Twitter withholds tweet worldwide after legal demand from India’s government
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | April 8, 2023
Twitter globally withheld a tweet by an Indian Home Minister in response to a “legal demand.” The news was shared by Journalist and Right to Information (RTI) activist Saurav Das, who posted screenshots of two tweets, one of which was a quoted Union Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah with a notice from the social media platform that said the content had been withheld in “worldwide.”
This is a first as Twitter normally restricts content in the territory that the legal demand has come from unless the tweet has violated the platform’s Terms of Service.
Das said that he could not remember the context of the withheld tweet. It is also not clear which government agency requested the content to be taken down.
The tweet was not accessible even via a virtual private network connected to the US.
“Twitter representatives expressed concern about the growing number of actors demanding that platforms remove content under broad and unclear definitions and the need for greater transparency from governments about such requests,” the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression (SRFOE) of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) said in a press release following a delegation’s visit to the company’s headquarters.
“They also argued that demands to curb illegal content must adhere to human rights regulatory frameworks and respect the fundamental purposes of freedom of expression,” the delegation added. Twitter’s Global Government Affairs team (formerly its Policy team) said in a tweet mentioning the delegation’s visit that “government requests [should] respect the fundamental purposes of freedom of expression.”
YouTube suspends pro-Trump network on eve of President Trump’s arraignment
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | April 4, 2023
YouTube has suspended the channel of Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) for allegedly violating its election misinformation policies. The 7-day ban came a day before Donald Trump’s arraignment in Manhattan, and the network’s coverage of the arraignment.
RSBN is an independent media organization founded in 2015, primarily focused on providing conservative news coverage and commentary in the United States.
The network gained prominence during the 2016 presidential campaign by live-streaming Donald Trump’s rallies and events. Since then, the network has continued to cover conservative political events, speeches, and interviews, while also providing analysis and opinion on relevant topics.
RSBN is recognized for its pro-Trump stance and sharing of conservative viewpoints in the media landscape.
On Monday, the network received a notice that several of its videos, including an exclusive interview with Trump in Mar-a-Lago, his recent rally in Waco, Texas, and his comments at the most recent CPAC event, had been removed for violating its election misinformation policies.
Aside from violating policies against making claims of fraud in the 2020 elections and 2022 election in Brazil, the videos were also removed for lack of “countervailing views.”
Because of the violations, YouTube imposed one strike and temporarily suspended the channel for a week, the same week when President Trump became the first US President in history to face criminal charges.
“Accordingly, the videos have been removed and a strike has been applied to the channel, and as a result, uploads and live streams by your account are suspended for a week. You can read more about our strikes system here,” a YouTube representative told RSBN.
“Conveniently, YouTube’s Orwellian censorship practices have returned just one day before President Trump is arraigned in a gross weaponization of the justice system,” RBN said in a statement.
“Rather than allowing RSBN to show a countervailing view to the mainstream media’s version of the arraignment, they are simply shutting down our efforts. Again, they are leaving millions of Americans voiceless in the face of tyranny.”
This isn’t the first time RSBN has been suspended from YouTube just hours before a planned event.
Twitter faces fines for not acting on German censorship demands
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | April 7, 2023
Twitter is facing fines in Germany for not censoring content deemed illegal under the country’s strict “hate speech” laws.
The federal government announced that it was investigating Twitter’s failures to act on censorship requests.
According to Chan-jo Jun, founder of specialist IT law firm JunIT Rechtsanwälte, the federal government is only acting on a few, out of the hundreds, of cases that have been reported.
Jun will be representing the Antisemitism Commissioner of the state Baden-Württemberg, Michael Blume.
Towards the end of last year, Jun’s firm filed a lawsuit against Twitter for refusing to remove hate speech content.
The court said that the tweets were “illegal.” On Tuesday the federal government said that there were “sufficient indications of failures” by Twitter.
Jun initially reported several tweets to the Federal Justice Office (BfJ). However, they were told that there was not enough material to prove systemic failure.
“We had reported a number of cases to the [BfJ] at that time, and found that they agreed that these tweets were illegal but said they do not have enough material for a systematic failure. And that’s when a group of volunteers started to systematically search for illegal content and keep reporting that and making a huge database… and they kept submitting that to the [BfJ]. So it’s over 600 cases,” he said.
“The ones that are now subject to the [federal government’s] case appear to be just the first ones. They picked them out because they were all similar in that way — I think they came from the same user and had the same content. That’s probably why they chose those because it would be the easiest case to see that is systematical failure. That it was not a single failure of one content moderator but actually that the vast majority — or all — of reports were wrongly handled.”
NetzDG carries a fine of up to €50 million per case, but Jun said it was unlikely that Twitter would be fined the maximum.
“The law expects fines of up to €50 million for each case. It is possible that at first they will not take the full amount. There’s actually a table… that states the intensity of the failure. So I would expect something between €5M and €20M to be the first fine,” he suggested, in an interview with TechCrunch.
The Great ‘Disinformation’ Hoax
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | APRIL 7, 2023
Writer Jacob Siegel has talked to UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers about America’s new censorship complex. In a 13,000 word essay for Tablet, Siegel explains how ‘disinformation’ is an invention that has morphed into a tool of governance. He told Sayers:
Disinformation is a means by which the Government in cooperation with private tech companies and civil society, NGO groups, censors, uses extra-legal means to censor political discourse around issues like Covid vaccinations, lockdowns, the elections. And in the U.S., it’s a free-for-all. It’s a blank cheque to censor anything. So on one level, disinformation is ostensibly censorship in order to protect national security. In a larger sense, that machinery of censorship is not opportunistically looking to erase certain things from the public record that are unflattering to political elites. It’s actually rather more than that. It is a means of governance. It is a system of power. It is its own system of power, outside of the formal, official — in the U.S., constitutional — means by which the Government is supposed to operate.
How did this ‘tool of governance’ become so mainstream, asks Sayers? The U.S. Government, Siegel points out, has long engaged in promoting disinformation of its own, but the ‘war on disinformation’ was begun by Barack Obama. One of the last things the former President did while in office was sign into law the ‘Countering Foreign Disinformation Act’, which fully committed the U.S. to a counter-disinformation campaign, which according to Siegel “was really always in spirit, and very quickly in practice as well, an information war directed against the American people”.
Siegel continues:
There was originally this foreign dimension… But from the very beginning, ‘foreign’ is a kind of ruse that’s setting up what is actually a much larger, effectively omni-directional structure, because the internet is global, that can censor anywhere but which is, in practice, focused on the domestic political environment inside the U.S. and specifically on this populist surge, which is taken as an existential threat by the ruling party officials in the U.S. who see populism in truly apocalyptic terms.
Siegel argues that the consequences of this censorship for American society should not to be minimised:
The system of secrecy and the Government’s own promotion of conspiracies, like the idea that Donald Trump was an agent of Vladimir Putin or a Russian stooge, which the U.S. intelligence agencies promoted. It’s not simply that they are wrong or pernicious, or that this reflects corruption. They actually drive people crazy. They deranged the political system. They ruin the ability for people to engage sanely and transparently in their own politics.
Worth reading (and watching) in full.
DHS is sued for censorship records on meetings with Big Tech
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | April 6, 2023
Judicial Watch has decided to sue the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after the federal agency failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records related to meetings with Big Tech representatives where censorship was allegedly discussed.
The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, seeks to force the DHS to disclose documents detailing how its Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) worked with companies behind social media platforms in order to censor speech.
We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.
The initial FOIA request dates back to December of last year, and the advocacy group said that it wanted to gain access to records and communications of CISA Director Jen Easterly, a former CISA director, Christopher Krebs, former CISA Senior Cybersecurity Advisor Matt Masterson, and CISA Senior Cybersecurity Advisor Brian Scully.
These documents concern meetings that CISA either hosted or facilitated with Meta and Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia Foundation, Pinterest, and Microsoft’s LinkedIn on the topic of “election security.”
Furthermore, Judicial Watch wanted information about several other meetings, including those with DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, FBI, US Secret Service, NSA, and the Office of the Director for National Intelligence employees, related to the previously mentioned meetings, and those with Election Infrastructure Subsector Government Coordinating Council.
The Judicial Watch press release refers to the Twitter Files where journalist Matt Taibbi on several occasions mentions CISA’s involvement in censorship activities, and cites these and the dates when the contacts or communication occurred.
The group also refers to Twitter Files revelations regarding the FBI’s role in censorship decisions, notably the pressure it exerted on the site to act in this way, and Taibbi’s testimony before Congress about the collusion between the Biden administration – including the Democratic National Committee and federal, state, and local law enforcement – and Big Tech, with the goal of suppressing legitimate information.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton described all this, and more that is mentioned in the statement, as “an unholy conspiracy in the Biden administration to censor Americans in collusion with Big Tech.”
As for the lawsuit, Fitton said it “shows the censorship abuse is furthered by unlawful secrecy and cover-ups.”
The West sets a disturbing new precedent over murdered Russian military blogger
By Rachel Marsden | RT | April 6, 2023
Apparently terrorism and murdering reporters get a free pass if the Western establishment doesn’t like the target’s profile – or if the perpetrator risks being linked to an ally.
The radio silence from the West is deafening in the wake of the murder of military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky at a cafe in St. Petersburg. Tatarsky was killed after being handed a statue by a young woman, Darya Trepova, that subsequently blew up the entire venue.
For all of the Western officials’ differences with Russia, can they really not at least bring themselves to condemn a blatant act of terrorism in the middle of a major city center? We’re talking here about the same folks who spent two decades kicking down doors around the world under the guise of fighting a “Global War on Terrorism.”
Just a few years ago, cartoonists and writers for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were gunned down in broad daylight at their Paris office by jihadists who objected to the publication’s portrayal of Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. Western leaders roundly condemned that terrorist act, standing firmly on the principle that you couldn’t just go around murdering people who conveyed thoughts and views that you didn’t like. Many of these leaders even traveled to Paris to march alongside a massive crowd in defense of freedom of expression and the press.
Now, however, they can’t even bother to muster the most meager defense of the same principles in the wake of Tatarsky’s murder in an attack that investigators claim is linked to Ukraine.
It seems that whenever there’s any alleged involvement of Ukraine, the West conveniently turns a blind eye. The automobile explosion that killed Russian journalist and activist, Darya Dugina, near Moscow comes to mind. “American officials said they were not aware of the plan ahead of time for the attack that killed Daria Dugina and that they had admonished Ukraine over it,” reported the New York Times last October. Similarly, the Washington Post reported this week that the “unwritten rule” among Western officials is “don’t talk about Nord Stream” – the pipeline network carrying gas from Russia to Europe that was mysteriously blown up last year – since they “would rather not have to deal with the possibility that Ukraine or its allies were involved.”
Then there is the “Mirotvorets” list of journalists and activists maintained by Kiev-based NGO, the Mirotvorets Center, which names people “whose actions have signs of crimes against the national security of Ukraine, peace, human security, and the international law.” It has yet to either be shut down by the Ukrainian government or denounced by Western allies, despite a 2017 United Nations report on human rights in Ukraine urging Ukrainian authorities to address it.
Acts of terrorism and affronts to free speech are clearly in the eye of the Western beholder, which would explain why much of the media rhetoric focuses on Tatarsky’s pro-Russia stance. The void left by the lack of official reaction from Western officials is being filled with Western press articles focusing on the Ukrainian-born blogger’s prior involvement with Russian-backed separatist forces in 2014 in the Donbass. There, he got his start in covering events through his Telegram channel, which grew to become wildly popular, with CNN noting his “ardent pro-war commentary.” But if prior military experience of some kind, and taking sides in one’s coverage of armed conflict, was justification for murdering journalists, then every Western veteran who started a blog, and every opinion journalist, would be fair game.
There was no shortage of Western outrage over the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi embassy in Istanbul a few years ago, despite his longstanding activism against the Saudi leadership. Why should the death of this Russian blogger be treated any differently?
Bulgarian investigative journalist, Cristo Grozev, who was heavily featured in the Academy Award-winning feature documentary film about Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, apparently thinks that some people are just “legitimate targets” for terrorism, and argues that the cafe may not have been a “purely civilian location.” Although it was previously owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russian private military enterprise, Wagner Group, that doesn’t magically transform a dining establishment, which welcomes anyone right off the street in the middle of a major city, into some kind of a military base. If an American general walks into the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Pentagon City, Virginia, it doesn’t suddenly turn the hotel or its bar into a legitimate military target for bombing by some entity that has a score to settle with Washington.
And what about every journalist who has been embedded as the guest of Western troops in conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan and has promoted the talking points of their hosts while siding with their own country? Are they fair game for picking off now, too?
The prominent Washington Institute for the Study of War think tank, whose board members include American generals Jack Keane and David Petraeus, as well as Washington’s former ambassador to the UN, Kelly Craft, previously and routinely qualified Tatarsky as a prominent Russian military blogger whose work they apparently considered worthy of informing their research.
It seems like there’s an effort underway by some members of the Western establishment to reframe this egregious act of terrorism and murder as something trivial, all because the target was a Russian whose views they don’t like – and that’s an awfully slippery slope.
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.
Hatchet job on RFK, Jr. is new low for ‘journalism’
The AP has jumped the shark and shows again the MSM is among the most toxic agents in society
By Bill Rice, Jr. | April 6, 2023
I was working on another big article when news hits that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is planning to run for president.
I’m going to have to come back to that article after reading the most egregious smear piece I’ve ever read. The article was written by an unnamed AP “journalist.”
Whether you are a fan of Kennedy or can’t stand him, every person in America should read this hatchet job for confirmation that journalism in America has now fallen below the gutter.
The real threat to America and “democracy” isn’t RFK, Jr. its instead journalists at once prestigious news organizations who now exist to attack people brave enough to dissent from the authorized narratives.
What follows are excerpts from this hit piece of malicious slander. I added my comments although the examples of yellow journalism are so obvious I probably didn’t need to. (Emphasis added).
***
“NEW YORK (AP) — Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist and scion of one of the country’s most famous political families, is running for president …”
Comment: The writer got “anti-vaccine activist” into the story after the fourth word. The not- exactly subtle theme of the article is that “anti-vaccine activists” are worse and more dangerous than communists, NAZI’s, KKK leaders and “gold bugs.” As we will see, they are just as atrocious as supporters of Donald Trump, January 6th “insurrectionists” and deniers of Russian election “hacking.”
“… The 69-year-old’s campaign to challenge incumbent President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination is a long shot ….”
Comment: So there we have it: The AP somehow already knows Kennedy has no chance to defeat his opponent, a man who has the worst approval ratings in history and is suffering from ever-worsening and plainly obvious dementia (a medical condition the AP will never report).
“… Kennedy … was once a bestselling author and environmental lawyer who worked on issues such as clean water …”
Comment: In this entire “fair and balanced” article, this is the closest thing readers get to a flattering comment about Mr. Kennedy.
FWIW, Kennedy is still a best-selling author. His book “The Real Anthony Fauci” sold more copies than any non-fiction book published in the last two years. (In my own book review, I called this book perhaps the most important non-fiction book published in my lifetime.)
“… But more than 15 years ago, he became fixated on a belief that vaccines are not safe. He emerged as one of the leading voices in the anti-vaccine movement, and his work has been described by public health experts and even members of his own family as misleading and dangerous …”
Comment: It doesn’t matter that his “fixation” that many vaccines are unsafe … is 100 percent correct.
Per the “watchdog” and skeptical journalists at the Associated Press, America’s “public health experts” have never uttered an incorrect statement in their entire careers.
For example, on Covid topics, their batting average is 1.000. The science is completely “settled,” per the experts. It’s only the “old” debunked science that says it’s okay to keep challenging and questioning pronouncements of other scientists.
“Kennedy had been long involved in the anti-vaccine movement, but the effort intensified after the COVID-19 pandemic and development of the COVID-19 vaccine.”
Comment: The article correctly points out that Kennedy is skeptical about the safety and efficacy of many vaccines. Why in the heck would he get fired up about a “vaccine” that’s not even a real vaccine, a gene therapy that was mandated and shot into the arms of billions of people after three months of alleged safety trials? A shot he thinks – based on his copious research – is killing or injuring millions of people, including innocent children.
I would hope such a person’s activism would “intensify” when the Mother of All Dangerous Vaccines was pushed onto the world.
If Kennedy just stuck to railing against contaminated drinking water at Camp Lejeune or asbestos cases, his life’s calling might be acceptable to the AP. But screaming about a vaccine that 250 million Americans got that is causing 100,000 times more harm is simply … not acceptable.
“… His anti-vaccine charity, Children’s Health Defense, prospered during the pandemic, with revenues more than doubling in 2020 to $6.8 million …”
Comment: Why did his charity “prosper” and get so many more donors? Could it be that large numbers of people and donors support his work? Does the AP have a problem with non-profits whose work has large numbers of supporters?
Also, Kennedy is the founder and leader of a non-profit that is growing and attracting far more supporters. No other non-profit is doing this work. This means Kennedy went out on a limb by himself. The fact Children Health Defense is becoming very popular and more important actually speaks favorably of Kennedy’s leadership and organizational talents.
“… His organization has targeted false claims at groups that may be more prone to distrust the vaccine, including mothers and Black Americans, experts have said, which could have resulted in deaths during the pandemic …”
Comment: What are these “false claims?” The AP doesn’t tell us. This is the same AP that’s swallowed hook-line-and-sinker probably 100 “false claims” about Covid.
And note how the author sneaks in his/her point about Kennedy’s efforts harming “Black Americans” and “mothers.”
Re-stated: Kennedy’s work is killing black people … and if you are targeting black people for abuse and death, you are a racist … which means your comments must be banned by social media (which actually happened to Kennedy).
It never occurs to this writer that Kennedy might be trying to save or help black people … “mothers” too.
“… Kennedy released a book in 2021, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” in which he accused the U.S.’s top infectious disease doctor of assisting in “a historic coup d’etat against Western democracy” and promoted unproven COVID-19 treatments such as ivermectin, which is meant to treat parasites, and the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine …”
Comment: Anthony Fauci did play a leading role in a coup against Western democracy.”
“Teflon Tony” led the movement to ban worship services, visits to nursing homes, shut down businesses, closed schools, made wearing worthless masks mandatory … all by emergency orders or bureaucratic edicts.
In a real “democracy,” big decisions are supposed to be voted on by elective bodies after serious and open debate. Our “New Normal” democracy is actually totalitarianism run amok. This is the type of “Western democracy” endorsed by the AP.
It has also been proven, per multiple studies, that ivermectin and HCQ benefit certain Covid patients. I would argue – like Kennedy does in his book – it’s also been proven that studies reaching this conclusion were sabotaged by people like Anthony Fauci.
“… His push against the COVID-19 vaccine has linked him at times with anti-democratic figures and groups. Kennedy has appeared at events pushing the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and with people who cheered or downplayed the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 …”
Comment: This is run-of-the-mill slander by association. The writer names allegedly awful figures and then links one person to these supposedly dangerous and nefarious individuals.
“… A photo posted on Instagram showed Kennedy backstage at a July 2021 Reawaken America event with former President Donald Trump’s ally Roger Stone, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and anti-vaccine profiteer Charlene Bollinger. All three have promoted the lie about the 2020 election being stolen …”
Comment: Did you get this? Someone once snapped a photo of Kennedy with Roger Stone and Michael Flynn at … a political rally. In the AP’s more-healthy democracy, people simply can’t attend political rallies to support a cause they think is important.
Note: It’s already “settled” political science that no election fraud happened in the 2020 election. This is a “lie” just like it’s the “truth” that Russia stole the 2016 election after a couple dozen Russian trolls mades some posts that nobody saw on Facebook.
“… The photo was posted but later removed by Bollinger, who has appeared with Kennedy at multiple events. She and her husband sponsored an anti-vaccine, pro-Trump rally near the Capitol on Jan. 6. Bollinger celebrated the attack and her husband tried to enter the Capitol. Kennedy later appeared in a video for their Super PAC …”
Comment: Here we have a shocking case of another outlawed, undemocratic “pro-Trump rally.” Apparently Kennedy is disqualified from running for president because somebody he knows “entered the Capitol” on January 6th.
“… Kennedy has repeatedly invoked Nazis and the Holocaust when talking about measures aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19, such as mask requirements and vaccine mandates …”
Comment: Showing your papers, persecuting “anti-vaxxers,” “anti-maskers” and “anti-lockdowners” are NAZI-like tactics. So are “quarantine camps.” So are exhortations of political leaders to rat-out your neighbors who are not complying with their masters’ orders.
Plenty of credible scientists and skeptics believe millions of innocent people have already died and/or suffered life-altering medical conditions because of these alleged “mitigation” edicts. Those are Holocaust-type numbers. If the analogy fits …
“… Kennedy has at times invoked his family’s legacy in his anti-vaccine work, including sometimes using images of President Kennedy.”
Comment: To seal the narrative that Kennedy is beyond the pale, we learn that the fiend has actually shown images of his late uncle.
Presidents Biden, Obama and Bill Clinton can publish images of President Kennedy, but not his nephew.
“His sister Kerry Kennedy … told the Associated Press in a 2021 interview her brother is “completely wrong on this issue and very dangerous.”
Comment: This is the last sentence of the story. RFK, Jr. – per his sister no less – is “completely wrong on this issue and very dangerous.”
Kennedy’s sister probably hasn’t even read his book, where Kennedy included more than 2,200 footnotes to back up his claims. She’s probably never spoken to one mother who is anguished (and feels hopeless) because of the loss or debilitating injury suffered by their beloved child.
One definition of courage is one’s willingness to do something he knows could be dangerous to his life, or harm his career …. Or cause a person to become estranged from long-time friends and family members. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has stuck to his principles and convictions even though his own sister apparently hates what he is trying to do.
Final Points …
Significantly and tellingly, this article does not include one paragraph or quote of anyone saying anything complimentary about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Here is a man who wrote one of the most important books of our times, started an ultra-successful if politically incorrect non-profit (Children’s Health Defense) and has filed numerous lawsuits against Big Pharma and other companies that have harmed innocent people.
It would have been easy for fair-minded journalists to find thousands of Americans who had glowing things to say about Robert F. Kennedy and his life’s work and how it benefitted them. But the article did not include even one favorable quote.
Kennedy also started a journalism site (The Defender ) which is publishing hundreds of stories that the mainstream press and AP won’t write about.
Almost by himself, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has begun to change the narrative on the entire corrupt Science/Medical Industrial Complex.
Forget his scholarship on the Covid atrocities, millions of people are now receptive to his long-ignored claim that vaccines are probably causing an epidemic of autism (today, 1-in-34 kids are now diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum).
He also rails against ever-increasing censorship and has been one of the most conspicuous victims of this Orwellian campaign.
Probably within one hour of his announcement he was running for president, the AP hit the wires with an article seeking to make this man seem like the worst villain in history.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. must scare the hell out of the people and organizations he wants to purge and discredit.
Since his life’s calling threatens the agendas of the worst actors in our society and threatens the Status Quo, they will do anything in their power to harpoon his presidential bid before it even gets started.
Of course his campaign is a “long shot.” He’s fighting the most corrupt and dangerous organizations on the planet … one of these organizations being the Associated Press.
Ukrainization is Destroying American Politics
Sputnik – 06.04.2023
The persecution of former US President Donald Trump takes a page out of the Zelensky regime’s playbook, Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk wrote in a commentary for The Other Ukraine Telegram channel.
Judge for yourself: the US government declares that it is ready to finance the war in Eastern Europe forever and indefinitely.
Of course, the American people have questions about why the country needs this war, why it has no end, and where the voters’ taxes are actually going. The American voter is not interested in funding a war on the other side of the globe because they see serious problems at home. Against this backdrop, the politics of peace becomes attractive to the American voter and is destined for a quick victory.
And now watch the hands. The country’s justice system is politically violated, and a peacekeeper is declared a criminal without any serious evidence, based solely on political desires. All this has already happened in Ukraine. First of all, we accuse politicians who stand for peace of crimes that do not exist. But it is impossible to stop here, as the Ukrainian experience shows. Next, the “wrong” media and parties with a pro-peace agenda must be shut down, churches that preach peace must be persecuted, the “wrong” political movements must be banned, and active citizens who advocate peace must be thrown in jail. And call all this a victory for democracy. This is what the American disciples did in Ukraine. But as far as the US is concerned, all this can only lead to a large-scale war, which Trump warns of in every speech.
All this means one thing: the much-praised Ukrainian “democracy” imposed by the United States in Ukraine has crawled into America and will destroy the state institutions of this country, just as Ukrainian statehood was destroyed before.
This is what Trump warns of: “We are in many ways a third world country. We are a country whose economy is floundering, whose supply chains are broken, whose stores are not full, whose deliveries are not coming in, and whose education system is at the bottom of every list…” And recently, he said, “Our country is going to hell.”
And here it is impossible not to agree with him, because Ukraine is already in hell, and it is dragging the US with it. Ukrainian students have surpassed their American teachers and have become teachers of legal chaos themselves. It only remains to add that Ukraine was pushed into a hell of lawlessness and arbitrariness by American policies, and today it is reaping the fruits of its own actions. As the saying goes, “God will repay each one according to his deeds.”
Estonia cracks down on Russian media
RT | April 5, 2023
Estonia has blocked access to 53 websites that were used to watch banned Russian TV channels, the Baltic country’s Consumer Protection and Technical Regulatory Authority (TTJA) said on Wednesday.
The regulator added that the crackdown was conducted in accordance with the EU sanctions on Russian media.
TTJA Director General Kristi Talving cited a poll commissioned by the Estonian government, which found that the trust of Russian channels has fallen from 40% to 18%. “Based on these numbers, we can say that the work to protect the Estonian information space has been effective,” Talving said.
Nearly 40% of people living in Estonia speak Russian, according to the official census. The country has had a sizable Russian minority from the time that it was part of the Soviet Union.
The EU banned the broadcasting of content from multiple Russian news organizations, including RT, in response to Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine, which was launched in February 2022. The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, accused the news outlets of spreading disinformation.
Estonia separately banned six Russian TV channels in February 2022. The next month, the TTJA blacklisted seven outlets, including Channel One and news agency TASS.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has described the ban on the country’s news organizations in the EU as an act of censorship aimed at “purging the information space of the presence of any media that is an alternative to Western [media].”
Political Prisoner? Corona Protest Movement Founder Michael Ballweg Released After 9 Months Detainment
By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | April 4, 2023
Dark times for political opponents, skeptics of dubious science.
Governments weaponizing the justice authorities to go after political opponents and protest movement leaders seems to have become vogue nowadays in the once democratic western hemisphere.
Victims of the tactic often face dubious charges, some even having to spend months in detention as authorities drag their feet carrying out the “legal” process.
Corona lockdown protest leader Michael Ballweg (left) released from the Stuttgart-Stammheim prison after detention on dubious charges. Image cropped from AUF 1 here.
For example, in Germany a number of physicians have been charged and even jailed for allegedly issuing “false mask exemptions” or “false vaccination exemption” certificates to patients who fear the experimental, shoddily launched COVID vaccine. Critics accuse the authorities of using these heavy handed tactics to intimidate legitimate political opponents into silence.
Ballweg released after 9 months of detention
One high profile example in Germany is Michael Ballweg, the founder of the Corona restrictions protest movement dubbed “Querdenken” (unorthodox thinking). Today we know that the “querdenkers” were right about a lot of things, and huge amounts of damage could have been avoided had their warnings been taken seriously.
But instead, the government and media got paranoid and scared of the Ballweg’s protest movement. The media characterized the movement as fringe right wingers who threatened “our democracy”. Last June, Ballweg was arrested and dragged to jail on dubious charges.
Today, after more than 9 months detention, he was finally allowed to leave Stuttgart-Stammheim prison. The Stuttgart Higher Regional Court on Tuesday lifted the arrest warrant in exchange for a condition.
Ballweg had been in pre-trial detention since June 2022 on suspicion of money laundering and fraud. Suspicion is all that’s needed nowadays to arrest unwanted voices.
AUF 1 reports:
Previously, several appeals against Ballweg’s pre-trial detention had come to nothing. As part of the nine-month trial, he can now leave prison. The reason for the revocation of the arrest warrant was proportionality. The expected punishment in case of a conviction was too small to justify a longer pre-trial detention.
Ballweg’s lawyer Dr. Alexander Christ commented on the decision: “I am happy for my client!”
Allegations reduced, allegations dropped
Last week, the allegations were significantly reduced: for example, parts of the money laundering allegations against Ballweg were dropped. Most recently, Ballweg had only been accused of attempted fraud. The prosecution worked with the daring legal construct of an “unsuccessful attempt”. Nobody had ever been harmed by Ballweg.
Lawyer Dr. Alexander Christ from Ballweg’s legal team appeared in an interview with Austria’s AUF1 last week and reported numerous inconsistencies in the 120-page indictment. For example, money laundering allegations that had already been dropped resurfaced in the indictment. “A tale,” summarized Dr. Christ.”
The release of Ballweg is certainly good news. But leading a protest and speaking up against the government still remains dangerously risky today.
Scott Ritter: US Complicit in Ukraine’s War on Journalists
By Scott Ritter – Sputnik – 03.04.2023
On Sunday, April 2, 2023, the well-known Russian journalist/blogger, Vladlen Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin, was killed in what appears to have been a targeted assassination.
At the time of his murder, Tatarsky had over 560,000 followers on his Telegram channel, making him one of the most influential voices when it came to covering the ongoing Russian special military operation in Ukraine.
The Russian government has publicly condemned the attack, with Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova condemning the role played by the West, noting that the harassment of Russian journalists by the West constitutes a veritable “witch hunt” that represents an acquiescence, if not outright complicity, in the murder of persons like Tatarsky and Daria Dugina, the daughter of the noted Russian philosopher, Alexander Dugin, and a journalist in her own right.
“Not a single case of the violent death of a Russian journalist hailed as a ‘success’ by the Kiev regime and its thugs, has been investigated by Western countries, international organizations, or foreign professional communities, and not even basic human sympathy has been shown,” Zakharova noted.
The double standard of the collective West, and in particular the United States, which prides itself for its ostensible support of a free press, has been put on display for all the world to see. In 2012, Marie Colvin, a war correspondent for The Sunday Times, was killed while covering the conflict in Syria.
In February 2019, Judge Amy Berman Jackson, of the US District Court in Washington, DC, awarded Marie Colvin’s estate damages in the amount of $300 million, claiming that Colvin had been “specifically targeted” by the Syrian government “because of her profession.” Judge Jackson further stated that “The murder of journalists acting in their professional capacity could have a chilling effect on reporting such events worldwide,” adding that “a targeted murder of an American citizen whose courageous work was not only important, but vital to our understanding of war zones and of wars generally, is outrageous.” [Note: The Syrian government denies that Marie Colvin was specifically targeted. She died when a so-called “media center” in a rebel-held town that doubled as a command center was struck by Syrian artillery. Colvin was operating in Syria without the permission of the Syrian government, in an active war zone.]
The murder of Daria Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky clearly represents the deliberate targeting of journalists operating in their professional capacity. Both Dugina and Tatarsky provided reporting that was “vital to our understanding of war zones and war,” and yet, because this “understanding” came with a Russian slant, the US government remains silent.
The “chilling effect” which Judge Amy Jackson warned about is, it seems, to be embraced when those chilled speak Russian, or whose facts sustain a Russian narrative.
The compassion shown Marie Colvin by the US government, in the defense of a free press, is exposed as a lie when confronted by the silence that followed the deaths of Daria Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky. But this was to be expected — after all, the US is seeking the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange so he can be prosecuted for the crime of publishing so-called “secrets” that exposed war crimes and other official malfeasance on the part of the US government and military in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Putting a journalist in jail for 175 years (the maximum sentence Julian Assange would face if found guilty) is the same thing as a death sentence. Free speech, American-style, is not free — it comes with a heavy price, especially if one publishes material that runs against the US-backed official narrative.
Both Daria Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky were included on the notorious “Myrotvorets” “kill list,” purportedly promulgated by the Ukrainian Security Services, along with hundreds of others—many of them minor children—similarly marked for death for the crime of speaking out against the policies of the Ukrainian government.
I, too, am on that list, along with scores of other Americans and non-Ukrainians.
To date, the US government has yet to condemn the Ukrainian government for targeting US citizens to die for exercising their Constitutionally protected right of free speech.
If the US government won’t protect its own citizens, one cannot expect it to speak out in the defense of the lives of non-US citizens designated for speech-related assassination.
But this isn’t simply a case of remaining silent in the face of crimes being committed by others. The US government is an active participant in the Ukrainian government’s campaign to silence dissenting voices using whatever means possible, including targeted assassination. The US government funds, helps organize, and actively supports the work of the Center for Countering Disinformation, or CCD, a Ukrainian agency operating under the auspices of the Office of the President of Ukraine. The CCD publishes a so-called “black list” containing the names of persons designated by the Ukrainian government as facilitating “Russian propaganda,” and designates those whose names appear on this list as “information terrorists” and “war criminals” who must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Just to be clear, the US actively hunts down and kills persons designated as terrorists. To fund and support similar designations of its own citizens by a foreign government — Ukraine — known to arrest, torture, and murder dissenting voices means the US, implicitly, supports marking them for death.
This is the truth behind the US silence in the face of the murders of Russian journalists like Daria Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky. A nation founded on the principles of free speech cannot tolerate free speech when it is practiced by those who oppose the US-backed narrative. Rather than engaging these dissenting voices in fact-based debate, dialogue, and discussion, the US —cognizant of the fact that their side could not prevail in such a contest — opts to silence these voices forever. For Julian Assange, this means life in prison.
For Daria Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky, this meant death.
This is how you kill a free press. Hopefully the voices of dissent that remain will not be “chilled” by this result, but rather opt to double down on their commitment to pursue the truth, whatever the cost.
I know I will.
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From the Archives
The New Baghdad Pact
By Dr Bouthaina Shaaban | February 23, 2017
A recently declassified CIA document prepared in 1983, and released on 20 January 2017, shows that the United States had at the time encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Syria, which would have led to a vicious conflict between the two countries, thus draining their resources.
The report, which was then prepared by CIA officer Graham Fuller, indicates that the US tried adamantly to convince Saddam to attack Syria under any pretense available, in order to get the two most powerful countries in the Arab East to destroy each other, turning their attention away from the Arab-Israeli conflict. … continue
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