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Deny, Deflect, Defend: The Censors’ Strategy on Display

Brownstone Institute | July 20, 2023

Despite the uproar surrounding the case, Judge Terry Doughty’s order in Missouri v. Biden was straightforward. It prohibited government actors from colluding with social media companies to censor “content containing protected free speech.”

In other words, the defendants – including the White House, the CDC, and the Department of Justice – must obey the Constitution they swore to uphold by adhering to the First Amendment. The censorship regime responded with familiar doublethink: denying the censorship exists while arguing that it must continue.

On Tuesday, the court held a hearing to consider whether Judge Doughty’s order should be reinstated. The oral arguments revealed the government’s three-part strategy: deny, deflect, and defend. Its lawyers denied the established facts, deflected from the controversy, and defended its actions through outlandish justifications.

In doing so, they demonstrated the censorship apparatus’s lack of remorse for stripping Americans of their constitutional liberties. Even worse, they insist that the totalitarian operations must continue.

  1. Deny: Blame the Facts

At the hearing, government defendants maintained that plaintiffs have manufactured the case. Like their allies in the media, they argued that allegations of censorship were nothing more than “an assortment of out-of-context quotes and select portions of documents that distort the record to build a narrative that the bare facts simply do not support.”

The censorship is nonexistent, they insist. It is a “thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory,” in the words of Larry Tribe.

Unlike issues of legal interpretation, this is a factual matter. Either government actors colluded with Big Tech to suppress Americans’ free speech rights or they did not. Discovery revealed extensive documentation proving that they did, and the defendants make no effort to explain how Judge Doughty’s 155-page order detailing dozens of violations of the First Amendment is merely “an assortment of out-of-context quotes.”

Journalists including Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Berenson have detailed the “censorship industrial complex,” the entangled web of government agencies, NGOs, and private-public partnerships that seek to control the free flow of information. But reviewing that series of connections and collusions is unnecessary – the defendants’ recorded statements contradict their denial.

“Thank you for the ongoing collaboration,” one bureaucrat wrote after a US Government “industry meeting” with Big Tech companies in October 2020.

White House Advisor Rob Flaherty took a different tack in his demands to Twitter: “Please remove this account immediately.” The company complied within an hour. “Are you guys fucking serious?” he wrote to company officials after they failed to censor critics of the Covid vaccine. “I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.” His boss was similarly direct regarding posts from RFK, Jr. “Hey Folks-Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process of having it removed ASAP.”

There is no need to recreate Judge Doughty’s 155-page opinion, but the denial of the censorship regime is facially absurd. Alex Berenson’s case, the revelations of the Twitter files, and the undisputed facts of Missouri v. Biden refute the defendant’s premise.

  1. Deflect: Blame the Russians

Rather than address the case’s inconvenient facts, government lawyers quickly pivoted to their second tactic: deflection. They avoided the case and Judge Doughty’s ruling in favor of a hypothetical narrative.

At one point, they defended government agencies’ right to issue health advisories that say “the vaccines work or smoking is dangerous.” They argued, “There’s nothing unlawful about the government’s use of the bully pulpit.” That reasoning was uncontroversial, but it was not responsive to Judge Doughty’s order.

Under Doughty’s ruling, the White House can denounce journalists, deliver press briefings, publish on social media, enjoy the bully pulpit, and take advantage of the friendly media environment; it just can’t encourage private companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.

The defense conflates free speech with control over information to deflect attention from the censorship at issue. The tactic is not limited to the government’s powers under the order.

During the hearing, the judge asked the defense attorneys whether saying “the COVID vaccine does not work” is constitutionally protected free speech. “That speech itself could be protected,” the attorney responded at one point. After repeatedly refusing to concede that the First Amendment protects political opinions that deviate from President Biden’s agenda, he resorted to Russian fear-mongering.

“Let’s say it was spoken by a covert Russian operative, that would not be protected by free speech,” he told the judge. Like the issue of the government’s “use of the bully pulpit,” restricting Russian operatives’ speech is unrelated to Judge Doughty’s order.

The attorney’s refusal to defend basic First Amendment liberties was telling. The defense instinctively changed the issue from free speech to national security, relying on an oft-used fear tactic to subvert the First Amendment.

These deflections deliberately obfuscated the purpose of the hearings. Defendants implied the plaintiffs sought to ban anti-smoking PSAs and fund Kremlin media campaigns. Like their strategy of denial, the goal was to avoid discussion of their extensive censorship operations.

