settler-colonial occupation rather than the rights of the people.

March 9, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Twitter sues Texas AG over state’s investigation into banning Trump, says it’s attempt to ‘intimidate’ & ‘harass’ company

RT | March 9, 2021

Twitter is attempting to stop Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s investigation into its moderation practices, calling the probe “retaliation” for its suspension of former president Donald Trump.

“Twitter seeks to stop AG Paxton from unlawfully abusing his authority as the highest law-enforcement officer of the State of Texas to intimidate, harass, and target Twitter in retaliation for Twitter’s exercise of its First Amendment rights,” Twitter said in its court filing on Monday.

Twitter said the investigation comes down to the platform making “editorial decisions” Paxton disagrees with, including suspending Trump’s account following the US Capitol riot on January 6.

On January 13, Paxton, a Republican, announced an investigation into the moderation practices of “Big Tech” companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and Amazon.

“First Amendment rights and transparency must be maintained for a free online community to operate and thrive,” he said in a statement about the investigation, adding that the “seemingly coordinated de-platforming” of Trump and other leading conservative voices “not only chills free speech” but “wholly silences those whose speech and political beliefs do not align with leaders of Big Tech companies.”

Twitter has said the investigation requires them to hand over “volumes of highly confidential documents” related to their moderation policies, which they claim could compromise their moderation practices altogether.

The social media platform claimed in their filing that they tried compromising with Paxton and narrowing the scope of his broad investigation, but they could not come to an agreement.

“Instead, AG Paxton made clear that he will use the full weight of his office, including his expansive investigatory powers, to retaliate against Twitter for having made editorial decisions with which he disagrees,” they said in their suit, which was filed in Northern California.

Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter on January 8 due to multiple tweets being deemed by the company as possibly contributing to violence at the Capitol only two days before.

March 9, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Hypocritical Outrage over Khashoggi’s Assassination

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | March 9, 2021

The mainstream media is outraged over President Biden’s decision to not level sanctions on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for his purported assassination of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who was a prominent columnist for the Washington Post. The CIA concluded that bin Salman ordered the assassination but U.S. officials have sanctioned only lower-level Saudi officials, choosing to leave bin Salman untouched by U.S. sanctions.

The outrage is a model of the hypocrisy that pervades the mainstream media. After all, these people just block out of their minds that the U.S. national-security state is every bit as brutal as Saudi officials are. Moreover, when it comes to the number of state-sponsored assassinations carried out on an annual basis, bin Salman and Saudi Arabia don’t even come close to matching those carried out by the world’s assassination nation.

Just look at the state-sponsored assassinations that are carried out by the Pentagon and the CIA in the Middle East, Africa, and Afghanistan every month. They have become so normalized — so much a regular part of American life — that the mainstream press has become totally blasé about them. No moral outrage at all.

Of course, Pentagon and CIA officials, along with their acolytes in the mainstream press, would respond, “Jacob, we are only killing terrorists. The Saudis killed an innocent man.”

Oh? And who exactly is a “terrorist.” Is it someone who criticizes a regime? Or is it someone who actually commits a terrorist act? And who makes that determination? If bin Salman concluded that Khashoggi was a terrorist who was trying to bring down the Saudi regime, would the U.S. mainstream press be coming to his defense?

Let’s consider the U.S. assassinations of Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman. Both of them were U.S. citizens, just as Khashoggi was a Saudi citizen. Where is the outrage among the mainstream press over those two assassinations of American citizens at the hands of their own government?

Oh yes, U.S. officials and their assets in the mainstream press would say that Anwar al-Awlaki was a terrorist. Really? What does that mean? Does it mean that he criticized the U.S. national-security state for its brutal imperialist policies? Or does it mean that he actually engaged in criminal acts of terrorism? If that is the case, who made that determination? I don’t recall there ever being criminal trial in which an American jury listened to evidence and concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that al-Awlaki was guilty of some act of terrorism. All I recall was that U.S. officials concluded that al-Awlaki was a terrorist and, therefore, needed to have his life snuffed out. I also recall that the U.S. Supreme Court, in its customary deference to the authority of the national-security establishment, affirmed the decision to assassinate this American citizen, which snuffed out his life without any due process of law.

U.S. officials claim that 16-year-old Abdulhahman was the unfortunate collateral damage from the U.S. assassination of someone nearby. Even if that’s true — and it might not be — what was the justification for firing a missile at that person, especially knowing that it would end up killing everyone around him? Who died and made the Pentagon and the CIA the deciders of life and death of other people?

