French government fines TV news for allowing a skeptic to speak without being challenged
We know what secrets they fear the most, by how they overreact
By Jo Nova | July 13, 2024
In France, the second largest news network let an economist go on air and declare he thought global warming was a lie and a scam used to justify State intervention. He even went on to say it is a form of totalitarianism. Shockingly (to the regulators Arcom*), the CNEWS TV* hosts did not contest this, and nor did anyone else in the studio. For this, 11 months later, the TV channel is being fined €20,000.
Too close to the truth then?
A popular French rolling news channel has been fined for broadcasting climate scepticism unchallenged
By Saskia O’Donoghue, EuroNews
During the programme, prominent economist Philippe Herlin shared personal climate scepticism – but was not contradicted by anybody else in the TV studio, including the hosts.
“Anthropogenic global warming is a lie, a scam… Explaining to us that it is because of Man, no, that is a conspiracy, and why does that have so much weight?”, Herlin said. “Because it justifies the intervention of the State in our lives, and it absolves the State from having to reduce its public spending… It is a form of totalitarianism.”
Apparently, the real crime here is not that he said the unthinkable, but that the TV crew didn’t correct him:
After investigation, Arcom found that CNews’ lack of reaction was a “failure” to meet the obligations of the channel …
Perhaps if they’d laughed at him, called him petty names, and treated him like a leper it would have been OK? (No, seriously, there is a razor point here. There are bound to be past examples where the only response to a skeptic was to call them a climate denier, and Arcom was apparently happy with that, since they’ve never used this fine before.) Does Arcom approve of namecalling or social approbation as a “balanced response”? Oh. Yes. They. Do.
The regulators go on to explain that the channel:
“… is required to ensure an honest presentation of controversial issues, in particular by ensuring the expression of different points of view”.
Which must be a new requirement since French TV has relentlessly hammered the establishment line in a one sided way for thirty years without needing any balance at all. And Arcom didn’t fine them for shamelessly promoting government propaganda. Perhaps a French skeptic could ask Arcon if controversial government opinions need to be balanced “in an honest presentation” or whether it’s only critics of the government who need to be held to account?
Arcom found that the views shared “contradicted or minimised” the scientific consensus on climate change “through a treatment lacking rigour and without contradiction”.
Since when was it the job of journalists to promote government approved “science”?
The regulator is going out on a limb and sawing off the branch…
Officially, the regulators are trying to pretend they are not punishing the TV channel for putting on a skeptic, which would be a free speech issue, but it’s clearly what they are doing. So they dress this up as a lack of balance, which accidentally exposes that they’ve never cared a jot about balancing opinions before. Immediately, this opens up all kinds of interesting doors: for one, skeptics can start asking where the balance is on controversial government propositions? In most countries about half the population doesn’t agree that mankind is solely responsible for “climate change”. Where is their voice? The government is suggesting that solar panels can stop storms, and EV’s will control floods, why isn’t this a failure of the obligations of a news channel?
Secondly, skeptics can ask when this rule started and why the regulator missed so many past examples. Why aren’t breaches the other way being fined too?
The overreaction IS the news story
Ponder how afraid the believers must be if the mere opinion of an economist is so dangerous. This man is a not a scientist and every person in France has heard the evidence is overwhelming, climate change is real, and 130% of all scientists who ever lived know that CO2 threatens life on Earth. For three decades children have been trained to say that skeptics are funded by Big Oil, and motivated by money, and yet here is one guy who used the word “totalitarian” and they all go off their rocker.
Why, perhaps because it suggests that believers are motivated by a bigger pot of money and power than skeptics ever could be.
* BACKGROUND
Arcon stands for theRegulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication
CNews is controlled by billionaire business magnate Vincent Bolloré and has been compared to FOX in the US.
‘Dangerous, Anticompetitive Behavior’: Big Brands Colluding to Control Online Speech
By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | July 12, 2024
A congressional investigation uncovered allegations that some of the world’s largest brands and advertising agencies are colluding to control online speech through coordinated boycotts and content demonetization schemes.
A 39-page interim staff report, released Wednesday by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, claims that the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) — an initiative of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) — is using its market power to silence disfavored voices in possible violation of antitrust laws.
“Through GARM, large corporations, advertising agencies, and industry associations participated in boycotts and other coordinated action to demonetize platforms, podcasts, news outlets, and other content deemed disfavored by GARM and its members,” the report states.
The committee’s investigation, which focused on GARM’s activities since its creation in 2019, examined its influence over major social media platforms, news outlets and content creators.
The report suggests that GARM’s actions may have far-reaching implications for online discourse and consumer choice in media.
‘Sounds a lot like a cartel to me’
GARM was established in 2019 by the WFA, which represents over 150 of the world’s biggest brands and more than 60 national advertiser associations globally.
According to this week’s congressional report, GARM’s influence stems from the collective power of its members. “WFA members represent roughly 90% of global advertising spend, or almost one trillion dollars annually,” the document states.
The alliance includes major players in the advertising industry:
- Every major advertising agency holding company.
- GroupM, the world’s largest media buying agency, on its Steer Team.
- Four large corporations — Unilever, Mars, Diageo, and Procter & Gamble — that together spend billions annually on advertising.
GARM’s Steer Team, which acts as a board of directors, is closely involved in day-to-day operations. The initiative reports to the WFA Executive Committee, which includes representatives from major corporations such as AB InBev, L’Oréal, Nestlé and IBM.
Robert Rakowitz, GARM’s initiative lead and co-founder, plays a central role in the organization’s activities. The report cites internal emails in which Rakowitz expressed views on free speech, describing an “extreme global interpretation of the US Constitution” as problematic.
GARM claims to focus on “content monetization” rather than “content moderation.” However, the report argues that these areas are “inextricably linked,” suggesting that GARM’s work effectively influences what content appears online.
In Wednesday’s congressional hearing on GARM, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), while questioning the CEO of GroupM and GARM board member Christian Juhl, said that GARM “sounds a lot like a cartel to me.”
Alleged antitrust violations and examples
The congressional report alleges that GARM’s activities may violate Section 1 of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which prohibits unreasonable restraints of trade. The committee report cites several examples of GARM’s alleged coordinated actions:
1. Twitter boycott after Elon Musk acquisition. Following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now known as X) in October 2022, GARM allegedly orchestrated a boycott of the platform. According to the report, GARM recommended its members “stop … all paid advertisement” on Twitter in response to the takeover.
Internal documents show that GARM held “extensive debriefing and discussion around [Musk’s] takeover of Twitter,” providing opportunities for the boycott to be organized. The report claims that GARM later boasted about “taking on Elon Musk” and noted that Twitter was “80% below revenue forecasts” as a result.
2. Pressure on Spotify over Joe Rogan podcast. In early 2022, GARM and its Steer Team allegedly pressured Spotify over content on Rogan’s podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience.” The report states that GARM members urged action against Spotify due to alleged misinformation on Rogan’s show, particularly regarding COVID-19 vaccines after Rogan said that young, healthy people didn’t need them.
Rogan later featured Dr. Robert Malone on his podcast, which prompted GroupM to reach out to Spotify after musician Neil Young removed his content from the platform in protest over vaccine-skeptical material.
Internal emails cited in the report show Rakowitz coordinating with member companies to formulate responses to Spotify. In one instance, he wrote that he “can’t publicly advise all clients to do X — that gets us into hot water by way of anticompetitive and collusive behaviors.”
3. Efforts to demonetize certain news outlets. The report alleges that GARM and its members discussed strategies to block certain news outlets, including Fox News, The Daily Wire and Breitbart News.
An internal email from a GARM Steer Team member describes monitoring these outlets closely. The email states that as much as he “hated their ideology and bulls**t,” his company “couldn’t really justify blocking them for misguided opinion[s]” but that it “watched them very carefully and it didn’t take long for them to cross the line.”
The congressional committee argued that these coordinated actions if proven, could constitute illegal restraints of trade that harm consumers by limiting their choices and access to diverse viewpoints online.
GARM’s influence on political content and elections
Through their content moderation efforts, GARM and its members attempted to influence political discourse and election outcomes — including pushing for coordinated action around the 2020 U.S. presidential election, according to the report.
In an October 2020 email, Rakowitz suggested telling Facebook it was “at a crossroads for the platform and fence sitting on content curation and moderation” and that it should apply its COVID-19 content moderation policies to election-related content.
The report cites an instance of GARM members pressuring Facebook to label a then-President Donald Trump campaign advertisement as misinformation. When Facebook refused, citing its policy of not fact-checking political candidates’ ads, Rakowitz allegedly described the decision as “honestly reprehensible” in an internal email.
The report also claims that GARM members expressed concerns about Musk’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story on Twitter. After Musk released internal Twitter documents about the platform’s suppression of the story, a GARM member reportedly described Musk’s actions as an “overtly partisan take.”
Misinformation definition and application. In 2022, GARM added a definition of misinformation to its framework, describing it as “verifiably false or willfully misleading content that is directly connected to user or societal harm.”
The report suggests this broad definition could be weaponized against disfavored political views.
Committee members said Wednesday that these actions demonstrate GARM’s potential to influence political discourse and election outcomes by controlling which content receives advertising revenue and visibility on major platforms.
GARM’s partnerships with ad-tech companies and AI integration
The congressional report delves into GARM’s relationships with advertising technology companies and plans to integrate its framework into artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools.
According to the report, GARM partnered with several “ad-tech partners” that offer solutions to help brands understand where their advertisements appear and what content surrounds them.
The report alleges that membership in GARM was conditioned on these partners agreeing “to make commensurate changes to business operations in pursuit of GARM’s goals.”
According to the congressional committee, this arrangement allowed GARM’s biases to be “baked directly into the solutions, allowing brands to seamlessly integrate GARM’s censorship.”
AI and machine learning integration
GARM’s plans for the future involve pushing its framework into AI solutions, according to the report. The committee said it was concerned that GARM’s partners are developing AI tools that will integrate GARM’s standards seamlessly across social media platforms.
“Such an automated censorship effort could result in the demonetization of any views or voices that GARM’s advertising cartel dislikes, potentially without any human involvement at all,” the report states.
Specific examples cited in the report include:
1. Zefr, a GARM ad-tech partner, which claims its “proprietary discriminative AI is powered by years of training data on platforms, and goes beyond keyword and text-based analyses, combining AI and ground truth data from global fact checking organizations that is mapped to the industry standards” set by GARM.
2. YouTube’s incorporation of Zefr-powered solutions to prevent advertisements from appearing next to content that violates GARM’s standards.
The combination of GARM’s framework with AI-powered content moderation tools could lead to opaque and potentially biased decisions about which content receives advertising revenue, ultimately limiting consumer choice and diverse viewpoints online, according to the report.
Connections to government agencies and censorship efforts
The congressional report alleges connections between GARM’s partners and government agencies involved in content moderation efforts. Specifically, it points to collaboration between GARM ad-tech partner Channel Factory and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
According to the report, Channel Factory worked with CISA to develop a “common lexicon” for discussing misinformation.
An email cited in the report shows Channel Factory’s global chief strategy officer sharing this lexicon with GARM’s initiative lead, stating, “The industry will need a common lexicon and detailed definitions in order to make progress … attached is the lexicon we developed with CISA/DHS … which may provide” a useful starting point.
This type of collaboration could lead to government influence over private-sector content moderation practices, the committee report stated.
The report noted that Channel Factory is also a member of YouTube’s Measurement Program, suggesting that these connections could have far-reaching implications for online content moderation.
Former U.S. Department of State official Mike Benz in a video posted on X Wednesday, alleged that U.S. government-linked efforts to control online content with groups like GARM go back at least to 2017.
GARM engages in ‘dangerous, anticompetitive behavior’
The House Judiciary Committee concluded that GARM’s actions may violate antitrust laws and threaten free speech and consumer choice online.
According to the report, GARM’s members’ collective power allows them to achieve through coordination what they could not accomplish individually.
The report states:
“If collusion among powerful corporations capable of collectively demonetizing, and in effect eliminating, certain views and voices is allowed to continue, the ability of countless American consumers to choose what to read and listen to, or even have their speech or writing reach other Americans, will be destroyed.”
The committee emphasized that antitrust laws still apply even if GARM claims to have good intentions. It states that federal antitrust laws “do not diminish because GARM or its members claim to have good intentions.”
The committee said it will continue its oversight of GARM and evaluate the adequacy of existing antitrust laws. It suggested that legislative reforms may be necessary to address what it describes as “dangerous, anticompetitive behavior.”
Watch the House Judiciary Committee’s July 10 hearing:
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Pro-Pentagon Media Calls on DoD to Step Up Anti-Houthi Info War Amid Blows to US Navy’s Reputation
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 11.07.2024
The Houthis resumed their attacks on suspected Israel and US-affiliated merchant ships Tuesday after a ten-day pause. Armed with mostly older missile designs and cheap drones and possessing no blue water navy to speak of, the militants have managed to effectively shut down the Red Sea to Western interests, humiliating the Pentagon in the process.
The US Navy’s inability to lift the Houthis’ self-imposed partial blockade of the Red and Arabian Seas or to meaningfully degrade the militia’s missile and drone capabilities in six months of air and missile strikes has given rise to embarrassing questions from allies and adversaries alike about whether the US military is a mere “paper tiger,” and not the “all powerful,” global and “omnipotent force” it’s cracked up to be.
In testimony by senior Pentagon officials on the state of America’s air and missile defenses earlier this year, Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces chairman Angus King complained that the US has proved not only unable to defend against peer competitors like Russia and China, but ineffective against smaller adversaries, including Iran and the Houthis, as well.
His concerns were echoed by media reports that the US has already spent over a billion dollars fighting the Houthis, with the USS Eisenhower supercarrier’s Super Hornet jets racking up tens of thousands of flight hours, and US warships firing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of interceptor missiles to target the militia’s simple missiles, UAVs and maritime drones.
Amid the Houthis’ successes in humbling the American goliath, panicky voices have emerged in Washington and US military-affiliated media calling for something to be done to stop the Yemeni militia’s humiliation of the US Empire in the Middle East from spreading online.
The “Navy should hit back harder against Houthi online disinformation,” Max Lesser, a senior analyst with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a DC neoconservative think tank, wrote in an op-ed that appeared in the Navy Times on Wednesday.
“While the US military and allies regularly hit back with airstrikes against Houthi missile launchers and other assets in Yemen, the Pentagon is less prepared to defend against the online lies and disinformation that the Houthis are spreading,” Lesser complained.
The think tank analyst pointed to a series of social media posts from late May shared by “Houthi supporters” of digitally altered images and videos of damage purportedly done to the USS Eisenhower in one of the militia’s attempts to retaliate to US-UK strikes into Yemen.
The manipulated images apparently proved prolific enough for the carrier’s captain, Captain Christopher Hill, to invite journalists to inspect the warship’s flight deck to show it had not in fact suffered any damage in Houthi attacks.
Lesser suggests that the “deluge of deceptively labeled images” spread by “pro-Houthi accounts” has generally not been sufficiently challenged or debunked by the Pentagon, despite the operation of a DoD Joint Maritime Information Center stood up specifically to report on the situation in the Red Sea region. The analyst urged the military to include any “Houthi disinformation” it finds into its weekly updates, noting that for now, “debunking” the false images is falling to lone “independent” OSINT analysts.
“The challenge is not limited to the Red Sea or the Middle East,” Lesser stressed. “Military forces in every command should have public affairs and open-source intelligence personnel working together to debunk false and exaggerated claims of enemy success on the battlefield.”
Lesser’s calls for the US to step up its game in online disinformation warfare are the latest in a long-running effort by Western officials, media and corporations to rein in the free-flow of information, whether through outright broad brush censorship like the scrubbing of entire websites, comments and social media posts, or ‘softer’ means, like private ‘fact checking’ organizations set up explicitly and exclusively to challenge anti-establishment narratives.
Given the US military’s proven track record of covering up information the Pentagon finds inconvenient, there’s no guarantee that any DoD-led campaign to combat Houthi “disinformation” online won’t result in the creation of new falsehoods spread by the Defense Department.
Canada Allocates $146.6M for New Censorship Commission to Enforce Online Harms Act
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 11, 2024
Canada’s government has decided to spend some $146.6 million (CAD 200 million) and employ, full-time, 330 more people to be able to implement the Online Harms Act (Bill C-63).
That is the monetary cost of bureaucratic red tape necessary to make this bill, which has moved for a second reading in Canada’s House of Commons, eventually happen.
At the same time, the cost to the country’s democracy could be immeasurable – given some of this sweeping censorship legislation’s more draconian provisions, primarily focused on what the authorities choose to consider to be “hate speech.”
Some of those provisions could land people under house arrest, and have their internet access cut simply for “fear” they could, going forward, commit “hate crime” or “hate propaganda.”
If these are found to be committed in conjunction with other crimes, the envisaged punishment could be life in prison. Meanwhile, money fines go up to $51,080. And, to make matters even more controversial, the proposed law appears to apply to statements retroactively, namely, those made before Bill C-63’s possible passage and enactment as law.
The new body, the Digital Safety Commission, Ombudsperson, and Office will be in charge, and this is where the money will go and where the staff amount to 330 people. The spending estimate that has recently come to light covers the five years until 2029.
The office’s task – if the bill passes – will be to monitor, regulate, and censor online platforms, as per the Online Harms Act.
Critics of the law are making a point of the distorted sense of priorities among Canada’s currently ruling regime, where a large amount of money is to be spent here, while vital sectors – such as combating actual, real-life serious crimes face funding restrictions.
Some of the purely pragmatic opposition to the bill has to do with the belief that it will – while violating citizens’ freedoms and rights – actually, prove to be unable to tackle what it is supposedly designed to do – various forms of online harassment.
And that’s not all. “Canadian taxpayers will likely be stuck footing the bill for a massive bureaucracy that will allow Big Tech companies to negotiate favorable terms with non-elected regulators behind closed doors,” is how MP Michelle Rempel Garner articulated it.
The UK election results hide a truth Labour won’t want you to hear
By Graham Hryce | RT | July 10, 2024
Many political commentators in the UK have failed to grasp the true import of the Labour Party’s electoral victory last week.
Some pundits see the party’s record majority as confirmation that politics in Britain has shifted back to the center – in contrast to the shift to the radical right that has characterized politics in most European countries in recent years.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Labour’s primary vote – 9.7 million but still a lowish 33.8% – increased only marginally, despite the complete collapse of the Conservative vote.
The most important aspect of last week’s election was the transfer of thousands of votes from the Conservative Party to Nigel Farage’s populist Reform Party – particularly in those “red wall” constituencies that Boris Johnson had single handedly captured from Labour at the 2019 election.
Reform received some 4 million votes – 14% of the total votes cast. The UK electoral system meant, however, that Reform only won five seats – including, most importantly, Farage himself.
This significant voting shift did, however, unseat more than 200 Tory MPs, including a former prime minister and a number of cabinet members, and ensured the election of Labour candidates in droves. This does not, however, constitute a “shift to the center.”
What actually occurred last week was predicted, prior to the election, by some conservative commentators who had become completely disenchanted with the Conservative Party, and had cast their lot in with Reform.
Matt Goodwin, for example, urged voters to engage in an act of “creative destruction” by voting for Reform, knowing full well that this would result in a landslide Labour victory.
Goodwin, in effect, urged voters to destroy a Conservative Party that, in his view, had long ago ceased to stand for genuine Conservative values – so as to clear the political landscape for a Reform victory at the 2029 election.
From this perspective, Starmer’s victory is simply a necessary political prelude to the creation of a viable British populist party that will be capable of governing in its own right in the next few years.
Whatever the prospects of this happening may be, such a perspective correctly predicted the imminent demise of the Rishi Sunak-led Conservative Party, and reflected what has actually been happening in UK politics for the past decade.
Other commentators – including Starmer propagandists and, curiously enough, some from the conservative right like Peter Hitchens – see Starmer’s win as a victory for “the most radical left-wing party in UK history.” Such a view could not be more mistaken.
There is nothing at all “left-wing” – in the traditional sense of the term – about Keir Starmer or the Labour Party that he has refashioned in his own image since its disastrous election loss in 2019.
Starmer has spent the past five years ruthlessly purging the Labour Party of the last remnants of left-wing Bennite radicalism – whose most recent proponent was the hapless Jeremy Corbyn. It is not for nothing that Starmer has ditched almost every element of the Labour manifesto that he so eagerly embraced not so long ago.
It is perfectly clear that Starmer’s Labour Party will govern for the global elites – not the traditional British working class or those other social strata that have been displaced and left behind by globalization.
Starmer may refer endlessly to his “tool setter” father in interviews, and Angela Rayner may go on ad infinitum about her poverty-stricken background – but this is all posturing and propaganda of the crudest kind. And it did not fool working-class voters in the “red wall” seats last week – they voted for Farage, not Starmer and Rayner.
Starmer’s first post-election speech is a surer guide to the elite policies that his Labour government will pursue.
Starmer immediately shut down the hopelessly ineffective Rwanda scheme – thereby foreshadowing in reality, whatever he may say publicly, his commitment to increased levels of immigration, a key global elite policy. Sunak was also committed to increased levels of immigration, notwithstanding his stated policy position to the contrary.
Also revealing was his comment that “we have too many prisoners” and his appointment of James Timpson as the minister of state for prisons. Timpson is on record as having said that two-thirds of those in British prisons should not be there, and he is famous for employing ex-prisoners in his shoe-repair chain.
Could there be a more elitist and woke policy than freeing prisoners in large numbers? The residents of London and other large cities in the UK must be looking forward the increased crime rates in which such a policy will inevitably result.
Starmer also reaffirmed his commitment to supporting the Zelensky regime in Ukraine in the strongest possible terms.
There can be no doubt that a Starmer Labour government will pursue elite policies such as these, and it will resort to radical constitutional reform in order to do so. Peter Hitchens has correctly drawn attention to Starmer’s radical plans to reform the House of Lords and further empower an already ideologically committed judiciary.
All of this is about governing in the interests of the global elites – it has nothing whatsoever to do with genuine left-wing politics.
What then can we expect to happen in British politics under a Starmer government over the next five years?
First, it is inevitable that the Conservative Party will disappear as a major political force.
The Tories have been deeply divided and led by fourth-rate politicians for decades, and Brexit exacerbated these problems to such an extent that the party tore itself apart once Brexit was finally implemented, after a debilitating internal battle, by Boris Johnson.
Johnson – although a flawed politician in some respects – was the only effective leader that the Conservative Party has had in the past decade.
Like Benjamin Disraeli and David Lloyd George, Johnson was something of a Tory outsider, a charismatic leader who understood that the electoral appeal of the Conservative Party could be significantly broadened by adopting policies that appealed to British patriotism and the traditional working class.
Johnson’s “get Brexit done” and “leveling up” policies allowed the Conservatives to appeal to disaffected traditional Labour voters and, at the same time, effectively neutralize the appeal of Nigel Farage’s UKIP Party.
These policies, together with Johnson’s charismatic leadership and campaigning skills, enabled him to win an extraordinary 80-seat majority at the 2019 election.
Notwithstanding this unprecedented electoral victory, within three years the Remainers and others within the Conservative Party (Johnson never had the support of a large majority of MPs) had joined forces with with the global elites, the mainstream woke UK media, the Supreme Court, and a raft of fourth-rate politicians of all political persuasions to ruthlessly destroy Johnson’s political career.
He was finally finished off by a narcissistic and vengeful populace who were, wrongly and foolishly, outraged at the Partygate affair.
Once Johnson had been deposed, the fate of a deeply divided Conservative Party under utterly incompetent leaders like Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak was sealed. In fact, last week’s collapse of the Tory vote was richly deserved, and Truss in particular deserved to lose her seat.
And one only has to observe the unseemly squabbling taking place this week between the half-a-dozen or so candidates for the Tory leadership – they include such luminaries as Robert Jennick and James Cleverly – to see that the Conservative Party does not have a viable future no matter who is eventually chosen to lead it.
What is the likely fate of the Starmer Labour government?
Like all mainstream governments in Western countries that represent the interests of the global elites, Starmer’s government will be unable to remedy any of the fundamental problems confronting the UK – because it is unwilling to introduce the genuinely radical economic and social reforms that would be necessary to bring that about.
Stramer’s government will be unable to resuscitate the ailing British economy. It will do nothing to solve the cost-of-living crisis or reduce energy prices. It will not be able to reverse the decline of the NHS or improve the delivery of government services. It will continue to support America’s proxy wars with all the adverse domestic consequences that follow from such a misguided foreign policy. And its firm commitment to woke policies will only intensify the culture wars that have so deeply divided British society for the past few decades.
It follows that, within a relatively short period of time, the British electorate will become disenchanted with Starmer and his government. Its fate will mirror the fate of the Biden, Macron and Sholz administrations.
The Reform Party will probably become the major beneficiary of this disillusionment – but whether it will be able to capitalize on it is very much an open question.
Populist parties do not have a good record of delivering on their promises, and the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system makes it almost impossible for minor parties to win large numbers of seats.
Farage himself was in two minds about coming back to lead the Reform Party and contest the election – and five years is a long time to spend in opposition as the leader of a party with only five MPs.
The French electoral system is much more favourable towards radical right-wing parties than the British, and in America Donald Trump had to take over the Republican Party in order for it to become an effective political force. Trump realized in the 1990s that he could not win the presidency as a third-party candidate.
If Farage is to become a significant political leader he may have to take over what is left of the Conservative Party after last week’s election.
Rather than bring about a “shift to the center” or usher in a “radical left-wing government,” Keir Starmer’s election victory is, therefore, much more likely to ensure that UK politics staggers along in much the same chaotic and dysfunctional fashion that it has for the past decade.
That appears to be the most that voters in Western democracies can hope for these days.
Graham Hryce is an Australian journalist and former media lawyer, whose work has been published in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Sunday Mail, the Spectator and Quadrant.
Le Pen slams witch-hunt after investigation launched into 2022 presidential campaign funding
BY DÉNES ALBERT | REMIX NEWS | JULY 10, 2024
An investigation has been launched in France into the suspected illegal financing of Marine Le Pen’s 2022 presidential election campaign, the Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed on Tuesday.
According to BFMTV, preliminary proceedings were opened on July 2 into investigating a loan from a legal entity, the prosecution said. However, no further details related to the investigation were provided.
Since 1990, the financing of French election campaigns has been managed and controlled by an independent body, the National Commission for Campaign Accounts (CNCCFP), which approves the reimbursement of part of campaign expenses to candidates by the state.
It is this authority that reported the suspicion of irregularities in the financing of the campaign of the presidential candidate of the National Constituency to the Paris prosecutor’s office in 2023.
The investigation is being conducted by the financial department of the Paris criminal police under the direction of an independent investigating judge, the prosecutor’s office said.
“My client has never been heard in any capacity on any of the facts of this general accusation,” Marine Le Pen’s lawyer Rodolphe Bosselut said in a statement. “She is now facing a media campaign to which she cannot yet respond or defend herself, as she is not aware of any specific complaints that could be the subject of a detailed response,” the lawyer added, indicating that it was “in vain” that he had asked the prosecutor’s office for further details.
“The proceedings are a vague accusation that cannot be challenged or questioned, and so to pillory my client in the media is dishonest,” Marine Le Pen’s legal representative stressed.
The AFP news agency quoted an unnamed source within the National Rally (RN) who recalled that Marine Le Pen’s presidential campaign account was approved by the competent authority in December 2022 and the state reimbursed part of the costs in February 2023.
EU Commission Urges Digital ID, E-Health Records, and Touts “Anti-Disinformation” Efforts in Digital Decade Report
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 8, 2024
Earlier this week the EU Commission (EC) published its second report on what it calls “the state of the digital decade,” urging member countries to step up the push to increase access and incentivize the use of digital ID and electronic health records.
At the same time, the bloc is satisfied with how the crackdown on “disinformation,” “online harms,” and the like is progressing.
In a press release, the EC said the report was done to assess the progress made in reaching the objectives contained in the Digital Decade Policy Program (DDPP), targeting 2030 as the year of completion.
EU members have now for the first time contributed to the document with analyses of their national “Digital Decade strategic roadmaps.” And, here, the EC is not exactly satisfied: the members’ efforts will not meet the EU’s “level of ambition” if things continue to develop as they currently are, the document warns.
In that vein, while the report is generally upbeat on the uptake of digital ID (eID schemes) and the use of e-Health records, its authors point out that there are “still significant differences among countries” in terms of eID adoption.
To remedy member countries falling short on these issues, it is recommended that they push for increased access to eID and e-Health records in order to meet the objectives set for 2030.
The EU wants to see both these schemes available to 100% of citizens and businesses by that date – and reveals that eID is at this point available to 93% of citizens across the 27 of the bloc’s countries, “despite uneven take-up.”
Still, the EC’s report shows that policymakers in Brussels are optimistic that the EU digital ID Wallet will “incentivize” eID use.
And, the document’s authors are happy with the way the controversial Digital Services Act (DSA) is getting enforced. Critics, however, believe it is there to facilitate crackdowns on speech – under the guise of combating “disinformation,” etc.
The EU calls this, “strengthening the protection against online harms and disinformation,” while also mentioning that it is launching investigations (into online platforms) to make sure DSA is enforced.
And in order to reinforce the message that DSA is needed as a force for good, the report asserts that “online risks are on the rise and disinformation has been identified as one of the most destabilizing factors for our societies, requiring comprehensive, coordinated action across borders and actors.”
The Prince And The Spy
By Whitney Webb | The Last American Vagabond | May 12, 2023
A TLAV investigation has found that Erik Prince, the man behind the Blackwater mercenary group, recently teamed up with an Israeli spy, creating a front company with her to help Israeli defense technology providers exploit loopholes and sell their products to the American military.
For years, Erik Prince – the founder of mercenary firm Blackwater (now Academi) – has been a major source of controversy. Ever since he left Blackwater over a decade ago, Prince has appeared in the news for pushing to privatize several wars, his ties to former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns, his violation of international arms embargoes and his unusually close ties with Project Veritas, among other notable events and connections.
However, some of Prince’s antics in recent years have not yet made it into the news – namely his decision to team up with an Israeli spy to build a very secretive company that has – until now – evaded scrutiny. That company, Comframe Solutions, appears to operate as an intelligence front and explicitly targets parts of the American military involved in highly sensitive combat operations. As this investigation will show, Prince’s partner in Comframe – Lital Leshem – has been tied to a series of apparent, and admitted, Israeli intelligence front companies, several of which have a focus on technology. Yet Prince and his close associate Chris Burgess – Comframe’s supposed president – have done everything they can to hide their association with the incredibly secretive company. Why might that be and what exactly is Comframe up to?
From “Army Brat” to Cyber Spy
Lital Leshem was raised as an “army brat” in Reut, Israel and Pennsylvania, USA. She later enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as she was “truly devoted to safeguarding the State of Israel.” She quickly rose in the ranks, becoming Operations Officer in the IDF of the besieged Gaza Strip and later becoming a Major, a position she continues to hold to this date through her “reserve duty activities.” According to her LinkedIn, she served in Israeli military intelligence from 2005 to 2011 and, more specifically, served in its signals intelligence unit – Unit 8200. She later attended IDC Herzliya, an Israeli university deeply tied to its military and intelligence apparatus. There, she met Amir Elichai and the two would co-create the company Reporty, which later became Carbyne911 – today known only as Carbyne.
Carbyne was originally founded as Reporty in 2014 by Leshem, Elichai and Alex Dizengof. Leshem and Elichai are Unit 8200 veterans, while Dizengof previously worked for Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office. Before it was revealed that Jeffrey Epstein had poured at least 1 million dollars into the company at the behest of his close associate Ehud Barak, Cabryne’s board of directors – which Barak chaired – included the former commander of Unit 8200, Pinchas Buchris, as well as Epstein associate turned venture capitalist Nicole Junkermann. In the wake of the Epstein scandal, Buchris, Barak and Junkerman, among others, were removed from the board and were largely replaced with veterans and former heads of American intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Leshem had left the company in 2017, but has continued to own shares in the company.
Carbyne is a Next-Generation 9-11 (NG911) platform and the explicit goal of NG911 is for all 911 systems nationwide to become interconnected. It is currently active throughout the United States, its main target market. Its software has been criticized due to “serious privacy concerns” about the amount of information it harvests from smartphones that call a 911 call center running Carbyne’s software. For instance, Carbyne’s smartphone app extracts the following information from the phones on which it is installed:
“Device location, video live-streamed from the smartphone to the call center, text messages in a two-way chat window, any data from a user’s phone if they have the Carbyne app and ESInet, and any information that comes over a data link, which Carbyne opens in case the caller’s voice link drops out.”
The potential for Carbyne as a tool for mass surveillance has been extensively reported by Narativ, MintPress News and other outlets. In addition, Carbyne stores all data on past calls and events in order to “enabl[e] decision makers to accurately analyze the past and present behavior of their callers, react accordingly, and in time predict future patterns.” As a result, Carbyne – along with other Israeli intelligence-connected companies seeking to dominate the American “public safety” market – has the potential to facilitate controversial “predictive policing”, i.e. pre-crime, policies.
In addition to Carbyne, Leshem also worked for Black Cube, which has since been removed from her LinkedIn. There, she had been the firms Director of Marketing. Black Cube was specifically outed as an Israeli intelligence front organization in a 2019 article published by Calcalist Tech. That same article also contains the stunning revelation that many Israeli companies, including Black Cube, have been founded as fronts for intelligence operations since 2012. It states that “since 2012, cyber-related and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli military and Israel’s main intelligence arms are transferred to companies that in some cases were built for this exact purpose.” The article also adds that:
“In some cases, managers of development projects in the Israeli military and intelligence arms were encouraged to form their own companies which then took over the [military and/or intelligence] project.”
With Leshem having worked for one company already known to be a product of this deliberate policy, it is worth scrutinizing Carbyne as being one such front, especially considering the common tie of Ehud Barak to both companies. In addition, Leshem has also worked for another company tied to Barak that has been described as worse than the NSO Group, which produced the notorious Pegasus software. Called Toka, its top executives – like Carbyne – are largely veterans of Israeli’s Unit 8200, where Leshem also served, or former commanders of Israeli military cyber operations.
Toka, which Ehud Barak founded in 2018, is very, very likely to be one of the front organizations produced as a result of the aforementioned 2012 Israeli intelligence policy. The company is directly partnered with Israel’s Ministry of Defense and other Israeli intelligence and security agencies since its founding and the company only sells its products to countries that are considered allies of Israel. It purports to be able to hack, not just smartphones, but any device with internet connectivity, such as doorbell cameras and other “smart” devices. As will be noted later in this article, Leshem herself has noted that Toka has a relationship with the CIA.
After being involved with a series of Israeli intelligence fronts and her enduring ties to Israeli military intelligence through her “reserve duty activities”, Leshem was courted by a surprising figure – Erik Prince, war profiteer and founder of the controversial mercenary outfit Blackwater.
Partnering with Prince
Leshem says that she met Prince after she “randomly stumbled across his path and joined his team.” There, per her website, she “managed his business portfolio and his global investments.” Her LinkedIn lists her as serving as the executive director of global business development of Frontier Resource Group (FRG) from 2018 to 2021. Frontier Resource Group was founded by Prince and is “an Africa-dedicated investment firm partnered with major Chinese enterprises, including at least one state-owned resource giant that is keen to pour money into the resource-rich continent,” according to the South China Post. It not only operates in Africa, but also other countries due to its contracts to support China’s One Belt One Road initiative, which were signed in 2019.
FRG is a subsidiary of Frontier Services Group (FSG), which Prince also founded. In 2013, he sold a majority share of FSG to the China International Trust Investment Corporation (CITIC), a state-owned Chinese investment company that is among the largest of the country’s state-run conglomerates. CITIC, during the mid-1990s, was chaired by Wang Jun, who doubled as China’s chief arms dealer and was a key figure in the “Chinagate” scandal of the Clinton White House. As detailed in One Nation Under Blackmail, that scandal involved the illicit transfer of American military technology to China and the illicit transfer of Chinese weapons, whose sale in the US was banned during this time, into the United States. Mark Middleton, a White House aide, and Jeffrey Epstein are some of the names apparently involved with those activities. “Chinagate” appears to have been a joint venture between factions of the CIA and Israeli intelligence and has never been properly investigated by federal authorities. It seems that Prince, who was (and may still be) a CIA asset, and Leshem have engaged in similar activities via FRG/FSG. For example, TRTWorld reported that Leshem is “speculated” to have transferred Carbyne’s technology to China via her role at FRG and her connection to Prince. China launched an app that was nearly analogous to Carbyne, but more explicitly focused on surveillance, at the same time that Carbyne launched its first 911 call system in the United States.
In addition, TRTWorld notes, the company DarkMatter, a UAE surveillance and intelligence group that employs former US intelligence operatives, attracted the attention of Chinese officials at a smart cities conference in 2015. DarkMatter, which was launched to modernize Emirati intelligence and military operations, signed a Global Strategic Memorandum of Understanding with Huawei, the Chinese tech giant. The middle man in this sale was none other than Erik Prince. Leshem and another Prince associate, Dorian Barak, also have business ties to the UAE via their prominent roles at the UAE-Israel Business Council.
As TRTWorld concluded:
“With similar technology being used, and the same mercenary middle-man between Carbyne and China who brought together UAE’s DarkMatter surveillance technology with China, indications point to a likely transfer of surveillance technology from Epstein’s Israeli company [Carbyne] to China.”
Comframe – Secretive Company or Intelligence Front?
Prince’s and Leshem’s joint activities after Leshem left FRG suggest that this pattern of behavior has not only continued, but deepened. According to Leshem’s website, a year and a half after she started working for Prince, she and Prince “joined forces to found Comframe, a company that takes the best of Israeli defense technology providers, and helps them penetrate the American market by bridging prevalent gaps.” Leshem also says Comframe was assisted by her “premier integrator and business development platform for deploying advanced military, special operations, public safety and HLS solutions in the United States, and a wide network of partnership, both government and civilian.”
In discussing Comframe elsewhere, Leshem writes that the company she co-founded with Prince “is led and staffed by Special Operations and defense procurement veterans with billions of dollars of successful sales to USG and foreign government to their names.” She says that Comframe has a “track-record of success implementing complex procurement and integrations programs from intelligence gathering & analysis, to contracting, program sales and personnel deployment, is exceptional.”
What Leshem says of the company clashes with Comframe’s threadbare public presence. For instance, its website, which is notably short on content, lists the following companies as partners – TomCar, BlueBird Aero Systems, General Robotics, SafeStrike, Ops-Core (now part of Gentex Corp) and Axon. On its partners page, Comframe says that this is “a small sampling of our current partners we have chosen to work with.” Most of these companies were created by Israeli military/military intelligence veterans.
Aside from the partners page, there is little other information available on the Comframe site. It describes its mission as “to source cutting-edge, innovative technologies that safely and securely solve articulated U.S. government problems” and touts its “get it done” commitment and how its employees “wake up every morning wanting to find solutions that keep the U.S. government safe and more lethal.” It lists the company’s president as Chris Burgess. Burgess, a former NAVY Seal who trained with Erik Prince, does not list Comframe on his LinkedIn or in any other site discussing his work history. He is currently the CEO of military contractor Regulus Global. Burgess previously ran a mercenary firm he founded, Greystone Ltd., that was previously affiliated with Prince’s Blackwater and was originally intended to be Blackwater’s “sister company.”
Both Blackwater (now Academi) and Greystone have been accused of sending mercenaries to fight in the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Both companies deny this. The accusations came after Prince had planned to create a “private army” in Ukraine, something he has attempted to do (and sometimes succeeded) in various conflict zones, such as Afghanistan. Prince has also attempted to offer “lethal services” to Russia’s Wagner group.
Aside from Burgess’ apparent unwillingness to associate himself publicly with Comframe, there is also the fact that the only employee publicly associated with Comframe at all is Lital Leshem. Indeed, even Erik Prince has declined to publicly affiliate himself with the company. Another oddity is the fact that Comframe’s website has an “Industry News” page that contains several blog posts with titles discussing oil markets and geopolitics. However, the content of the posts themselves are all filler generated by WordPress. Was Comframe also intended to work in commodities markets? The odd and sparse nature of the website seems to clash with Leshem’s characterization of the company.
So, what is Comframe exactly and what is it intended to do? Why are the only people associated with the company two professional mercenaries, one of whom is a known CIA asset, and an Israeli spy? A 2020 article published in the Jerusalem Post seems to highlight Comframe’s mysterious inner workings and likely purpose.
That article notes that Comframe acted as a middleman in forging an agreement to create an assembly line in El Paso, TX in order for the Israeli company Tomcar to “offer its latest models to the US Armed Forces.” The agreement was made between Tomcar and Prince Manufacturing, a major contract manufacturing company that works with Ford, General Motors and Tesla, among others. Prince Manufacturing was notably founded and run for many years by Edgar Prince, Erik Prince’s father. Notably Tomcar, its founder – Yoram Zarchi – and his son (works for Tomcar) – Ram Zarchi – appear in the Panama Papers as does the former holding company that owned Tomcar from 2004 to 2011.
The article notes that Comframe “is focused on recognizing needs in the US defense industry and matching them to possible solutions, usually involving innovative Israeli companies.” However, the article notes, “to meet the demands of American security needs, one must have an American entity.” Leshem is then quoted as saying, “Ram [Zarchi of Tomcar] had been living in Phoenix for 15 years, but he can’t do that [sell to the American military because he is not a US citizen]. We can.”
In other words, per Leshem, Comframe utilizes Prince and presumably Burgess to sell Israeli defense technology and products to the American military that would otherwise not happen due to national security concerns around buying foreign-made products for sensitive defense and military operations. Leshem goes on to state Comframe sells “to the US Special Forces and other branches of the service [i.e. US military],” noting that Comframe is specifically targeting Special Ops. She also suggests that, aside from the US military, another intended market for the company is NATO – she told the Jerusalem Post that the US “controls 70% of NATO’s defense industry.”
The article ends by stating that, for Comframe, when sales are related to national security, one still has to have “boots on the ground,” suggesting why Comframe has such a minimal web and online presence. This is similar to another company Leshem has been working for while at Comframe, Ehud Barak’s Toka. Notably, at the end of this very article, Leshem uses Toka as an example regarding Comframe’s “boots on the ground” sales approach. She states:
“Hi-tech companies like Toka with clients like the CIA, can’t discuss what they do using Zoom.”
A New Pattern for Prince
Comframe is a very suspect company – it is highly, highly secretive, targets sensitive American military agencies with foreign technology, and its known employees are apparent spooks and intelligence-linked mercenaries. Not only that, but the history of Israeli espionage in the United States – from Jonathan Pollard and PROMIS to Comverse and beyond – shows a concerted effort to target the American military and security agencies, often with bugged or “backdoored” technology.
In addition to the above, Prince has also recently engaged in efforts to market a very suspect smartphone to MAGA Republicans as being “unhackable” and “unsurveillable.” That phone was “designed in Israel” and the company that produces it is called Unplugged. According to reports, Unplugged’s “day-to-day technology operations are run by Eran Karpen, a former employee of CommuniTake, the Israeli start-up that gave rise to the now infamous hacker-for-hire firm NSO Group.” Karpen, like Leshem, is also a veteran of Unit 8200.
Notably, DarkMatter, the UAE private intelligence company that was mentioned earlier due to its association with Prince, once marketed an “ultrasecure” phone called Katim, only to be later outed for hacking dissidents and journalists. In addition, Prince debuted Unplugged’s phone on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” program. Both Prince and Bannon have controversial relationships with exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, also known as Miles Guo.
That Prince would help market this phone specifically to MAGA Republicans is disturbing given that his associate Leshem and other Israeli intelligence veterans and operatives have played a major role in developing the infrastructure for the US’ “War on Domestic Terror,” which is mainly targeted at the political right and has already utilized mass surveillance through smartphones and other technologies to justify arrests, including “pre-crime” arrests. Given the content of this investigation, Prince’s ties to foreign governments and intelligence agencies should be heavily scrutinized, especially Comframe – whose secretive activities may be drastically undermining American national security.
SCOTUS ruling is about protecting the institution of the presidency
Sky News Australia | July 5, 2024
Lawyer Robert Barnes says the SCOTUS ruling is now the “only thing” preventing former presidents from being extradited to foreign countries to be prosecuted.
“Without it, you know, someone unhappy with Joe Biden’s policies, unhappy with Barack Obama’s policies, unhappy with George W. Bush or Bill Clinton’s policies, all of them could seek the extradition of someone over something that was done by the US military or the US government overseas,” he told Sky News Australia host James Morrow.
“This protects all of them, and primarily cares about protecting the institution of the presidency.”
British Columbia Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Defeated on Judicial Notice
Case of Dr. Charles Hoffe Kills Deferral to Government Offices as Agents of “Truth”
Courageous Discourse™ | July 6, 2024
This was written by Canadian attorney Lee Turner after discussion with Dr. McCullough.
Dr. Charles Hoffe is a family and (former) emergency room physician in British Columbia who is the subject of disciplinary proceedings before the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia for making public statements about SARS-CoV-2, the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, and other alternative treatments including ivermectin. Hoffe has successfully defeated an application made by the College seeking judicial notice of the truth of facts alleged by the College concerning these issues. In its efforts to discipline the physician, the College has alleged that the statements made by the physician are misleading, incorrect or inflammatory and constitute professional misconduct. The College asked the discipline panel to take judicial notice of the following facts and thereby prevent the doctor from presenting any contrary evidence in his defence:
- The Covid virus kills or causes other serious effects;
- The virus does not discriminate;
- Vaccines work;
- Vaccines are generally safe and have a low risk of harmful effects, especially in children;
- Infection and transmission of the COVID-19 virus is less likely to occur among fully vaccinated individuals than for those who are unvaccinated; vaccines do not prevent infection, reinfection or transmission, but they reduce the severity of symptoms and the risk of bad outcomes;
- Health Canada has approved COVID vaccines, and regulatory approval is a strong indicator of safety and effectiveness;
- Health Canada has not approved ivermectin to treat COVID-19; and
- Health Canada advises that Canadians should not consume the veterinary version of ivermectin.
In its June 29, 2024 decision, the disciplinary panel of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia declined to take judicial notice of items 2-5, did take judicial notice of items 7-8 (the straightforward ivermectin claims), and took judicial notice of a revised version of items 1 and 6.
The panel was prepared to take judicial notice of item 1 that reads: “COVID-19 can kill or cause other serious effects”.
The College explained their rationale for taking judicial notice of a revised version of item 1 by referencing evidence presented by the doctor in his defence that included the following:
- risk of severe disease and death from COVID-19 is extremely skewed to those above 70 years of age, especially those with multiple comorbidities. The average age of persons that died from COVID-19 in Canada was approximately 84 years old;
- very low proportion of COVID-19 related deaths in Canada occurred in those under 50 years of age-the data shows very high (although not 100%) survival rates for those under 70;
- average rate of lethality from COVID-19 for Canadians is much lower than estimates given by public health officials; and
- reported hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 have been over-counted, because many hospitalizations and deaths “with, and not from” COVID-19 were wrongly attributed to COVID-19
With respect to item 6, the panel endorsed findings of an earlier provincial Court of Appeal decision that held the safety and efficacy of any drug is always relative and as a rule the safety and efficacy of a pharmaceutical product cannot be discussed in such blunt fashion as to say that it “is” or “is not” safe and effective. The panel held that the issues raised in the citation should be determined based upon the evidence that is tested through cross-examination rather than by taking judicial notice of one party’s assertion of the facts, and in this case, based upon statements made by public health officials or public health agencies. The panel held that it was prepared to take judicial notice of the fact that Health Canada had approved the COVID – 19 vaccines, but declined to take judicial notice that Health Canada’s approval was a strong indicator of safety and effectiveness.
This decision on the issue of judicial notice, is consistent with the June 28, 2024 decision of the US Supreme Court in Loper Bright Enterprises et al. v. Raimondo Secretary of Commerce et. al. which overturned the landmark 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The Chevron decision had given rise to what is commonly referred to as the Chevron deference doctrine. Under this doctrine, federal agencies had the power to interpret a law that they administer when that law is vaguely written, and courts were required to defer to the agency’s interpretation of a statute. In Loper, the US Supreme Court rejected the Chevron deference doctrine calling it “fundamentally misguided.” They said court should rely on their own interpretation of ambiguous laws rather than having to accept the agency’s interpretation. Commentators have suggested that the Chevron deference doctrine gave the powerful – the people who control the agencies like the FDA, CDC and FCC – a significant advantage in court making them essentially the ultimate decision-makers in interpreting ambiguous laws. Commentators have pointed out that many of these agencies are captive agencies with close ties, including financial ties, to the industries that they are charged with regulating and therefore they lack objectivity with respect to those industries. The ruling in Labor means that federal judges now have more authority to interpret these laws. The decision by the British Columbia Disciplinary Panel of the College of Physicians of Surgeons of British Columbia prevents regulatory bodies from saying “it is so because we say it is so”. They have to prove the facts they assert and those who disagree will be allowed to challenge those facts and present contrary evidence.
The case against Dr. Hoffe is far from over. This development is significant in that a government agency cannot make the rules, interpret them, and claim they hold the truth on an evolving scientific or medical issue.
Lee C. Turner, Partner, Doak Sherriff Lawyers, LLC, Kelowna BC V1Y 2A9
(Professional Law Corporation)
Former FBI and Twitter Lawyer Jim Baker Joins Election Task Force Advocating for Social Media Censorship
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 5, 2024
From presidential election to another election, to Covid – to another election. That is how members of particular, mostly flying-under-the-radar power centers in the US have been moving over the last decades.
From time to time, however, circumstances demand that they show their faces: one is James “Jim” Baker, a former FBI lawyer whose “censorship portfolio” includes the infamous case of endorsing the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression – while he was on Twitter’s payroll.
And while there – Baker also wanted to know how come President Trump was not censored for a post saying – “Don’t fear Covid.”
Well, Baker also seems to be staying true to himself – unfortunately, his “truth” appears to be to never miss the chance to support the wrong thing (the “RussiaGate” saga happens to be among them). Right now, he has joined something called “the National Task Force on Election Crises.”
It’s a crisis, alright. A crisis of online censorship that can, and does, produce multiple “election” crises and a rapid erosion of trust in legacy media and political institutions.
The group’s parent operation is the Protect Democracy Project.
There’s nothing particularly innovative about the group’s lobbying talking points: remove or downgrade “election misinformation” and make sure removing and labeling content (as false) is done ASAP by social and news media (time is clearly of the essence, at this point…)
As for the electoral process itself – which ended up highly and even dangerously contested perhaps for the first time in US democratic history in 2020 – the group Baker is now affiliated with seems to want the reasons by and large leading to that to remain intact.
Namely, things like “(preventing) cyber or other attacks by foreign adversaries or domestic disrupters, promot(ing) pre-canvassing of absentee ballots” – and working to discourage legal challenges to the election process.
Looks like Baker might be just the right man for the wrong job.
The Supreme Court’s Superb Dissenting Opinion
At least three justices understand what is at stake here
By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | July 5, 2024
Three justices of the Supreme Court actually read and understood the record in our case. Justice Alito, joined by Gorsuch and Thomas, wrote an important dissenting opinion. I’d like to share a few highlights here, as it provides a roadmap to ultimately prevailing in our case.
The three dissenting justices clearly recognize that we the plaintiffs were victims of the government’s unconstitutional censorship activities:
Among these victims were two States, whose public health officials were hampered in their ability to share their expertise with state residents; distinguished professors of medicine at Stanford and Harvard; a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine; the owner and operator of a news website; and Jill Hines, the director of a consumer and human rights advocacy organization. All these victims simply wanted to speak out on a question of the utmost public importance.
Echoing the district court and circuit court opinions, the dissenting justices indicate the landmark importance of this free speech case:
If the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years. Freedom of speech serves many valuable purposes, but its most important role is protection of speech that is essential to democratic self-government, and speech that advances humanity’s store of knowledge, thought, and expression in fields such as science, medicine, history, the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts.
Unlike the majority opinion, which took the government’s claim to be combating “misinformation” at face value, the dissenting opinion recognized that much of the speech that the government suppressed was true:
The speech at issue falls squarely into those categories. It concerns the COVID–19 virus, which has killed more than a million Americans. Our country’s response to the COVID–19 pandemic was and remains a matter of enormous medical, social, political, geopolitical, and economic importance, and our dedication to a free marketplace of ideas demands that dissenting views on such matters be allowed. I assume that a fair portion of what social media users had to say about COVID–19 and the pandemic was of little lasting value. Some was undoubtedly untrue or misleading, and some may have been downright dangerous. But we now know that valuable speech was also suppressed. That is what inevitably happens when entry to the marketplace of ideas is restricted.
The majority opinion suggested, without evidence, that our censorship was the result of the actions of social media platforms, who may have censored us even in the absence of government coercion. The dissenting opinion explains the flaws with this unwarranted assumption:
Of course, purely private entities like newspapers are not subject to the First Amendment, and as a result, they may publish or decline to publish whatever they wish. But government officials may not coerce private entities to suppress speech, see National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo, 602 U. S. 175 (2024), and that is what happened in this case.
The record before us is vast. It contains evidence of communications between many different government actors and a variety of internet platforms, as well as evidence regarding the effects of those interactions on the seven different plaintiffs.
Alito focuses on Facebook and co-plaintiff Jill Hines as the clearest example (though by no means the only example) to illustrate the nature of the problem:
Here is what the record plainly shows. For months in 2021 and 2022, a coterie of officials at the highest levels of the Federal Government continuously harried and implicitly threatened Facebook with potentially crippling consequences if it did not comply with their wishes about the suppression of certain COVID–19-related speech. Not surprisingly, Facebook repeatedly yielded. As a result Hines was indisputably injured, and due to the officials’ continuing efforts, she was threatened with more of the same when she brought suit. These past and threatened future injuries were caused by and traceable to censorship that the officials coerced, and the injunctive relief she sought was an available and suitable remedy.
It’s hard to know how much more harm the Supreme Court would need to see before agreeing that at least one of the plaintiffs has standing. These examples could be multiplied. By refusing to examine the record and rule on the merits, Alito suggests that the Court actually provides a roadmap for future government censorship efforts:
This evidence was more than sufficient to establish Hines’s standing to sue, and consequently, we are obligated to tackle the free speech issue that the case presents. The Court, however, shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.
That is regrettable. What the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional in Vullo, but it was no less coercive. And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even more dangerous. It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so. Officials who read today’s decision together with Vullo will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send.
Alito then echoes arguments I published in The Federalist following oral arguments, regarding the key differences between newspapers and social media companies in terms of their interactions with government:
Internet platforms, although rich and powerful, are at the same time far more vulnerable to Government pressure than other news sources. If a President dislikes a particular newspaper, he (fortunately) lacks the ability to put the paper out of business. But for Facebook and many other social media platforms, the situation is fundamentally different. They are critically dependent on the protection provided by §230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, 47 U. S. C. §230, which shields them from civil liability for content they spread. They are vulnerable to antitrust actions; indeed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described a potential antitrust lawsuit as an “existential” threat to his company. And because their substantial overseas operations may be subjected to tough regulation in the European Union and other foreign jurisdictions, they rely on the Federal Government’s diplomatic efforts to protect their interests.
This dynamic sets social media companies up to be vulnerable to government coercion, in precisely the way we argued before the Court:
For these and other reasons, internet platforms have a powerful incentive to please important federal officials, and the record in this case shows that high-ranking officials skillfully exploited Facebook’s vulnerability. When Facebook did not heed their requests as quickly or as fully as the officials wanted, the platform was publicly accused of “killing people” and subtly threatened with retaliation.
Not surprisingly these efforts bore fruit. Facebook adopted new rules that better conformed to the officials’ wishes, and many users who expressed disapproved views about the pandemic or COVID–19 vaccines were “deplatformed” or otherwise injured.
Alito perfectly describes how this abusive Stockholm Syndrome dynamic played out between Facebook and the White House:
What these events show is that top federal officials continuously and persistently hectored Facebook to crack down on what the officials saw as unhelpful social media posts, including not only posts that they thought were false or misleading but also stories that they did not claim to be literally false but nevertheless wanted obscured. And Facebook’s reactions to these efforts were not what one would expect from an independent news source or a journalistic entity dedicated to holding the Government accountable for its actions. Instead, Facebook’s responses resembled that of a subservient entity determined to stay in the good graces of a powerful taskmaster. Facebook told White House officials that it would “work . . . to gain your trust.” When criticized, Facebook representatives whimpered that they “thought we were doing a better job” but promised to do more going forward. They pleaded to know how they could “get back to a good place” with the White House. And when denounced as “killing people,” Facebook responded by expressing a desire to “work together collaboratively” with its accuser. The picture is clear.
Here we have a major social media platform responding as though they are entirely subservient to government interests. The more they try to please the government by ramping up censorship, the more abusive and demanding the government becomes.
To the dubious claim that plaintiffs cannot allege potential future injuries because—on their word—the White House has backed off the social media companies, Alito (in contrast to the majority opinion) calls the government’s bluff:
The White House threats did not come with expiration dates, and it would be silly to assume that the threats lost their force merely because White House officials opted not to renew them on a regular basis.
As Alito later quips, “death threats can be very effective even if they are not delivered every day.”
Drawing an analogy to another free speech case (Vullo) that was heard on the same day as ours, Alito explains:
In Vullo, the alleged conduct was blunt. The head of the state commission with regulatory authority over insurance companies allegedly told executives at Lloyd’s directly and in no uncertain terms that she would be “‘less interested’” in punishing the company’s regulatory infractions if it ceased doing business with the National Rifle Association. The federal officials’ conduct here [in Murthy] was more subtle and sophisticated. The message was delivered piecemeal by various officials over a period of time in the form of aggressive questions, complaints, insistent requests, demands, and thinly veiled threats of potentially fatal reprisals. But the message was unmistakable, and it was duly received.
The Supreme Court majority was ready to knock down ham-fisted censorship (in Vullo) but gave a pass—at least for now—to sophisticated and debonair censorship (in Murthy).
The government’s defense of its behavior included the argument that it had the right to use the bully pulpit to “persuade” social media companies to do its bidding—”the government has free speech rights, too, don’t you see?” Alito sees right through this ruse:
This argument introduces a new understanding of the term “bully pulpit,” which was coined by President Theodore Roosevelt to denote a President’s excellent (i.e, “bully”) position (i.e., his “pulpit”) to persuade the public. But [Rob] Flaherty, [Andy] Slavitt, and other [White House] officials who emailed and telephoned Facebook were not speaking to the public from a figurative pulpit. On the contrary, they were engaged in a covert scheme of censorship that came to light only after the plaintiffs demanded their emails in discovery and a congressional Committee obtained them by subpoena. If these communications represented the exercise of the bully pulpit, then everything that top federal officials say behind closed doors to any private citizen must also represent the exercise of the President’s bully pulpit. That stretches the concept beyond the breaking point.
In any event, the Government is hard-pressed to find any prior example of the use of the bully pulpit to threaten censorship of private speech.
To repeat what I have said many times before: this case is not about constraining the government’s speech—as they falsely claim; it’s about stopping the government from constraining the speech of U.S. citizens.
The dissenting justices argue that the majority opinion applies a “new and heightened standard” of traceability in our case (p.20). Alito explains, again using the case of co-plaintiff Jill Hines, that she clearly has standing to bring the case (and we only need one plaintiff with standing to prevail):
Here, it is reasonable to infer (indeed, the inference leaps out from the record) that the efforts of the federal officials affected at least some of Facebook’s decisions to censor Hines. All of Facebook’s demotion, content-removal, and deplatforming decisions are governed by its policies. So when the White House pressured Facebook to amend some of the policies related to speech in which Hines engaged, those amendments necessarily impacted some of Facebook’s censorship decisions. Nothing more is needed. What the Court seems to want are a series of ironclad links—from a particular coercive communication to a particular change in Facebook’s rules or practice and then to a particular adverse action against Hines. No such chain was required in the Department of Commerce case, and neither should one be demanded here.
Furthermore, the Court’s majority opinion developed a novel, higher standard of repressibility of potential future harms to avoid ruling on the merits of our case:
As with traceability, the Court applies a new and elevated standard for redressability, which has never required plaintiffs to be “certain” that a court order would prevent future harm.
Having established that the Court should have found that we have standing, Alito proceeds to analyze the record on the merits, using the following legal framework:
The principle recognized in Bantam Books and Vullo requires a court to distinguish between permissible persuasion and unconstitutional coercion, and in Vullo, we looked to three leading factors that are helpful in making that determination: (1) the authority of the government officialswho are alleged to have engaged in coercion, (2) the natureof statements made by those officials, and (3) the reactions of the third party alleged to have been coerced. 602 U. S., at 189–190, and n. 4, 191–194. In this case, all three factors point to coercion.
Although the government tries to spin their interactions with social media platforms as fairly benign, examination of the record in this regard leaves no doubt: “The totality of this record—constant haranguing, dozens of demands for compliance, and references to potential consequences—evince ‘a scheme of state censorship.’” Lest there be any doubt in this regard, “Facebook’s responses to the officials’ persistent inquiries, criticisms, and threats show that the platform perceived the statements as something more than mere recommendations.” Alito concludes, “In sum, the officials wielded potent authority. Their communications with Facebook were virtual demands. And Facebook’s quavering responses to those demands show that it felt a strong need to yield.”
From here we return to the District Court in Louisiana for trial, where we have an excellent judge (Terry Doughty). We will be granted additional discovery, in which we anticipate getting enough additional “smoking guns” to cross the high standing bar set by the majority Supreme Court opinion. The District court has combined our case with an analogous case filed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is clearly named and targeted in several government censorship missives—so between Hines and Kennedy there should be no questions on the issue of standing, even under the novel and strict criteria that SCOTUS requires in this case.
In other words, we will prevail in the end. I anticipate being back at the Supreme Court in another year or two for the final ruling. At that point, SCOTUS will not be able to temporize or look away as they did this time. And when judges examine the record in our case, they have only reached one conclusion: the government engaged in unconstitutional censorship on a mass scale. And it has to stop.
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From the Archives
Should Europeans ‘Thank’ the Americans for Destroying Nord Stream?
By Robert Bridge | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 29, 2022
With an investigation continuing into the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline that provided energy supplies to Europe from Russia, there appears to be just one prime suspect, and that should surprise nobody.
Following the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski already seemed to know the identity of the perpetrator when he tweeted out: “Thank you, USA.”
At first glance, it seemed that Sikorski was speaking sarcastically, berating Washington for carrying out an attack that will have severe repercussions for the people of Europe. After all, how could anyone see any good coming from the termination of Europe’s primary source of gas reserves with winter just around the corner? It was Sikorski’s homeland of Poland, after all, that urged its citizens to collect firewood in the face of dwindling gas reserves.
In fact, the Polish diplomat was speaking one-hundred percent literally… continue
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