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The Global War on Thought Crime

By David James | Brownstone Institute | September 4, 2023

Laws to ban disinformation and misinformation are being introduced across the West, with the partial exception being the US, which has the First Amendment so the techniques to censor have had to be more clandestine.

In Europe, the UK, and Australia, where free speech is not as overtly protected, governments have legislated directly. The EU Commission is now applying the ‘Digital Services Act’ (DSA), a thinly disguised censorship law.

In Australia the government is seeking to provide the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) with “new powers to hold digital platforms to account and improve efforts to combat harmful misinformation and disinformation.”

One effective response to these oppressive laws may come from a surprising source: literary criticism. The words being used, which are prefixes added to the word “information,” are a sly misdirection. Information, whether in a book, article or post is a passive artefact. It cannot do anything, so it cannot break a law. The Nazis burned books, but they didn’t arrest them and put them in jail. So when legislators seek to ban “disinformation,” they cannot mean the information itself. Rather, they are targeting the creation of meaning.

The authorities use variants of the word “information” to create the impression that what is at issue is objective truth but that is not the focus. Do these laws, for example, apply to the forecasts of economists or financial analysts, who routinely make predictions that are wrong? Of course not. Yet economic or financial forecasts, if believed, could be quite harmful to people.

The laws are instead designed to attack the intent of the writers to create meanings that are not congruent with the governments’ official position. ‘Disinformation’ is defined in dictionaries as information that is intended to mislead and to cause harm. ‘Misinformation’ has no such intent and is just an error, but even then that means determining what is in the author’s mind. ‘Mal-information’ is considered to be something that is true, but that there is an intention to cause harm.

Determining a writer’s intent is extremely problematic because we cannot get into another person’s mind; we can only speculate on the basis of their behaviour. That is largely why in literary criticism there is a notion called the Intentional Fallacy, which says that the meaning of a text cannot be limited to the intention of the author, nor is it possible to know definitively what that intention is from the work. The meanings derived from Shakespeare’s works, for example, are so multifarious that many of them cannot possibly have been in the Bard’s mind when he wrote the plays 400 years ago.

How do we know, for example, that there is no irony, double meaning, pretence or other artifice in a social media post or article? My former supervisor, a world expert on irony, used to walk around the university campus wearing a T-shirt saying: “How do you know I am being ironic?” The point was that you can never know what is actually in a person’s mind, which is why intent is so difficult to prove in a court of law.

That is the first problem. The second one is that, if the creation of meaning is the target of the proposed law – to proscribe meanings considered unacceptable by the authorities – how do we know what meaning the recipients will get? A literary theory, broadly under the umbrella term ‘deconstructionism,’ claims that there are as many meanings from a text as there are readers and that “the author is dead.”

While this is an exaggeration, it is indisputable that different readers get different meanings from the same texts. Some people reading this article, for example, might be persuaded while others might consider it evidence of a sinister agenda. As a career journalist I have always been shocked at the variability of reader’s responses to even the most simple of articles. Glance at the comments on social media posts and you will see an extreme array of views, ranging from positive to intense hostility.

To state the obvious, we all think for ourselves and inevitably form different views, and see different meanings. Anti-disinformation legislation, which is justified as protecting people from bad influences for the common good, is not merely patronising and infantilising, it treats citizens as mere machines ingesting data – robots, not humans. That is simply wrong.

Governments often make incorrect claims, and made many during Covid.

In Australia the authorities said lockdowns would only last a few weeks to “flatten the curve.” In the event they were imposed for over a year and there never was a “curve.” According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2020 and 2021 had the lowest levels of deaths from respiratory illness since records have been kept.

Governments will not apply the same standards to themselves, though, because governments always intend well (that comment may or may not be intended to be ironic; I leave it up to the reader to decide).

There is reason to think these laws will fail to achieve the desired result. The censorship regimes have a quantitative bias. They operate on the assumption that if a sufficient proportion of social media and other types of “information” is skewed towards pushing state propaganda, then the audience will inevitably be persuaded to believe the authorities.

But what is at issue is meaning, not the amount of messaging. Repetitious expressions of the government’s preferred narrative, especially ad hominem attacks like accusing anyone asking questions of being a conspiracy theorist, eventually become meaningless.