The fact is that U.S. and Saudi officials have no business assassinating anyone. The U.S. mainstream press is good at recognizing the wrongfulness of assassinating Khashoggi. Their loyalty to the Pentagon and the CIA, however, has given them a moral blindness that prevents them from recognizing the wrongfulness of state-sponsored assassinations carried out by the U.S. national-security establishment.

It’s also revealing that the mainstream press is calling for sanctions to be imposed on bin Salman but not calling for terminating the U.S. government’s armed sales to the Saudi regime. Yet, it’s those weapons that help the Saudi regime maintain its brutal tyranny over the Saudi people. And remember: the U.S. mainstream press is always calling for new gun-control measures — except when it comes to the U.S. government’s sales of guns to overseas pro-U.S. tyrants.

Notice also that the U.S. government continues to send U.S. taxpayer-funded foreign aid to brutal and tyrannical regimes, such as to Egypt’s tyrannical military dictatorship. That foreign aid helps to maintain the brutal tyranny that is enforced against the citizens under those regimes. No outrage there among the U.S. mainstream press. On the contrary, they continue to support foreign aid being sent to brutal and tyrannical pro-U.S. regimes.

It’s all just a valuable lesson in what can be called Hypocrisy 101.

March 9, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

WAPO Opens “Domestic Terrorist” Campaign Against Those Who Refuse the Experimental COVID Vaccines

By Brian Shilhavy | Health Impact News | March 8, 2021

And so it begins.

Those of us who have been exposing the corruption in Big Pharma, and especially in the vaccine industry, for more than a decade now, knew this day was coming.

It’s been coming for a long time now, but the COVID Plandemic has shifted medical tyranny into high gear, primarily because this time around the masses have complied with the medical tyrants and, so far, voluntarily surrendered their rights all in the name of “public safety.”

Very soon now, the supply of experimental COVID vaccines will exceed the demand for those who have been lining up and begging to be injected with who-knows-what to fight the unseen enemy, the dreaded Coronavirus, and then it will be time to deal with the “vaccine resistant” who are perceived as a threat to public health.

Domestic Terrorists. That’s the new label for those who dare to question the new experimental COVID injections.

And who else should Big Pharma and their media anoint to start this new campaign, but California Senator Dr. Richard Pan?

Richard Pan is a pediatrician-turned-politician who has spearheaded California’s descent into medical tyranny, since 2015, when he wrote bill SB277 to remove all religious exemptions to childhood vaccines in the State of California, despite widespread public opposition by parents, doctors, lawyers, and educators.

Dr. Pan has a long history of lying to his constituents and selling them out to Big Pharma.

Not being content with spearheading the movement to remove religious exemptions to childhood vaccines in 2015, in 2019 he spearheaded an effort to remove the medical exemptions also, by going after California doctors who were writing medical exemptions to childhood vaccines as well. See:

Senator-Doctor Wants California to Eliminate Doctor’s Medical Exemptions to Vaccines

Today, if you live in California, it is nearly impossible to get any exemptions to childhood vaccines, which has driven many families out of California, and those that remain who want to protect their children from vaccines must home-educate their children and keep them out of the system (a good thing to do in ANY state!).

So it did not surprise me at all last week when an “Opinion” piece published in Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post titled: Opinion: Anti-vaccine extremism is akin to domestic terrorism, was written by none other than the California Big Pharma spokesperson, Richard Pan.

I have probably written a couple of dozen of articles on Senator Pan over the years, so if you want to learn more about him, click here.

Kit Knightly, writing for OffGuardian, also picked up on this, relating it back to the January 6th “insurrection” and a way to enact new legislation on “domestic terrorism.”

CALLED IT: WaPo calls anti-vaxxers “domestic terrorists”

By Kit Knightly  | Off-Guardian | March 8, 2021

BACK IN JANUARY I WROTE ABOUT HOW THE CAPITOL HILL “INSURECTION” WAS LAYING THE GROUNDWORK FOR BIDEN’S ADMINISTRATION TO INTRODUCE A MUCH-TALKED-ABOUT NEW “DOMESTIC TERRORISM” LAW.

The piece speculated that any definition of “domestic terrorism” will be very loose, and include essentially anybody the state finds problematic. Including those who spread “anti-vaccine misinformation” [emphasis added]:

What will “Domestic Terrorism” mean in this law? The answer to that is pretty much always “whatever they want it to mean.”

It will probably be tied into the Covid “pandemic” in some way, too. After all, what is discouraging people from taking vaccines if not the very definition of “terrorism”, right?