  1. Defend: Blame the Virus

When the government was forced to address the case, it resorted to claiming that Covid justified the abolition of constitutional liberties. The pandemic-made-us-censor argument continued the pervasive Doublethink. Eradicating democratic norms was necessary to protect democracy, they reasoned. Previously, the Biden Administration told the court that reversing the order was necessary “to prevent grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes.”

Defendants argued that the evidence of the case vindicates the government actors. The attorneys said “It shows, in the face of urgent crises, a once-in-a-generation pandemic and bipartisan findings of foreign interference with U.S. elections, the government responsibly exercised its prerogative to speak on matters of public concern.”

They continued, “It promoted accurate information to protect the public and our democracy from these threats. And it used the bully pulpit to call on various sectors of society, including social media companies, to make efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation.”

Demonstrating no remorse, they remain proud of their efforts to usurp the First Amendment because of their self-professed noble aims. They expect this defense to evade judicial scrutiny.

When confronted with past censorship – including CISA’s “switchboarding” leading up to the 2020 election – defendants reasoned that prior conduct was not pertinent to the case because plaintiffs could not prove it will happen again.

They described the Department of Homeland Security’s unconstitutional censorship campaigns as “occurring long in the past.” They argued that health officials’ emails working to silence opponents should be disregarded because they were sent “more than two and a half years ago.”

The censorship apparatus is asking the courts to trust them to act responsibly despite repeatedly demonstrating its indifference, or perhaps disdain, toward the First Amendment.

While the government’s denials and deflections are insulting to the citizens they purport to represent, we must remain focused on their aim: they appealed Doughty’s order because they oppose constitutional restraints on their control of information.

We would hope that requiring the government to obey the Constitution would be uncontroversial; now, it may signify whether the rule of law still stands in the United States.

July 21, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

RFK Jr. Pleads with Fellow Democrats for More Civility and Less Censorship

By Dan Hart | The Washington Stand | July 20, 2023

A fiery hearing held Thursday by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the “Weaponization of the Federal Government” unexpectedly became an opportunity for Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reflect on civility and the seminal importance of free speech in the wake of Democratic committee members accusing him of being racist and anti-Semitic.

In his opening statement, Kennedy announced that he would be setting aside his prepared remarks so that he could address the accusations of racism and anti-Semitism leveled at him by ranking member Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-V.I.), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schulz (D-Fla.), and others. Kennedy’s testimony ended up becoming an impassioned plea for Americans of all political persuasions to become more empathetic of each other and to have greater respect for the free speech protections enshrined in the Constitution.

“Debate — congenial, respectful debate — is the fertilizer, it’s the water, it’s the sunlight for our democracy,” he said, after noting that his speech in April announcing his Democratic 2024 presidential bid was deplatformed by YouTube. “We need to be talking to each other.”

Kennedy then referred to a letter signed by 102 of his fellow Democrats in Congress that attempted to get him barred from testifying at the hearing because of his supposed “anti-Semitism,” noting that “this itself is evidence of the problem that this hearing was convened to address. This is an attempt to censor a censorship hearing.”

“Censorship is antithetical to our [Democratic] party,” Kennedy continued. “It was appalling to my father, to my uncle [John F. Kennedy], to FDR, Harry Truman, Thomas Jefferson. … [Opposition to censorship] sets us apart from all the other forms of government. We need to be able to talk. The First Amendment was not written for easy speech. It was written for the speech that nobody likes you for.”

He went on to observe that the Biden administration invented the word “malinformation” to censor him and others. “There was no misinformation on my Instagram account. Everything I put on that account was cited and sourced by peer-reviewed publications or government databases. … I was removed for something they called ‘malinformation.’ Malinformation is information that is true but is inconvenient to the government, that they don’t want people to hear. That’s antithetical to the values of our country.”

Kennedy further explained that after he announced his candidacy for the presidency, it was harder for the administration and social media platforms to censor him. “So now I’m subject to this new form of censorship which is called ‘targeted propaganda.’ … I am being censored here … through smears, through misinterpretations of what I’ve said, through lies, through association, which is a tactic that we all thought had been discredited and dispensed with after the Army-McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. But those same weapons are now being deployed against me to silence me.”

Kennedy then launched into a fervent appeal for the Democratic Party to turn away from polarization, censorship, and demonization.

“This toxic polarization is destroying our country today. How do we deal with that? This kind of division is more dangerous for our country than any time since the American Civil War. … Every Democrat on this committee believes we need to end that polarization. Do you think you can do that by censoring people? I’m telling you: you cannot. That only aggravates and amplifies the problem. We need to start being kind to each other. We need to start being respectful to each other. We need to start restoring the comity to this chamber and to the rest of America. It has to start here.”

After noting that his uncle, former Senator Ted Kennedy, was able to pass a record amount of legislation by reaching across the aisle, Kennedy discussed the cordial relationship between Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich.

“There are no two people in the country who feel more differently about American politics than these two people, and yet they are friends,” he observed. “Dennis attended his children’s basketball games, attended his daughter’s wedding. This is how we need to start treating each other in this country. We have to stop trying to destroy each other, to marginalize, to vilify, to gaslight each other. We have to find that place inside of ourselves of light, of empathy, of compassion. And above all, we need to elevate the Constitution of the United States which was written for hard times. That has to be the premier compass for all of our activities.”

Immediately after Kennedy finished his statement, Wasserman Schultz moved to halt the hearing, claiming that his past statements on race violated the committee rules. Her motion was voted down. Later in the hearing, Wasserman Schultz refused to allow Kennedy to fully respond to her direct questioning of him regarding his reference to an NIH-funded study that suggested that the coronavirus may have been engineered to target particular ethnicities. Instead of allowing Kennedy to provide context for what he said, Wasserman Schultz repeatedly interrupted his attempted response by stating “reclaiming my time” over and over again.

Later in the hearing, Kennedy issued a stern warning about where government censorship of the citizenry can lead.

“A government that can censor its critics has license for every atrocity,” he underscored. “It is the beginning of totalitarianism. There’s never been a time in history when we look back, and the guys who were censoring people were the good guys. All of us grew up reading Arthur Koestler, Robert Heinlein, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and they were all saying the same thing: once you start censoring, you’re on your way to dystopia and totalitarianism.”

July 21, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

So what’s the REAL point of “Just Stop Oil” protests?

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | July 19, 2023

It seems every day lately there is a new “shocking viral video” of “desperate drivers losing patience with Just Stop Oil”, or some similar phrasing.

Something like this…

No sporting event has been spared the orange dust and hi-viz vest of Just Stop Oil, and wherever they go they are either cheered on for their antics, or the subject of vigilante justice… which likewise gets a cheer.

But are these videos and protests organic? And if not, what is the point of these clashes?

First of all, let’s agree the protests themselves are pointless, even on  their own terms.

Not only do none of the people being inconvenienced by the blocked traffic or disrupted sporting events have any power at all to “just stop oil”, but slowing down traffic actually increases emissions whilst the destruction and disruption will certainly turn many people against the movement.

But that doesn’t actually matter anyhow because the entire movement is FAKE.

Yup, stop the presses guys, news incoming is that Just Stop Oil are not actually a guerilla band of desperate anti-petrol hippies!

Turns out they have branding and funding and social media managers.

Turns out they are a product being marketed as much as anything else, and they are backed by the Climate Emergency Fund, a US-based NGO.

Shocking, right.

Ok,  before any of you get apoplectic, it’s perfectly possible some (or all) of the JSO people out there actually wearing their hi-viz and chanting their slogans genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing.

But it’s just as possible they’re all being paid to be there.

Yes, just like charity collectors or seat fillers, paid protesters exist.

Hell, it’s possible the “ordinary people” doing the violence are paid too and the many of the “viral videos” are entirely staged.

Staged or not, paid or not, the violent videos will certainly encourage real violence eventually. And even if they don’t spawn more physical violence, they provide endless ammunition for violent disagreement.

Yes, you guessed it, it’s another fake binary.

A dialectic construction to control the conversation. Making the question on the public mind not “is climate change a problem?”, but “is protesting hydrocarbon production this way right?” or “is violence against protesters acceptable?”.

And, of course, no matter how you answer those questions you’re providing support for one establishment narrative or another.

See, if you support the protesters, you’re agreeing we should be using any means necessary to reduce CO2 emissions etc. You agree that the problem these people are reacting to requires a solution. That way lies carbon taxes and a laundry list of restrictive policies that contol and impoverish people in the name of “saving the planet”.

But, on the other hand, if you’re anti-protesters you’re going to be gaslit into supporting “new anti-protest legislature” to “stop environmentalists disrupting daily life” or “prevent outbreaks of violence” or something.

This anti-protest legislation will be used to stamp-out REAL protests when they inevitably occur in response to Great Reset policies down the line.

See how it works? It’s a win-win for the establishment.

That’s the nature and purpose of the false binary. Violent disagreement across a very narrow band of opinion, and no matter which side you take you’re partaking in a constructed reality that directs your behaviour and responses into endorsing a New Normal policy.

This is almost literally everything that’s been in the news since Covid sputtered out, and the solution is always the same: Keep objective and refuse to take a side.

July 20, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

House Judiciary Letter to Pfizer CEO Bourla: Turn over Your Content Moderation Contacts and Documents

Representative Jordan Puts Pfizer on Tight Timeline to Produce Evidence of Collusion with Executive Branch and Social Media

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | July 20, 2023

The noose is tightening around Pfizer’s European veterinarian CEO Albert Bourla. He has not faced a single hard question on the Hill but finally has received a request from House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) to produce documents and contacts on how the pharmaceutical giant colluded with the Executive Branch and social media companies (Twitter, Gettr, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram etc.) by weaponizing “misinformation” in order to push mRNA vaccines.

Jordan J, House Judiciary Letter to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla July 18, 2023

I imagine a Pfizer strategy that was anchored to the Trusted News Initiative dating back to December 2020 will emerge.

  1. Overstate the lethality of COVID-19
  2. Suppress any hope of early treatment
  3. Downplay the role of natural immunity
  4. Flood the zone with “safe and effective messaging” on COVID-19 vaccines
  5. All should take the shots over and over every six months with no exceptions, no matter how many times COVID-19 was contracted or how severe the side effects
  6. Squash any “vaccine hesitancy” arising from reports of vaccine injuries, disabilities and death

For sure Jordan is interested in former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and his influence peddling with Twitter to mute messaging on natural immunity as he was pushing mRNA as a Board member of Pfizer on national television.

Expect Pfizer will distract and delay on this request which has a deadline on August 1, 2023.

July 20, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Spending Bill Proposals Include Provisions To Limit Elements of The Censorship Industrial Complex

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 20, 2023

There is currently an unprecedented legal battle raging in the US between several state attorneys general, a judge who is siding with them, versus a court of appeals that is reluctant; and there’s the activities of the White House that prompted it all.

It’s the case of serious accusations leveled at the Biden administration and major social platforms of colluding to suppress free speech; and even though the developments in the lawsuit so far give some reason for optimism, those in Congress who are vocal about the need to separate the state and “the Church of Big Tech,” as it were, are not resting easy.

Whether or not the First Amendment case results in a resounding victory for the anti-censorship side in the battle, some Republicans are trying to make sure that there is actual legislation in place, rather than only a possible precedent set by a court ruling, to protect speech.

Currently, this is happening in the form of two House spending bills (here and here) that concern the likes of the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – but not exclusively – which basically seek to “defund state-driven censorship,” i.e., these federal agencies’ collusion efforts with Big Tech, the extent of which is shockingly documented in the Twitter Files.

One proposal is to ban the DHS and a group known as the Global Engagement Center from banding together to police online speech.

It comes as Congress is considering the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that is approved every year. A provision would now prevent the Department of Defense (DoD) from bankrolling organizations like NewsGuard, the Global Disinformation Index, and Graphika Technologies.

The wording of the bill is stark: if passed, the Pentagon (DoD) would be banned from giving money to groups that, “advise the censorship or blacklisting of news sources based on subjective criteria or political biases” – doing so under the guise of combating “misinformation,” “foreign propaganda,” and/or performing “fact checking.”

Similar provisions can be found in the House bill drafts that cover the said agencies, but also the Executive Office of the President, the Justice Department, the FBI – and many more.

The Global Engagement Center, meanwhile, is singled out as effectively the kingpin in what the bills refer to as the “censorship industrial complex.”

July 20, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

House Republicans Consider Holding Mark Zuckerberg in Contempt of Congress Over Failure To Disclose Censorship Docs

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | July 18, 2023

According to sources relaying information to Fox, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, a Republican representative from Ohio, is contemplating levying contempt charges against Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The move may transpire as early as next week.

The center of the brewing controversy lies in Meta’s failure to disclose internal correspondences pertaining to its censorship policies. Ever since his rise to the helm of the influential House Judiciary Committee earlier this year, Jordan has been relentless in his pursuit of Meta’s internal documents. This scrutiny has intensified following the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in January.

Meta found itself on the receiving end of a subpoena from the Jordan-led Judiciary Committee back in February, demanding documentation related to the company’s censorship practices. Jordan reiterated his request in May, indicating that Meta’s response to the subpoena was inadequate and lacked the required internal communications among the company’s employees.

The letter from Jordan stated, “Meta’s rolling productions to date have not included material the Committee knows is, or has reason to believe may be, in the company’s possession and that is responsive to the subpoena […] If Meta fails to comply in full with the subpoena’s demands, the Committee may be forced to consider the use of one or more enforcement mechanisms.”

In his plea, Jordan specifically asked Meta to divulge any records that involve “internal meeting notes or discussions of government statements, requests, referrals, or recommendations related to content moderation, including certain documents commemorating findings and/or recommendations regarding whether to apply enforcement actions to purported disinformation.”

When FOX Business approached a Meta spokesperson for comment, they responded, “We have shared over 50,000 pages of documents in response to the committee’s request and have made nearly a dozen current and former employees available to discuss external and internal issues. We look forward to continuing to work with the committee moving forward.”

Nonetheless, a source with firsthand knowledge claims that none of the supplied documents or responses contain the specific internal communications requested by Jordan.

July 19, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Mental Health Round-Ups: The Next Phase of the Government’s War on Thought Crimes

By John & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | July 18, 2023

Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes: mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions.

Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.

If we don’t nip this in the bud, and soon, this will become yet another pretext by which government officials can violate the First and Fourth Amendments at will.

This is how it begins.

In communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, based solely on their own judgment, even if those individuals pose no danger to others.

In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.”

While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, they could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”

As the AP reports, federal officials are already looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.

Of course, this is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced, declared unfit for society, labelled dangerous or extremist, or turned into outcasts and exiled.

Red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others), are a perfect example of this mindset at work and the ramifications of where this could lead.

As The Washington Post reports, these red flag gun laws “allow a family member, roommate, beau, law enforcement officer or any type of medical professional to file a petition [with a court] asking that a person’s home be temporarily cleared of firearms. It doesn’t require a mental-health diagnosis or an arrest.”

With these red flag gun laws, the stated intention is to disarm individuals who are potential threats.

While in theory it appears perfectly reasonable to want to disarm individuals who are clearly suicidal and/or pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others, where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.

This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.

This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

Let that sink in a moment.

Now consider the ramifications of giving police that kind of authority in order to preemptively neutralize a potential threat, and you’ll understand why some might view these mental health round-ups with trepidation.

No matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.

Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands. For instance, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

July 19, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Jim Jordan Calls on FBI Director To Amend Testimony on FBI’s Social Media “Misinformation” Censorship

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | July 19, 2023

Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has raised questions regarding the veracity of FBI Director Christopher Wray’s recent testimony on the bureau’s role in curbing social media “misinformation.”

Jordan, along with Rep. Mike Johnson, who chairs the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, have sent a letter to Wray offering him a chance to clarify his statements which appeared to be contradicted by information possessed by the committee and federal court findings.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

Wray had previously stated that the FBI’s emphasis was on thwarting harmful disinformation stemming from foreign adversaries. He had stressed that the bureau doesn’t influence or control social media content, but instead may alert media companies about particular content. The decision of further action, according to Wray, remained within the purview of the respective social media companies.

However, Jordan and Johnson drew attention to Wray’s testimony conflicting with a federal court ruling in Missouri v. Biden. The ruling stated that the FBI had flagged domestic speech as potential misinformation and had significantly urged social media platforms to take specific content-related actions. The court had recently impeded key agencies of the Biden administration from liaising with social media companies, citing potential First Amendment breaches.

Jordan and Johnson also highlighted the court’s finding that the FBI did not attempt to distinguish the origin of misinformation reports related to the 2020 election. The court criticized the FBI for misleading social media platforms about the Hunter Biden laptop story.

The congressional duo also underscored their findings that the FBI had followed up with social media companies and asked for updates regarding flagged accounts. They also suggested that the FBI provided unsolicited advice on whether content would infringe the companies’ terms of service.

July 19, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Enemies Above: The FBI and the Creation of the Brown Scare Myth

By Brandan P. Buck | The Libertarian Institute | July 19, 2023

“Today’s threat to our national security is not a matter of military weapons alone. We know of new methods of attack. The Trojan Horse. The Fifth Column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery.”

Such were the remarks from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fireside chat on May 26, 1940. Roosevelt’s sentiments captured and propagated a growing sense of fear and paranoia that the United States was entering a covert war with a hostile foreign power. These sentiments, coupled with the steps taken by the United States government to fight them, are strikingly similar to those of today. With Vladimir Putin as a stand-in for Hitler and MAGA for the alleged rising presence of domestic fascism, supporters of the foreign policy status quo are mobilizing a version of history to frame current dissent as beyond the pale and to justify their extraordinary steps to curtail it.

As they had during the Great War, the United States government and American interventionists preceded official entry into World War II with a concerted effort to convince Americans of the need to aid the Allies. This push to move foreign policy opinion accompanied a growing panic concerning domestic extremism, particularly on the Right, in what historian Leo Ribuffo called “the Brown Scare.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was among the institutions that perpetuated the scare and constricted American foreign policy opinion. During the height of the “Great Debate” concerning American entry into the Second World War, the White House used the FBI as a means to surveil and gather political intelligence. The FBI’s authority to conduct these operations stemmed from a 1936 directive in which FDR formally granted the bureau the power to monitor “subversive activities,” primarily the presence of explicitly illiberal organizations like the German American Bund. The fear of domestic extremism, coupled with the domestic security demands of the Second World War, proved a boon to the FBI and the career of its director, J. Edgar Hoover. From 1933 through the end of World War II, the FBI’s budget grew 16-fold and its number of agents rose from 266 to around 5,000. With the outbreak of war in Europe, and the ensuing foreign policy debate in the United States, the FBI’s writ to monitor “subversive” organizations was extended to noninterventionist groups, chiefly, the America First Committee (AFC).

To achieve its mission to monitor the AFC and its leadership, principally Charles Lindbergh, the FBI employed its usual litany of odious and often extralegal collection techniques, including wiretaps, break-ins, and bugging. The entirety of the FBI’s surveillance campaign against the AFC was done without a criminal predicate, and was, therefore, illegal. In addition to the FBI’s assortment of black-bag techniques, the bureau also attended AFC meetings, gathered their materials, and collected public and often derogatory information on members and leadership. Among the information collected during the FBI’s campaign was some of the non-interventionist Senator Gerald Nye’s correspondence, collected incidentally during an illegal wiretap in the execution of another and eventually unfounded investigation. Knowledge gathered by the FBI, either fair or foul, revealed nothing legally actionable but did provide the Roosevelt administration and its allies in Congress with information it would not have otherwise obtained.

Throughout 1941, FBI headquarters and field offices received reports from private citizens in which they offered up gossip, commentary, and concerns about the America First Committee, its members, and its activities. Letters to J. Edgar Hoover and other government officials, located within the FBI files on the AFC, revealed that numerous Americans voluntarily participated in the FBI’s domestic surveillance and legitimately believed that non-interventionism presented an existential threat to the nation and advocated for authoritarian measures to address the presence of the alleged internal threat.

In a letter addressed to President Roosevelt, one such correspondent from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania wrote, “I therefore implore you, or have someone In Washington, try to break this rotten [America First Committee]” and added that “a Democracy should not permit traitors to go on and on and on causing more disunion.” Similarly-minded individuals who wrote to the FBI saw the AFC as an enemy within and opined on possible solutions to this “fifth column.” One concerned citizen floated the idea of sending AFC’s leadership “to concentration camps, or some place [sic] where they could do no more harm.” In a letter dated from June 10, 1941, a full seven months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, another correspondent agreed with such sentiment. Its author complained that the FBI was unwilling to find all the “subversive individuals,” i.e., antiwar activists, and “round them all up.” Not content with mere extrajudicial imprisonment, still, another writer to the FBI lamented that America was too lenient with the America Firsters to do what other countries, “big or small,” do with their “traitors,” and put them “against the wall.”

While other correspondents with the FBI were considerably less authoritarian in their desires, they willfully offered up information to the bureau. These voluntary assets delivered the names and addresses of AFC members, forwarded AFC materials, circulated anti-AFC propaganda, and provided their assessments of individuals’ motivations and assumed links to Nazi Germany. These citizen spies made note of America Firsters’ views on FDR, his foreign policy, the location of new chapters, speculated on the presence of draft-dodgers within these chapters, and the ethnic makeup and presence of foreign accents at AFC events.

Correspondents also ratted out their neighbors and coworkers to the FBI, treating membership in the AFC akin to membership in a spy ring. One correspondent from Staten Island was appalled that AFC members showed disdain for FDR and his foreign policy. They noted that “a woman with a decided [sic] German accent” made the galling suggestion that FDR “should be impeached [underlined in original].” They went on to note that they were stunned into silence and dared not defend the honor of the president as they were “spotted” by “3 tough men.” Implicit within this correspondent’s letter, as with others, was the view that merely disagreeing with the president was worthy of suspicion.

The information citizens gave amounted to little more than gossip, generating more paperwork than leads. Despite the FBI’s failure, these acts of surveillance, including writing the FBI, matched with the official writ of the bureau and the often-glowing responses from government officials helped to sustain fear among the American populace. Correspondents, be they regular people or members of Congress, sought and received validation for their paranoia and thereby sustained a domestic panic that curtailed legitimate foreign policy debate; as historians Douglas M. Charles and John P. Rossi wrote, the FBI’s efforts, even if indirectly, “successfully defined the parameter of what was permissible in public debate and cautioned those who would oppose government policy.” Combined with those of the British government and (nominally) private actors, the FBI’s energies successfully collapsed the Overton Window. They created a useable (and mythic) history that has served the foreign policy consensus for decades.

Despite the FBI’s best efforts, their agents found no evidence of illegal activity or overseas connections, or unlawful funding activity within the America First Committee. From the perspective of the White House, the FBI’s efforts, at best, provided them with political information that gave it an edge in public debate. The FBI’s collection also served as a means of distributing information on AFC and other non-interventionists to friendly members of Congress. Despite failing to create a legal mechanism to silence the America Firsters, the FBI’s surveillance campaign succeeded in one area; it helped to sustain an environment of fear that successfully branded non-interventionism as a subversive activity worthy of opprobrium and suspicion.

The United States did not look over the brink into the chasm of domestic fascism in the waning days of American neutrality, and moral considerations of entering the war aside, the United States was never under military or covert threat from the Nazi regime. Nor did their avatars within the German American Bund, or its fellow travelers like the Silver Shirts—however odious their presence—constitute a threat to the American republic. However, the United States took its first giant steps into imperium overseas, and it implemented a form of soft authoritarianism within its borders that lasted long after the end of the Second World War.

The federal government repurposed the powers, personnel, and legal techniques granted to the FBI during World War II against left-wing targets. The postwar growth of the security state, coupled with the normalization of corporatism (banally referred to as “private-public partnerships”) and an aggressive overseas foreign policy, bear many of the characteristics of the dreaded F word. Yet an AFC member with controversial views of FDR did not implement these transformations to American society. These changes were wrought by the federal government, bolstered by the opinions of the redacted correspondents who longed to imprison or execute their political opponents, all in the name of fighting fascism.

Yet, the image of the AFC as an inherently subversive organization has resurfaced in recent years. Despite the dispositive findings of the FBI and decades of scholarship from credentialed academics, the Brown Scare has returned to (liberal) American consciousness. Recent academic work like Susan Dunn’s 1940, Bradley W. Hart’s Hitler’s American Friends, Sarah Churchwell’s Behold America as well as Rachel Maddow’s pop history podcast Ultra, and the novel and HBO miniseries The Plot Against America have all resurrected the Brown Scare and view American non-interventionism as a subversive activity, one either essentially embedded within, or suspiciously adjacent to American fascism.

With the postwar American order under strain overseas and losing legitimacy within the minds of a growing number of Americans, consensus tastemakers have remobilized the image of America, teetering on the edge of fascist tyranny in the late 1930s to buttress policy objectives in a post-2016 world. In doing so, they not only repackage a long-debunked version of the past, but they obscure the civil rights abuses of yesteryear to legitimatize government efforts to censor speech or undermine associations deemed threatening to the regime in the present. As in the past, supporters of current American foreign policy, either earnestly or cynically, compare their domestic opponents to agents of outside hostile actors. Meanwhile, the federal government, yet again, has inserted itself into the domestic foreign policy debate, monitored antiwar activists, and allegedly suppressed online speech on behalf of a foreign power.

History is repeating, just not in the manner portrayed in the pages of The New York Times or on the programming of MSNBC.

July 19, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

YouTube ‘arbitrarily’ shutters channels affiliated with Yemen’s Ansarallah resistance

The Cradle | July 18, 2023

US video-sharing and social media platform YouTube on 17 July closed 18 channels affiliated with Yemen’s ruling Ansarallah resistance movement, including those of the media bureau of Yemen’s Operations Command Center (OCC) and the resistance’s art and documentary production unit.

In a statement issued to Yemen’s SABA news agency, Yemeni officials called the move “an arbitrary measure and intellectual terrorism that reaffirms the aggressive intentions of the US-Saudi-Emirati coalition of aggression against Yemen by harnessing their media assets to serve their colonial project. It also reveals the falsity of the slogans of freedom of opinion and expression raised by western countries.”

The suspended channels reportedly had over 500,000 subscribers and hosted over 7 thousand videos with over 90 million views.

According to officials, many of the closed channels hosted art and music and did not promote any form of political hatred or incitement.

This is not the first time that YouTube and other social medial platforms have deleted Yemeni accounts or pages without any prior justification.

In 2021, the US Justice Department seized the website domain of the Yemeni Arabic-language Al-Masirah television channel and nearly three dozen other regional websites.

Social media giants often purge content that supports the Axis of Resistance and works to silence journalists who document Israeli and US war crimes in the region.

Western censorship often targets non-hegemonic news organizations like PressTV and RT.

Last year, a leak of internal Twitter files offered evidence that the Pentagon collaborated with Twitter to wage a secret “PsyOps campaign” across West Asia to sway public opinion in favor of Washington’s military interests in the region.

July 19, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

Biden is Calling Up Military Reserves… Are Your Kids Next?

By Ron Paul | July 17, 2023

As a rule, US war reporting since Vietnam has been mostly mainstream media cheerleading the mission rather than digging beyond government war propaganda. After all, it was images of American boys coming home in body bags shown on the six o’clock news across America that finally galvanized mainstream opposition to that war.

The Pentagon learned its lesson by the first Gulf War, and it severely restricted up-close media coverage. Only “trusted” journalists were able to report from the front lines. Most of the press corps wrote up stories based on US military press releases from luxury hotels in Baghdad.

By the time of Gulf War II the Pentagon came up with the concept of “embedding” select journalists with the troops. This allowed the story to be framed by the Pentagon with the false impression that actual journalism was taking place. It felt authentic, because the journalist was with the troops and close to the action, but the story presented what the Pentagon wanted to be presented.

This is perhaps a long way of pointing out that US mainstream media coverage of the war in Ukraine leaves a lot to be desired. Yes, sometimes the truth does slip out in publications like the New York Times, which reported last week that in just the first weeks of Ukraine’s “counter-offensive” at least 20 percent of the weaponry and equipment donated by the US and NATO has been destroyed.

However, usually what the mainstream media serves up are Pentagon and neocon talking points. Russia is losing, they report. Russia has already lost, as Biden said recently. Most Americans don’t go out of their way to listen to actual experts like Col. Doug Macgregor, who from the beginning has been telling a very different story. Thus Americans continue to be fed propaganda.

There is a funny thing about propaganda, though. Sometimes it comes face-to-face with contradictory reality and is shown to be nothing but a pack of lies.

Take for example last week’s shocking report that President Biden has signed an order to mobilize 3,000 US military reservists for deployment to Europe in support of the 2014 “Operation Atlantic Resolve.” What is Atlantic Resolve? It was launched in the aftermath of the US-backed coup in Ukraine and the ensuing unrest under the US-installed puppet government.

So, if Russia is losing – or has already lost, as Biden said last week – why has it suddenly become necessary to call up US reserve forces? Well, in the midst of one of the most serious US military recruiting crises ever, it seems Washington does not have sufficient troops for its anti-Russia mission in Ukraine. So what is the mission and why does it seem to be creeping toward sending more Americans close to the battle zone? No one in the Administration seems interested in explaining it and no one in the US media or Congress seems interested in asking.

We are on a very slippery slope, with Biden’s neocons continuing to escalate in the face of massive Ukrainian losses and an apparent shortage of US troops. Make no mistake, if the US/NATO proxy war with Russia is not halted the next step will be to look at the US Selective Service. That means they are coming for your kids. How long before America wakes up and says “NO”?

Copyright © 2023 by RonPaul Institute

July 19, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | | Leave a comment

Biden’s corruption led to Ukraine’s destruction: former Kiev diplomat

AARON MATÉ · THE GRAYZONE · JULY 13, 2023

Former Ukrainian government official and diplomat Andrii Telizhenko joins Aaron Maté to discuss how, in his view, powerful US figures including Joe Biden have used Ukraine for personal corruption and the geopolitical aim of bleeding Russia — all to the detriment of Ukrainians.

Telizhenko worked for the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office in Kyiv before moving to Ukraine’s US Embassy in 2015. He went on to work for Blue Star Strategies, a Democrat-run lobbying firm that represented Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that appointed Biden’s son Hunter to a lucrative board seat.

Telizhenko, who cooperated with Rudy Giuliani’s effort to dig up information about the Bidens’ alleged corruption in Ukraine, has been sanctioned by the US Treasury Department for “having directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign influence in a United States election.”

Guest: Andrii Telizhenko. Political consultant who was previously a Ukrainian government official and diplomat.

Video link

July 19, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

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