By contrast just one well-researched and well-argued post or article can permanently persuade readers to an anti-government view because it is more meaningful. I can recall reading pieces about Covid, including on Brownstone, that led inexorably to the conclusion that the authorities were lying and that something was very wrong. As a consequence the voluminous, mass media coverage supporting the government line just appeared to be meaningless noise. It was only of interest in exposing how the authorities were trying to manipulate the “narrative” – a debased word was once mainly used in a literary context – to cover their malfeasance.

In their push to cancel unapproved content, out-of-control governments are seeking to penalise what George Orwell called “thought crimes.” But they will never be able to truly stop people thinking for themselves, nor will they ever definitively know either the writer’s intent or what meaning people will ultimately derive. It is bad law, and it will eventually fail because it is, in itself, predicated on disinformation.

September 5, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

FBI and DOJ Are Sued For Concealing Biden Administration Censorship Pressure

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | September 4, 2023

America First Legal (AFL) has taken legal action against the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DOJ). AFL alleges that these federal agencies are unlawfully withholding records that may reveal the Biden administration’s manipulation of the 2022 midterm elections through censorship initiatives.

Last year, journalist Matt Taibbi, in his investigative series “The Twitter Files” unearthed communication between the FBI’s National Election Command Post (NECP) and its San Francisco Field Office. The NECP had reportedly flagged 25 Twitter accounts for “misinformation” right before the November 2022 elections and had asked for coordination with Twitter for subsequent actions.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

Further evidence coming from litigation between Missouri and the Biden administration disclosed that the FBI had run a continuous operations center to root out “disinformation” and “misinformation.” During a deposition, FBI agent Elvis Chan conceded that the agency had indeed prompted social media platforms to engage in content suppression, which he acknowledged led to de facto censorship.

Responding to these unsettling revelations, AFL sought to unearth further details through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made in late December 2022. However, their quest hit a legal roadblock when the FBI labeled the request as “overly broad” in February 2023. An appeal yielded no relief, with the DOJ upholding the FBI’s original denial on August 23, 2023.

The lawsuit filed last week by AFL aims to challenge the murky policies of the FBI and the DOJ, which they claim are concealing critical information under the guise of combating disinformation. In essence, AFL is advocating for the public’s right to scrutinize how labels like “misinformation” or “disinformation” might be weaponized to disrupt the democratic process.

Reed D. Rubinstein, Senior Counselor and Director of Oversight and Investigations at AFL emphasized the gravity of these allegations.

“Mr. Chan’s deposition contains significant evidence that the Biden government’s political censorship operation was fully engaged to blind the American people in advance of the 2022 midterm elections. Given that AFL is seeking documents directly related to his testimony, there is strong reason to believe that the FBI and DOJ are illegally stonewalling to protect their election interference means and methods. Three times now, in 2016, 2020, and 2022, the Deep State has put its thumb directly on the scale to influence our elections and aid Democrat party candidates — the American people have a right to know what else the FBI has waiting for 2024,” said Rubinstein.

September 5, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

WHO IS THE REAL ELON MUSK?

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | August 31, 2023

September 4, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Deaths up 14%. Births down 28%. Disability up 37%. Wake up, politicians!

By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | September 1, 2023

The official figures for births and deaths in New Zealand between July 1 2022 and June 30 2023 have been released. The short summary accompanying the release of the horrifying figures compares these with the previous 12 months, and reports increases in deaths and reductions in live births. The 2022/23 figures would have better been compared with the July 2018 to June 2019 totals, the first available pre-pandemic period. We report this comparison below.

There were 38,442 deaths among all ages for July 2022-June 2023 compared with 33,753 deaths in the 2018/19 period. This is an increase of 4,689 deaths (up 14 per cent) and equates to 90 excess deaths per week.

Deaths among 15-to-64-year-olds were up by 6 per cent. Figures released by the Household Labour Force Survey report the rate of disability sufficient to preclude joining the workforce among this age group has increased by 37.5 per cent over the same period and now stands at 14.3 per cent of the workforce. That is huge.

Alarmingly, live births fell from 26,500 in 2018/19 to 19,185 in 2022/23, a decrease of 7,400 or 28 per cent. This is an unprecedented drop.