It took less than two months for the mainstream media to prove OffG right. Just last week the Washington Post ran an op-ed piece by California State Senator Richard Pam headlined:

Anti-vaccine extremism is akin to domestic terrorism

The article goes on to insist that “Laws need to be strengthened” to protect people administering vaccines from being “harassed”. That “Social media companies should not be complicit in this dangerous movement”, and caps it all off with glorious jingoism:

Getting vaccinated is a patriotic act. So is speaking up to support public health efforts. Let’s not allow extremism, division or fear to slow the efforts to end this deadly chapter in our nation’s history.

The message is clear: anyone who questions vaccination, especially the Covid “vaccine”, is a threat to public health and national security. A terrorist.

The WaPo is the first mainstream outlet to make the parallel so blatantly, but they almost certainly won’t be the last.

Be on the lookout for other examples. They’ll probably start building up this narrative quite fast.

And we can likely expect a new false-flag.

Something along the lines of a “lone wolf extremist” who was “radicalised online” by “militant anti-vaxxers” and then allegedly does something crazy like mail Bill Gates a suitcase full of home-made explosives or drives a tanker truck into a vaccination centre.

Of course, that will mean we need to start shutting down and censoring “vaccine misinformation” which is “encouraging violence” and “damaging public health”.

It’s all very predictable at this point.

March 8, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

It’s Here: First Court Case Against Mandatory Vaccination — Attorney Interview

By Spiro Skouras | Activist Post | March 7, 2021

In this interview, which was initially banned by YouTube before it was even published (but now reversed), Spiro is joined by Attorney Ana Garner of New Mexico. Garner represents her client Isaac Legaretta, an officer at the Doña Ana County Detention Center and a military veteran, who is suing the county over its new policy for first responders to receive the COVID-19 vaccinations or face termination.

Attorney Garner explains the significance of this case and what is at stake, as it is the first of its kind and may set a new standard for legal precedent regarding mandatory vaccination. Garner says she is prepared to take this case to the Supreme Court if necessary.

Spiro and Ana Garner also discuss another case of hers that is ongoing currently. A case that challenges not only the Governor of New Mexico, but the emergency itself.

You can see this important interview on the free speech platform BitChute below:

NM Stands Up!
https://nmstandsup.org

First case against mandatory vaccination filed in New Mexico: report
https://thehill.com/regulation/labor/541173-first-case-against-mandatory-vaccination-filed-in-new-mexico-dention-center?rl=1

Federal judge denies Doña Ana County employee’s request, for now, in mandatory vaccine lawsuit
https://www.lcsun-news.com/story/news/2021/03/04/federal-judge-rules-restraining-order-dona-ana-county-new-mexico-mandatory-vaccine-lawsuit/4586480001/

EEOC Says Employers May Mandate COVID-19 Vaccinations – Subject to Limitations
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/eeoc-says-employers-may-mandate-covid-19-vaccinations-subject-to-limitations

Image credit: torstensimon 

Follow Spiro on BitChute, Parler and Gab.

March 7, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , , | Leave a comment

GLOBAL SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE ERA OF GREAT POWER CONFLICT

By J.Hawk, Daniel Deiss, and Edwin Watson | South Front | March 6, 2021

Loose Tweets Sink Reputations

While on the one hand Twitter flexed its muscles when it permanently de-platformed a sitting US president and deactivated tens of thousands of other accounts, with Facebook closely following suit against accounts the two social media giants claimed were “disinformation” concerning the 2020 election results, in practice it was a pyrrhic victory at best. The real power of Facebook, Twitter, other social media lay in their reputation as essentially neutral, impartial platforms where free speech was triumphant and the invisible hand of the marketplace of ideas dictated which accounts would get millions of followers and which would languish in obscurity.

That, of course, was never really true. Twitter and Facebook were no strangers to muting, banning, or at least stealth-banning accounts that promoted ideas inconsistent with whatever dogma, social or political, prevailed in Washington D.C. at the moment. However, this tended to be done in dribs and drabs, not in avalanches which moreover explicitly targeted specific political candidates or parties. Twitter’s knee-jerk panic-induced purge of Trump and Trump-supporting accounts that followed the events of January 6, 2020 on the flimsy pretense that there was a “risk of violence” created by the mere existence of these accounts, showed that @Jack and indeed the entire @TwitterSupport team are not impartial at all, for all the world to see. Naturally, as Twitter and Biden apologists were quick to point out, the First Amendment does not extend to private entities, which means that, legally, US social media giants were in the clear. Unironically defending a mega-corporation’s inherent right to censor speech in a way that US government institutions are prohibited from doing was not exactly a very good position to be in. That is a blow to the foundations of Twitter’s free-speech reputation from which it can never recover. That toothpaste can never be put back in the tube again. Banning accounts, rather than suspending until “offending” material is deleted, is a form of “prior restraint” of free speech that is explicitly prohibited by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Even such Donald Trump non-fans as Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron found themselves decrying Twitter’s decision to muzzle the US president, on the basis of it being a corporate abuse of power that should be reserved only to national governments.