Covid deaths during this period averaged around two to three per week and can be discounted as a causal factor for the increase in deaths. Nor is an ageing population sufficient explanation for the figures.

We have been aware of data like this for some time now, but there has been deafening silence from our politicians, who are currently running for re-election. We are heading into this election under unusual and coercive constraints which have no precedent in our history as a nation.

Due to the events of the last three years, the machinery of government has assumed more control over our medical and food choices. The birth and death figures must be regarded as a verdict on policies which have enjoyed cross-party support.

As a result of government policies, we have lost many of our rights as citizens. None of the parties currently elected to Parliament has any plans to revoke this government overreach. So what has gone wrong and how will this affect us if we re-elect the same group of political parties to power?

Pandemic policies have established a precedent allowing the government to enforce compliance with its medical rules. They coerced almost everyone to take injections with high rates of adverse effects. Restrictions on social movement and communication have been normalised. Agreements with social media providers and the mainstream press have censored the availability of independent information and hampered scientific dialogue. Access to official public health data has been limited.

The government has passed the Therapeutic Products Bill which has legitimised the substitution of thousands of natural ingredients with untested synthetic alternatives without requirements for clear labelling. The Bill also facilitates dose restrictions and banning of many traditional herbal products and supplements at the whim of a bureaucrat.

The government has authorised the addition of fluoride to public water supplies. It has mandated the addition of chemical supplements to staple foods including a synthetic form of folic acid to flour which is hard to metabolise and inhibits some metabolic pathways vital for health.

Re-electing sitting members of parliament from any party is a prescription for more of the same. Our current politicians are refusing to face up to some hard facts. We are in the midst of a medical emergency of unparalleled proportions. Our hospitals are overwhelmed, our politicians are silent.

Unbelievably, these politicians and medical tsars continue to ignore accumulating evidence being published in learned science journals pointing to adverse effects of mRNA vaccines. Despite this, the government is still funding advertising encouraging the population to receive further booster injections. They don’t work and they endanger health.

There are no plans to investigate what has gone wrong. It is time to say goodbye to MPs from across the political spectrum who have spectacularly failed our nation in its hour of need. If they are re-elected, our ability to manage our own health choices will be gone for good.

The judgment on their competence is there in black and white from their own statistics – deaths up 14 per cent and births down 28 per cent. It doesn’t take a genius to know where this is going. Mistakes were made and they cannot be hidden or denied any longer. Some hard questions must be asked and answered.

Our media are lazy and compliant in a cover-up. They have enjoyed government support.

None of this is in the character of our nation or in its history. It is time to wake up.

September 3, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Soros Foundation Vows to Stop ‘MAGA-Style Republicans’ From Winning 2024 Election

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 03.09.2023

The Soros family has waged a years-long political war against Donald Trump and his supporters, with George Soros calling Trump a “danger to the world” and characterizing his ideas as a “threat to democracy.” Trump has alleged that “district attorneys hand-picked and personally funded by” Soros are behind the ongoing effort to put him behind bars.

Last month, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations soft power empire announced a dramatic scaling back of funding for operations in Europe, sparking an outcry from liberal activists, NGOs, and think tanks regarding the impact the end of the financial gravy train will have on their operations.

Alexander Soros, the 37-year-old son of the Hungarian-born US billionaire who took the reins at the OSF in June, responded with a manifesto-style appeal this week explaining the shift in focus under his leadership, assuring that the OSF isn’t really “leaving Europe,” and that the region “remains of huge strategic importance.”

Shift in Focus to Eastern Europe and US

Rather, Soros indicated, the shift in funding is the result of a shift in focus, from Western to Eastern Europe and the United States.

“The future of accountable, democratic government in Europe is now being determined not just in Paris and Berlin but also in Warsaw, Kiev and Prague,” he wrote. “This isn’t about funding levels – it’s about priorities as the focus of funding shifts back to the continent’s east,” Soros Jr. noted, recalling that, after all, his father’s soft power meddling in nations’ political affairs began in Eastern Europe in the 1980s.

Spending in Ukraine won’t be affected by the cuts, Soros assured, recalling with “pride” the $250 million in cash funneled into the country since the 2014 Euromaidan coup, and which played “such an important role in Kiev’s resilience” amid the ongoing NATO-backed proxy war against Russia.

The OSF will also continue to “support” operations in Moldova and the Western Balkans, per Soros, and Central European University – the Vienna-based school booted out of Budapest in 2019 amid allegations of meddling in Hungary’s politics.

The reorganization will also include a redoubling of Soros foundations’ efforts against Donald Trump and MAGA-style Republicans, Soros indicated, expressing concerns over the impact Trump’s possible return to power in 2024 would have on the OSF’s global agenda.

“As someone who spends up to half their time working on the continent and thinks former United States President Donald Trump – or at least someone with his isolationist and anti-European policies –will be the Republican nominee, I believe a MAGA-style Republican victory in next year’s US presidential election could, in the end, be worse for the EU than for the US. Such an outcome will imperil European unity and undermine the progress achieved on many fronts in response to the war in Ukraine,” Soros opined.

Accordingly, he noted, the OSF is being “adapted” to “be able to respond to whatever scenarios might emerge, on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Soros Jr. did not elaborate on concrete adjustments in OSF operations, nor the possible “scenarios” he mentioned. However, if the Soros soft power empire’s previously disclosed efforts are anything to go by, the strategy may include pouring even more of the estimated $1.5 billion per year that’s currently been shelled out from the financier’s hedge fund profits for OSF initiatives into US politics.

Trump’s “America First” approach to foreign policy, which the billionaire began discussing decades before ever running for office, sparked alarm with Soros’ liberal globalist vision of world affairs in 2016, when he began pumping millions of dollars into Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and super PACs affiliated with her candidacy.

After Trump’s surprise victory, Soros and his allies began plotting an anti-Trump “resistance movement,” which soon manifested itself in a series of street protests, court challenges to his domestic policies, low key communications with members of his administration, support for hawks in Congress lobbying a neoliberal foreign policy, and cash to fuel the conspiracy theory that Trump was a Kremlin agent. Soros’ open meddling in American politics led to petitions from Trump’s supporters demanding that the financier be declared a “domestic terrorist,” stripped of his assets, and expelled from the country.

As the Trump presidency progressed, the Soros empire turned its focus to lower key soft power campaigns, like lobbying tech giants to regulate social media, and campaign funding to dozens, if not hundreds, of of liberal prosecutors, gubernatorial candidates, and various other state and local officials in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

The effort has apparently paid off, with Trump’s defeat in 2020 allowing Soros to push his domestic agenda through into the next administration. An investigation last year found that a Soros dark money-linked think tank had influenced Biden administration policy across nearly two dozen different policy areas.

Earlier this year, after Trump made clear that he would be running for president in 2024, an unprecedented four criminal indictments totaling close to 100 felony counts were leveled against him, with charges ranging from the mishandling of classified governments, to his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election, to suspected falsification of records related to hush money payments to a porn star.

Trump, his supporters, and even some of his Republican primary challengers almost immediately connected Soros’ soft power influence operations to the historically unprecedented political “witch hunt” against the GOP frontrunner.

“Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who was hand-picked and funded by George Soros, is a disgrace. Rather than stopping the unprecedented crime wave overtaking New York City, he’s doing Joe Biden’s dirty work,” Trump said in March following his first indictment.

And although Soros has denied funding Bragg’s campaign, or even “knowing” the prosecutor, media investigations have confirmed that the billionaire donated at least a million dollars to the candidate, who had established himself as a Trump opponent, in 2021.

“I expect that Trump will be found guilty at least in some cases, and will be in jail by election day in November 2024, though that is not the general expectation today,” George Soros said in an interview last month. “If I am right, he is unlikely to win the election. But if I am wrong, the US will face a constitutional crisis that is likely to bring on an economic crisis as well,” he added.

With a little more than a year between now and election day, it remains to be seen what tricks Alexander Soros and the revamped OSF may be able to pull to stop Trump from entering the White House a second time.

September 3, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

GoFundMe Censors Grayzone Fundraiser

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | September 1, 2023

GoFundMe, the online fundraising platform, has come under fire for what appears to be an overt politicization of its services. In what is being broadly interpreted as an act of economic censorship, GoFundMe terminated a campaign organized by The Grayzone, a leftist and antiwar website led by Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté.

The campaign aimed to generate funds for the reporting of Kit Klarenberg, Wyatt Reed, and Alex Rubenstein, had garnered $90,000 from over a thousand well-meaning individuals before GoFundMe abruptly pulled the plug.

The Grayzone reported it had garnered support from over 1,100 donors before GoFundMe decided to halt the disbursement of funds. An email from a member of the site’s Trust and Safety Team, known only as “Sabrina,” cited “external concerns” as the reason for the review of the fundraiser. Despite this, GoFundMe has provided no further details or updates since the initial communication on August 19.

“Our number one goal here is ensuring that the money from GoFundMe fundraisers always gets to the right place, so we really appreciate you helping us to make sure GoFundMe is a safe place to give,” Sabrina wrote in the email to The Grayzone.

The timing of this financial freeze is noteworthy, as it comes on the heels of sanctions imposed on The Grayzone’s managing editor, Wyatt Reed, by digital payment services Venmo and PayPal.

The incident spotlights the increasingly politicized nature of economic mechanisms, with GoFundMe emerging as an archetype of this unsettling trend.

By this point, GoFundMe is becoming renowned for its censorship. Last year, it extensively censored the civil liberties protests in Canada, and has even shut down campaigns from parents and students.

September 1, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Israel confiscates Palestinian schoolbooks in Jerusalem

MEMO | September 1, 2023

Israeli occupation authorities yesterday confiscated school textbooks printed according to the Palestinian curriculum in the occupied city of Jerusalem.

The Palestinian Jerusalem Governorate said Israeli intelligence officers seized the textbooks from inside a car that was delivering them to one of the private schools that teaches the Palestinian curriculum in the Old City of Jerusalem. The officers detained the driver and a school staff member.

For years, Israel has been trying to prevent Palestinian children in Jerusalem from following the Palestinian curriculum, claiming they must follow the Israeli curriculum, which provides a distorted view of Israel’s illegal occupation of their land.

The Jerusalem Governorate slammed the measure as an attack on the rights of Palestinian people to education, calling on the international community and human rights organisations to confront these racist crimes.

It also called on the Palestinian people, especially in Jerusalem, to confront these crimes against students and the Palestinian national curriculum and to refuse the Israeli “forged, fake and distorted” curriculum.

September 1, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

UN Publishes Final Draft of Declaration That Targets “Misinformation,” Backs WHO Pandemic Treaty

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | August 31, 2023

The United Nations (UN) is no fan of free speech and one of its plans to “address” so-called “misinformation, disinformation, hate speech and stigmatization” is on the verge of being finalized.

This unelected intergovernmental organization, which wields significant influence over its 193 member states, recently published the final draft of its Political Declaration of the United Nations General Assembly High-level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response.

The final draft contains several agreements from heads of state and government to crack down on lawful speech. Additionally, it contains pledges from these heads of state and government to back two instruments that will give the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) enhanced powers to target “misinformation” and build out its surveillance networks.

These instruments, the international pandemic treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005), have been in the works since 2021 and despite facing major pushback, are on track to be completed by May 2024.

The final draft of this political declaration is being developed for the UN’s High-Level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response which will take place on September 20, 2023 in New York. The political declaration outlined in this draft will be finalized at this meeting.

While UN political declarations aren’t usually legally binding, they do wield significant legal influence. According to the UN, declarations “represent the dynamic development of international legal norms and reflect the commitment of states to move in certain directions, abiding by certain principles.”

The proposed speech crackdowns are outlined in several sections of the final draft of this political declaration.

In section OP35, the heads of state and government agree to “take measures to counter and address the negative impacts of health-related misinformation, disinformation, hate speech and stigmatization, especially on social media platforms” and counter “vaccine hesitancy in the context of pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.” Additionally, section OP42 includes an agreement to combat “misinformation.”

The UN member states back the pandemic treaty in section OP15 and agree to encourage the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (the group that’s responsible for drafting and negotiating the pandemic treaty) to conclude their negotiations on the “WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response” (the full name of the WHO’s pandemic treaty).

Not only do UN member states give explicit backing to the pandemic treaty and push for it to be finalized but they also encourage the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) to prioritize the “need for equity.” Equity is framed by its proponents as something that encourages fairness but critics have warned that equity policies can lead to bias and the injection of “radical ideology.”

The support for the amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) is contained in section OP16 of the final draft. This section encourages the working group that’s focused on these amendments to continue its work with respect to the intended finalization date of May 2024.

This political declaration is one of the many ways the UN is tightening its grip on speech. This year alone, it has started building a “digital army” to fight against “deadly disinformation”, encouraged people to snitch on each other for “hate speech”, and claimed that censoring “disinformation” and “hate speech” will protect “free speech.”

The UN has also consulted with several governments and blocs on their censorship work. Specifically, it has attended multiple “disinformation sessions” with a UK government censorship agency and held discussions with the European Union on how to address “disinformation” on digital platforms.

Related:

The UN Human Rights Council Turns Its Back on Free Speech

August 31, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Louisiana Attorney General Files Amicus Brief in CHD’s Landmark Suit Against Trusted News Initiative

The Defender – August 31, 2023

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry on Tuesday filed an amicus brief in support of Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) groundbreaking lawsuit against the legacy news media members of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI).

The lawsuit, filed May 31, alleges the TNI violated antitrust laws and the U.S. Constitution by colluding with tech giants, some of which also are members of the TNI, to censor online news.

An amicus brief is filed by non-parties to a lawsuit to provide information that has a bearing on the issues and to assist the court in reaching the correct decision.

According to Landry’s amicus brief:

“The scope of TNI group’s conspiracy is wide-ranging. Restricting disfavored information injures not merely the Plaintiffs, but also Louisiana residents and state officials.

“Louisiana officials need a free press to communicate with and understand the concerns of the State’s residents. Louisiana residents, in turn, need a free press to receive information and make up their own minds about what is true and what is false.

“The State has a strong interest in seeing the injuries the TNI group has inflicted on Louisiana officials and residents redressed.”

Jed Rubenfeld, lead attorney in CHD’s lawsuit, said Landry’s amicus brief “from the sovereign state of Louisiana is incredibly helpful to CHD’s historic case against TNI and in explicating Louisiana’s own compelling interests in its outcome.”

Landry in May 2022 helped bring a lawsuit against the Biden administration alleging key officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, colluded with social media giants to suppress free speech on topics like COVID-19 and election security.

CHD and its chairman on leave, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in March filed a similar lawsuit against Biden administration officials, in a Louisiana district court. A federal judge last month consolidated the two cases.

TNI describes itself as an industry “partnership” formed during the early days of the COVID-19 crisis. Its members include some of the world’s largest legacy news organizations including The Washington Post, The Associated Press, Reuters, and the BBC.

Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft also are members of the TNI.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include CHD, Jim Hoft (the Gateway Pundit), Dr. Joseph Mercola and seven others.

According to the complaint, one of TNI’s stated goals is to “choke off” and “stamp out” online news reporting that TNI or any of its members deems “misinformation.”

Federal antitrust laws prohibit companies from colluding to deny critical facilities or market access to rivals. Such agreements, known as group boycotts, are per se illegal.

Chief U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty for the Western District of Louisiana on Wednesday granted leave to file Landry’s amicus brief. The court’s decision on the defendants’ legal objections to the lawsuit is expected in the near future.

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.

August 31, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Retraction of paper saying there is no climate emergency illustrates dependence of climate activists on scaremongering

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 29, 2023

The recent cancellation of Alimonti et al shows clearly that catastrophising bad weather events and attributing them to a collapse of the climate is now the main weapon deployed to scare populations into embracing the Net Zero agenda. Of course, reference is still made to global warming, but most recent rises seem to owe more to frequent upward retrospective adjustments of temperature, rather than any significant natural boost. Perhaps we should not be surprised by this turn of events. In a short essay titled ‘The New Apocalypticism’, the science writer Roger Pielke Jr. noted: “For the secular millenarian, extreme events – floods, hurricanes, fires – are more than mere portents, they are evidence of our sins of the past and provide opportunities for redemption in the future, if only we listen, accept and change.”

The climate is collapsing all around us, shout the headlines – they require we ignore the data, the historical record, even common sense. When all is said and done, the Earth is not actually boiling! Well Professor Gianluca Alimonti and three other Italian scientists didn’t ignore the past data, much of it in fact from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and they found little change in extreme weather events. They published a paper concluding that there was certainly not enough to justify the declaration of a ‘climate emergency’. A year later, the publisher Springer Nature bowed to the demands of a group of activist scientists and journalists led by the Guardian and Agence France-Presse and retracted the non-conforming paper. An addendum was proposed and sent to four reviewers for comment. Three reviewers argued for publication. The fourth stated that typical readers were not climate experts and “editors should seriously consider the implications of the possible publication of this addendum”.

We own climate science, boasted UN communications flak Melissa Fleming at a recent World Economic Forum disinformation seminar, and we partner with Google to keep our version at the top of the search list. What a great service these climate experts provide in telling us what to think and see as we unsophisticated rubes struggle towards the path of true enlightenment!

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently said we are on a pathway to climate hell, with our foot on the accelerator. Steve Koonin, President Obama’s Energy Under-Secretary for Science and the author of Unsettled, recently charged that climate scientists were negligent for not speaking out and saying Guterres’s comments were “preposterous”. Koonin is not very impressed with mainstream media click bait weather stories. “I can take current media and almost any climate story I can write a very effective counter,” he recently told Peter Robinson, host of Uncommon Knowledge. “It is like shooting fish in a barrel.”

The mainstream media has an agenda to set, namely the de-carbonisation of society. Noting the influence of green billionaire-funded operations like Covering Climate Now, Koonin said the mission was to promote the narrative. The MSM will not allow anything to be broadcast or written that is counter to the narrative. And the narrative is: “We have already broken the climate and we are heading for hell.”

You just need to look out of the window, claim the politicised alarmists. These days any half-decent storm, or scorchio summer’s day, gets them going. This year some unusual weather patterns are put forward as Exhibit A for Thermogeddon. Such deception depends upon the rubes failing to spot the difference between weather and long-term climate trends. Nobody should ask why carbon dioxide has been up to 20 times higher in the atmosphere in the past and life on Earth thrived. CO2 might gently warm the atmosphere up to a certain point, but temperatures naturally go up and down, ocean currents get warmer and cooler, change direction and melt and freeze polar ice. The idea that single events can be linked to any long term effects of CO2 is not just unproven, it’s unprovable. Computer models that ‘attribute’ single events to 30-year trends are laughable pseudoscience.

That wise sage Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, who’s spent decades trying to figure out how the atmosphere works, summed up all this fraud and corruption:

What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world – that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.

For the distinguished climatologist Dr. Judith Curry, the Alimonti affair is “why I no longer publish in peer-reviewed papers”. She described the behaviour of the journal editors as “reprehensible” in retracting a widely read climate paper just because it contained “politically inconvenient conclusions”. She is right of course – the Alimonti affair is another shocking scientific scandal that casts further doubt on the climate science peer-review process. But then, Dr. Curry is merely a scientist in all this – she doesn’t own the science.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

August 30, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Another Soros-Funded Group Pushes For Social Media Platforms To Censor Election “Disinformation”

Election season will soon be in full swing. And so will censorship demands

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | August 30, 2023

An organization under the financial umbrella of outspoken billionaire George Soros is mounting a brazen bid to implement a perilous cap on free speech in America’s digital public square. Today, the battle lines are being drawn with Common Cause, a group bankrolled by Soros, gleefully trumpeting its success in nurturing a potent alliance with Big Tech to quash election “disinformation.”

Expounding on its tactics in a recent press release titled “Election Disinformation in 2022 and What We Learned for 2024,” Common Cause masterfully revealed its ironic contradiction: a group professing to be a champion of democracy while vigorously advocating for restrictions on free speech.

The last time social media platforms pushed for election related censorship, we all know how that turned out.

Proudly recounting its successful call for Big Tech to suppress political content it disagrees with, Common Cause outlined its anti-free speech strategy, stating that the “continuing threat of election disinformation” necessitated the silencing of certain voices via Twitter and Facebook.

The group proposed a timeline to moderate and downrank online discourse, especially focusing on the suppression of what they believe to be “false statements” two months ahead of an election, and showed glaring bias by repeatedly accusing Republicans of purveying election untruths.

In the document, the group points a finger at the January 6 event as evidence of misplaced election integrity concerns, attributing this to right-wing misinformation.

Common Cause detailed how it unilaterally flagged and removed alleged “election disinformation” across social media platforms, with no regard for the principle of open discourse.

While the boast is loud about influencing Big Tech’s actions for now, Common Cause ominously remarks that these platforms still need to increase their censorship efforts ahead of future elections, chillingly suggesting that the present censorship should be just the tip of the iceberg.

Elon Musk has pledged to initiate lawsuits against NGOs financed by philanthropist George Soros, claiming they violate free speech rights. This comes on the heels of Musk filing a legal case against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), alleging that the organization is spreading inaccurate and deceptive information about X content with the aim of driving away advertisers through a manipulative “fear campaign.”

August 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Latest Biden coverup — 5,400 emails he sent under secret names

By James Bovard | New York Post | August 29, 2023

In Washington, conning the American people is always considered a victimless crime. The latest DC shellshocker is the National Archives blocking release of 5,000+ emails Vice President Joe Biden wrote using a pseudonym to shroud Biden family graft.

In ancient Rome, the consul Scipio was accused of abusing his power. He stood in front of the Senate, pulled out the written records of his reign and tore them to pieces. Scipio’s reputation was so impeccable that the audience cheered him, regardless of his destruction of evidence.

Bizarrely, this is the same template the liberal media use to whitewash President Biden. Americans don’t need to know the facts of how Biden has used his power because his intentions are good.

But the only reason his intentions appear good is because we don’t have the facts.

Consider the latest wacky revelations on the nom de crook. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the National Archives admitted there are 5,400 emails Biden apparently sent under fake names including robinware456@gmail.com, JRBWare@gmail.com and Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov.

A few of those emails have trickled out from other sources, revealing messages tied to Hunter Biden’s Ukraine hustle. But the Archives is refusing to reveal thousands of other messages despite disclosure demands from the House Oversight Committee.

Biden declared in 2019 that there was “an absolute wall” between Biden family foreign schemes and his own role as vice president. Apparently, the “absolute wall” only applied to the specific name “Joe Biden.”

Did Biden take a class in law school on Incognito Influence Peddling or what?

This is the second Biden scandal recently exposed. In 2018, Biden bragged to a Council on Foreign Relations audience that he threatened to withhold a billion dollars in foreign aid to Ukraine unless that government immediately fired its chief prosecutor in December 2015.

Biden claimed the prosecutor was corrupt, yet State Department and other documents released last week reveal that the Ukrainian prosecutor had Washington’s trust. But that prosecutor was closing in on Burisma, threatening the million dollars a year in payoffs pocketed by Hunter Biden.

If those documents had surfaced during the first Trump impeachment case in late 2019, Donald Trump’s behavior would have appeared less conniving and Biden would have looked more conniving. (Both of them would still have looked like hell.)

Two years after Biden finagled that firing to purify the US ally, Ukraine was ranked the most corrupt nation in Europe except for Russia.

Biden owes his 2020 presidential election victory to pervasive, perpetual federal coverups. The Hunter Biden laptop coverup was only the tip of the bureaucratic iceberg.

How many other Biden scandals are scattered like unexploded cluster bombs throughout federal filing cabinets inside the Beltway?

How many other FBI memos exist on potential Biden bribes that we have not heard about?

How many Treasury Department Suspicious Activity Reports on massive wire transfers from squirrely foreign entities to Biden Inc. have not surfaced?

Are there other IRS investigations that were squelched without a trace?

Federal secrecy and coverups switched more votes in 2020 than Trump’s antics in Georgia and elsewhere ever could have flipped. Biden’s yammering about how his election was “the will of the people” looks more deranged with each new exposé of his pre-election abuses.

Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson declared in 2019, “If people don’t have the facts, democracy doesn’t work.” Why bother having a national election if the result merely reveals how many voters were hornswoggled by secrets the feds kept from them?

Politics has rarely been an honest business, but the combination of pervasive secrecy and perpetual deceit makes a mockery of every high-school civics-class lesson.

Will the National Archives go to the barricades to defend the privacy interest of Joe Biden’s imaginary friends? Will dogged investigators, congressional committees and whistleblowers obliterate the tattered remnants of Team Biden’s credibility? Will the liberal media cease invoking the president’s good intentions to expunge his crimes?

August 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

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