Twitter’s epic self-own became evident within days, in the context of elections in Uganda in which Twitter, no doubt at the behest of US intelligence community failure and/or other political and economic interests, attempted to meddle by locking accounts favoring candidates the US government clearly didn’t favor. Uganda’s retaliation in the form of shutting down Twitter in all of the country led to a predictable Twitter boilerplate reaction concerning the sanctity of free speech that was equally predictably jeered by US Trump supporters who by now were less than impressed with Twitter’s commitment to open political discourse. It seems rather inevitable that other countries will follow suit whenever Twitter-based political meddling becomes too much to tolerate, without exposing themselves to the usual tut-tutting by pearl-clutching Western liberals who praised Twitter’s shut-down of Trump. US social media networks rapidly won reputation as US propaganda and influence instruments will facilitate effective action against them in the future by countries interested in defending their sovereignty and integrity of political institutions.

Ne Parler Pas

Twitter’s and Facebook’s blowing of own cover, as it were, was quickly followed by the saga of the Parler social media network which revealed a far deeper behind-the-scenes collusion among information technology firms in support of Biden and the Democrats. Parler was a low-budget, low-quality operation set up to cash in on Twitter’s banning and shadow-banning policies. Its sole advantage was the absence of literally any restrictions on political expression, which meant that it quickly became a network with a pronounced GOP lean. The low-budget aspect of the company meant that instead of setting up its own “server farm”, with mirroring and denial of service protections against the inevitable hacking attempts that incidentally also cost real money, it opted to have its operations hosted on servers owned by none other than Amazon, which has extensive dealings with and contracts from many US intelligence agencies, including secret services. A rumor that Donald Trump might react to the Twitter ban by holding court on Parler was enough for Amazon to peremptorily kick Parler off its servers. Other Parler vendors, down to law firms, similarly refused services, all of it happening to a company against which no government investigation or other action has even been initiated. Another piece of evidence, as if one were needed, of the existence of a “deep state” in the US operating outside the official legal framework.

It turns out, however, that Parler is run not only by cheapskates but experts at trolling because in their search for an alternative hosting platform they settled on a provider with servers based in… Russia, where their operations evidently do not break any laws, written or unwritten, and therefore can proceed unimpeded, in stark contrast with the United States. That revelation prompted a furious response from Congressional Democrats who are now demanding an FBI investigation into Parler’s Russia ties and Russia’s involvement in the events of January 6. Again, a panicky knee-jerk reaction that will set a precedent not only for the United States but also for the rest of the world, that social media networks on servers outside one’s country are automatically to be viewed as foreign agents.

War of Words

One way or the other, things will never be the same for social media, in the United States or elsewhere. The idea of a global free speech commons conveniently hosted by US social media networks in cozy collaboration with US intelligence services has been revealed to be a pernicious myth and is now irretrievably dead. Going forward, no self-respecting country will allow its political discourse space to be in the hands of unknown, shadowy, and unaccountable US actors. In practical terms it means demands for transparency and regulation of social media, even in the United States where the Republicans will eventually return to power and settle scores with @Jack and @Zuck. Elsewhere in the world, we are likely to see the creation of social media alternatives, as well as the growth in popularity of existing ones such as Telegram or even VKontakte. Russia’s newly adopted legal framework for hefty fines to be leveled against social media firms for allowing disinformation and other socially undesirable activities will become the norm all over the world.

This may lead to a situation in which the world’s polarization into hostile economic and military blocs is mirrored by the fragmentation of the Internet, including of social media, into national or regional networks, to the detriment of the currently existing global one. China’s early banning of US social media networks from its country, a decision whose wisdom is now plainly evident, may become the global norm. The deepening US political crisis that has not ended with Biden’s inauguration means that the United States is liable to lead the world in restricting the activities of foreign social media firms on its territory, under the guise of “combating domestic terrorism” that is Biden’s actual top priority, thus providing further ammunition for advocates of doing the same in their own countries. Twitter’s continued suppression of speech, such as suspension of a Chinese official government account for supposedly “dehumanizing” the Uyghurs, again ostensibly on the basis of the company’s terms of service rather than US official guidance, will only accelerate process.

Whether matters will deteriorate to such an extent remains to be seen. If US continues to escalate its aggression against countries unwilling to become its client states, social media will not remain unaffected by it. However, Twitter’s and Facebook’s panicky reaction to the January 6 “insurrection” had greatly weakened one of crucial tools of US “hybrid warfare”.

March 7, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment