Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

German Official Trashes Cost of Living Protesters as “Enemies of the State”

Says they’re extremists who want to overthrow the government

Getty Images
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | August 17, 2022

A top German official has trashed people who may be planning to protest against energy blackouts as “enemies of the state” and “extremists” who want to overthrow the government.

The interior minister of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Herbert Reul (CDU), says that anti-mandatory vaxx and anti-lockdown demonstrators have found a new cause – the energy crisis.

In an interview with German news outlet NT, Reul revealed that German security services were keeping an eye on “extremists” who plan to infiltrate the protests and stage violence, with the unrest being planned via the Telegram messenger app, which German authorities have previously tried to ban.

“You can already tell from those who are out there,” said Reul. “The protesters no longer talk about coronavirus or vaccination. But they are now misusing people’s worries and fears in other fields. (…) It’s almost something like new enemies of the state that are establishing themselves.”

Despite the very real threat of potential blackouts, power grid failures and gas shortages, Reul claimed such issues were feeding “conspiracy theory narratives.”

However, it’s no “conspiracy theory” that Germans across the country have been panic buying stoves, firewood and electric heaters as the government tells them thermostats will be limited to 19C in public buildings and that sports arenas and exhibition halls will be used as ‘warm up spaces’ this winter to help freezing citizens who are unable to afford skyrocketing energy bills.

As Remix News reports, blaming right-wing conspiracy theorists for a crisis caused by Germany’s sanctions on Russia and its suicidal dependence on green energy is pretty rich.

“Reul, like the country’s federal interior minister, Nancy Faeser, is attempting to tie right-wing ideology and protests against Covid-19 policies to any potential protests in the winter.”

“While some on the right, such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD), have stressed that the government’s sanctions against Russia are the primary factor driving the current energy crisis, they have not advocated an “overthrow” of the government. Instead, they have stressed the need to restart the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, end energy sanctions against Russia, and push for a peaceful solution to end the war.”

Indeed, energy shortages and the cost of living crisis are issues that are of major concern to everyone, no matter where they are on the political spectrum.

To claim that people worried about heating their homes and putting food on the table this winter are all “enemies of the state” is an utter outrage.

As we highlighted last week, the president of the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Stephan Kramer, said energy crisis riots would make anti-lockdown unrest look like a “children’s birthday party.”

“Mass protests and riots are just as conceivable as concrete acts of violence against things and people, as well as classic terrorism to overthrow it,” Kramer told ZDF.

August 18, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Weaponizing the Bureaucracy: Who Will Protect Us from the Government’s Standing Army?

By John & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | August 17, 2022

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”—James Madison

The IRS has stockpiled 4,500 guns and five million rounds of ammunition in recent years, including 621 shotguns, 539 long-barrel rifles and 15 submachine guns.

The Veterans Administration (VA) purchased 11 million rounds of ammunition (equivalent to 2,800 rounds for each of their officers), along with camouflage uniforms, riot helmets and shields, specialized image enhancement devices and tactical lighting.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) acquired 4 million rounds of ammunition, in addition to 1,300 guns, including five submachine guns and 189 automatic firearms for its Office of Inspector General.

According to an in-depth report on “The Militarization of the U.S. Executive Agencies,” the Social Security Administration secured 800,000 rounds of ammunition for their special agents, as well as armor and guns.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) owns 600 guns. And the Smithsonian now employs 620-armed “special agents.”

This is how it begins.

We have what the founders feared most: a “standing” or permanent army on American soil.

This de facto standing army is made up of weaponized, militarized, civilian forces which look like, dress like, and act like the military; are armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; are authorized to make arrests; and are trained in military tactics.

Mind you, this de facto standing army of bureaucratic, administrative, non-military, paper-pushing, non-traditional law enforcement agencies may look and act like the military, but they are not the military.

Rather, they are foot soldiers of the police state’s standing army, and they are growing in number at an alarming rate.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the number of federal agents armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment, authorized to make arrests, and trained in military tactics has nearly tripled over the past several decades.

There are now more bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed with weapons than U.S. Marines. As Adam Andrzejewski writes for Forbes, “the federal government has become one never-ending gun show.”

While Americans have to jump through an increasing number of hoops in order to own a gun, federal agencies have been placing orders for hundreds of millions of rounds of hollow point bullets and military gear. Among the agencies being supplied with night-vision equipment, body armor, hollow-point bullets, shotguns, drones, assault rifles and LP gas cannons are the Smithsonian, U.S. Mint, Health and Human Services, IRS, FDA, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Education Department, Energy Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and an assortment of public universities.

Add in the Biden Administration’s plans to grow the nation’s police forces by 100,000 more cops and swell the ranks of the IRS by 87,000 new employees (some of whom will have arrest-and-firearm authority) and you’ve got a nation in the throes of martial law.

The militarization of America’s police forces in recent decades has merely sped up the timeline by which the nation is transformed into an authoritarian regime.

What began with the militarization of the police in the 1980s during the government’s war on drugs has snowballed into a full-fledged integration of military weaponry, technology and tactics into police protocol. To our detriment, local police—clad in jackboots, helmets and shields and wielding batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, and assault rifles—have increasingly come to resemble occupying forces in our communities.

This standing army has been imposed on the American people in clear violation of the spirit—if not the letter of the law—of the Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts the government’s ability to use the U.S. military as a police force.

Unfortunately, the increasing militarization of the police, the use of sophisticated weaponry against Americans and the government’s increasing tendency to employ military personnel domestically have all but eviscerated historic prohibitions such as the Posse Comitatus Act.

The menace of a national police force—a.k.a. a standing army—vested with the power to completely disregard the Constitution, cannot be overstated, nor can its danger be ignored.

Historically, the establishment of a national police force accelerates a nation’s transformation into a police state, serving as the fundamental and final building block for every totalitarian regime that has ever wreaked havoc on humanity.

Then again, for all intents and perhaps, the American police state is already governed by martial law: Battlefield tactics. Militarized police. Riot and camouflage gear. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Drones. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Concussion grenades. Intimidation tactics. Brute force. Laws conveniently discarded when it suits the government’s purpose.

This is what martial law looks like, when a government disregards constitutional freedoms and imposes its will through military force, only this is martial law without any government body having to declare it.

We are sliding fast down a slippery slope to a Constitution-free America.

This quasi-state of martial law has been helped along by government policies and court rulings that have made it easier for the police to shoot unarmed citizens, for law enforcement agencies to seize cash and other valuable private property under the guise of asset forfeiture, for military weapons and tactics to be deployed on American soil, for government agencies to carry out round-the-clock surveillance, for legislatures to render otherwise lawful activities as extremist if they appear to be anti-government, for profit-driven private prisons to lock up greater numbers of Americans, for homes to be raided and searched under the pretext of national security, for American citizens to be labeled terrorists and stripped of their rights merely on the say-so of a government bureaucrat, and for pre-crime tactics to be adopted nationwide that strip Americans of the right to be assumed innocent until proven guilty and creates a suspect society in which we are all guilty until proven otherwise.

All of these assaults on the constitutional framework of the nation have been sold to the public as necessary for national security.

Time and again, the public has fallen for the ploy hook, line and sinker.

We’re being reeled in, folks, and you know what happens when we get to the end of that line?

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’ll be cleaned, gutted and strung up.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute.

August 17, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Are They Essentially Erasing Most Of The Internet?

By Michael Snyder | End Of The American Dream | August 14, 2022

What I am about to share with you is incredibly alarming, and so I hope that you will share this article as widely as you can. The Internet has made it possible for us to communicate directly with one another on an absolutely massive scale. For many years it truly served as a very robust “marketplace of ideas”, and it was not difficult to find a multitude of viewpoints on just about any topic that you could possibly imagine. Unfortunately, things have completely changed. As you will see in this article, much of the Internet has essentially been erased at this point. If you don’t understand what I am talking about, just keep reading.

For most of us, search engines are the primary tools that we use to find information on the Internet.

When they originally came on the scene, search engines could generally be trusted to present information in a neutral manner. The most relevant information was supposed to come up first, and less relevant information was supposed to be pushed farther down the listings.

Of course bias eventually started to creep in, and that was extremely unfortunate. Certain sources of information were purposely elevated while other disfavored sources of information were purposely suppressed.

But what if I was to tell you that we have now gotten to a point where the vast majority of the information on any particular topic is being purposely excluded altogether?

I know that this may sound crazy, and so I am going to take some time and prove it to you.

Google is the most prominent search engine in the world, and so let’s start there. Go to Google and do a search for “Donald Trump” and look at the top of the page to see how many “results” you get.

I just did that, and it says that there are about 451,000,000 results.

That should be plenty of information, because nobody would ever have the time to go through 451,000,000 results.

But the truth is that the search engine doesn’t actually give us that many results.

Scroll down and go to page 2. For me, it still says that there are about 451,000,000 results.

Most people would stop there, and the big search engines know this.

But I want you to try something. Just keep going to the next page for as long as you can.

For me, everything looks the same until I get to page 12. At the top of the page, it says “Page 12 of about 118 results”.

Wow.

Needless to say, 118 results is a far smaller number than 451,000,000, and the vast majority of the 118 results that I have been given come from corporate media sources that generally have similar opinions of Trump.

At the bottom of page 12, there is a message that will seemingly allow me to pull up the rest of the 451,000,000 results. This is what it says…

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 118 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

That sounded good to me, and so I clicked on the link.

But it didn’t give me 451,000,000 results.

Instead, I can now click through 40 pages of results that mostly come from corporate media sources and that’s it.

The top of page 40 says “Page 40 of about 398 results”, and there is absolutely no option to go farther.

Do you understand what this means?

All but 398 of the 451,000,000 potential results have been purposely excluded.

You may be tempted to believe that this is just because Donald Trump is such a controversial figure.

So let’s try an example that is completely and utterly uncontroversial.

Let’s try putting the term “quilting” into Google.

I just did that, and the top of page 1 tells me that there are about 228,000,000 results.

And it keeps telling me that there are about 228,000,000 results until I get to page 26.

Once I get to page 26, the top of the page tells me that there are only 258 results.

But once again I am given the option of repeating the search with the omitted results included by clicking a link at the bottom of the page.

I just did that, and now I have been given 42 pages of results.

At the top of page 42, it tells me that there are only 414 results and it will not allow me to go any farther.

No matter what you search for, the pattern will always be the same.

You will only be given hundreds of results, and those results will generally be from certain types of sources.

Bing is the second largest search engine, and they do things a little differently.

If you do a search for “Donald Trump” on Bing, it will tell you that there are 194,000,000 results.

But for me, once I got to page 14 I noticed that they started to give me the same results on each page over and over again.

For dozens of pages, it was just the same results.

Do they really think that people wouldn’t notice?

Try it for yourself. Go to Bing and type in “Donald Trump” and just keep scrolling through the pages and you will notice this very odd pattern.

So at this point, the largest search engines are purposely restricting the amount of information that they give us.

And the vast majority of the listings that they do come up with are generally from certain types of sources that they wish to promote.

Yes, it is still possible to find truly independent sources of information, but it is becoming much more difficult to do so.

For example, once this article has been discovered by the search engines you will be able to find it if you type in the exact title.

But the vast majority of people just type in a single word or a short phrase when they are searching for something online, and those searches are going to be overwhelmingly dominated by certain types of sources.

In other words, the big tech companies have essentially put you and me in a box at this point.

We are going to be repeatedly fed information that they want us to consume.

As for everything else, what we are not allowed to find may as well not even exist.

Facebook, Twitter and the other big social media platforms do the same thing. They promote the things they want you to see, and they suppress information that they want you to avoid.

The information that they are keeping from us is still out there, but at this point the tech giants have pretty much been successful in essentially deleting most of the Internet for the vast majority of the population.

The inspiration for this article was a great YouTube video that was produced by a guy named Jimmy Corsetti. I would encourage you to share his video with everyone that you can, because he does a great job of breaking all of this down.

I still believe that search engines and social media platforms could be such helpful tools if they would just present information to us in a neutral way.

My hope is that many people that work in the tech industry will read this and that it will inspire them to push for reform.

Trying to greatly restrict the amount of information that we have access to is fundamentally wrong.

A vibrant “marketplace of ideas” is essential for any free society, and right now our “marketplace of ideas” is dying right in front of our eyes.

August 15, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Facebook blocks #diedsuddenly hashtag

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | August 12, 2022

Facebook has hidden posts with the “#diedsuddenly” hashtag because it claims that some of these posts violate its far-reaching community standards. When users search for this hashtag, no results are displayed and Facebook shows a message stating that the results are hidden.

While Facebook doesn’t specify which rules these posts allegedly violated, Twitter users have been using the hashtag to share news stories about people who died suddenly. Most of these Twitter posts note that those who died were fully vaccinated for COVID-19 and allude to there being a connection between the vaccines and their deaths.

If Facebook users are posting similar content under this hashtag, the posts are likely to violate the tech giant’s ban on a wide range of COVID-19 vaccine claims. Facebook prohibits claims that “vaccines are toxic, dangerous, or cause autism” and reduces the distribution of “shocking stories” about the vaccines. One of Facebook’s examples of a shocking story is “Uncovered: See the 632 reports made of people who died within a week of having the new COVID-19 vaccine.”

The blocking of this hashtag is the latest of many examples of Facebook censoring content that is critical of or raises questions about the COVID-19 vaccines. Throughout the pandemic, Facebook has also mass censored anti-mask content, anti-lockdown content, and content that said the coronavirus came from a lab (a censorship policy that was suddenly reversed after the Biden admin announced that it would be investigating the origins of COVID).

Not only does Facebook mass censor content that goes against or questions government guidance and the legacy media narrative on COVID but it also partnered with the Pfizer-backed CDC Foundation to increase “vaccine uptake” and maintained a close relationship with US federal agencies on COVID messaging.

The tech giant has previously used hashtag blocking to censor many other topics including “#buchamassacre” (a block that it later said was a mistake), “#Revolution” (which was blocked on a July 4th weekend), and “#SaveTheChildren.”

August 12, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Leaked chats: Biden regime reportedly pushed for Alex Berenson to be banned from Twitter

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | August 12, 2022

Newly released internal messages between Twitter staff show them discussing an April 2021 meeting with the White House where the Biden administration reportedly pushed for journalist and author Alex Berenson to be booted from the platform before Twitter banned him.

Berenson was banned from Twitter for violating its “COVID-19 misinformation” rules four months later in August 2021. Berenson responded by suing Twitter in December 2021, with the lawsuit accusing the tech giant of acting “on behalf of the federal government in censoring and barring him from access to its platform.” Berenson’s account was subsequently reinstated in July 2022 after both parties settled the censorship lawsuit.

These internal messages were published by Berenson and show April 22, 2021 discussions between Twitter employees on the business messaging app Slack. Berenson said he obtained the messages as part of his lawsuit against Twitter.

In one of the Slack messages, a Twitter employee says their meeting with the “WH [White House]” was “pretty good” but “they had one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform.”

In another Slack message, a Twitter employee says that the White House “really wanted to know about Alex Berenson” and that Andy Slavitt, a Senior Advisor to President Biden’s COVID-19 Response Coordinator, “suggested they had seen data viz that had showed he was the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.”

Berenson said that in another Slack message, a Twitter employee said: “I’ve taken a pretty close look at his account and I don’t think any of it’s violative.”

Berenson noted that the message about White House officials questioning why he hadn’t been banned from the platform “make clear that top federal officials targeted me specifically, potentially violating my basic First Amendment right to free speech.”

He added: “If the companies are acting on behalf of the federal government they can become ‘state actors’ that must allow free speech and debate, just as the government does.”

Berenson also noted that previous censorship lawsuits accusing the government and social media companies of colluding to ban users have failed because the courts have “universally held that people who have been banned have not shown the specific demands from government officials that are necessary to support state action claims.”

However, in this case, Berenson argues that “federal officials appear to have gone far beyond generically encouraging Twitter to support Covid vaccines or discourage ‘misinformation’ (i.e. information that the government does not like). Instead, top officials targeted me personally.”

Berenson said he intends to sue the Biden administration for violating his First Amendment rights by pressing Twitter to ban him and that there will be “more to come soon.”

Jenin Younes, an attorney for the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), who has worked on two lawsuits that accuse the Biden administration of violating Americans’ First Amendment rights by coercing tech companies to censor “misinformation,” said that the revelations in the Slack messages released by Berenson are “a virtual smoking gun, and along with myriad circumstantial evidence proves our contention beyond any doubt.” Younes added that despite initial setbacks, she is confident that the NCLA’s lawsuits will be successful.

August 12, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Twitter bans NYP columnist Paul Sperry following criticism of FBI Mar-A-Lago raid

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | August 12, 2022

New York Post columnist and investigative journalist Paul Sperry was suspended from Twitter following tweets criticizing the FBI’s raid on President Trump’s Mar-A-Lago.

The tweet that was widely shared when Sperry got suspended read: “Funny, don’t remember the FBI raiding Chappaqua or Whitehaven to find the 33,000 potentially classified documents Hillary Clinton deleted. And she was just a former secretary of state, not a former president.”

However, speaking to MRC’s News Busters, Sperry said that he received a notice from Twitter saying that his account had been permanently suspended. He added that Twitter did not give a reason or explanation for the suspension.

“This is outrageous censorship,” Sperry told MRC. “Yes, Twitter is a private entity, but it has become the [dominant] public town square for political information and debate and it also enjoys a monopoly as the site where government agencies and corporations first post their releases and statements to the press. Denying a veteran working journalist access to this platform restricts my ability to cover events and issue[s].”

Sperry went on to criticize the Biden administration for its involvement in censorship on social media, saying the suspension “amounts to state censorship by proxy.”

The Biden administration has encouraged social media censorship. Last year, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden administration was “regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans are seeing across all of social and traditional media.”

August 12, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

Twitter outlines its plot to “protect” the US midterm elections from “misinformation”

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | August 11, 2022

Twitter will start censoring “disputed claims,” “potentially harmful and misleading information,” and “false” information about the 2022 US midterms from today under its “Civic Integrity Policy.”

Tweets that fall foul of this policy will be removed or labeled with links to “credible information” or “helpful context.” Labeled tweets aren’t amplified or recommended by Twitter and the platform also dissuades or prevents users from liking and sharing labeled tweets. Twitter also noted that its latest label design reduces likes by 10%, reduces replies by 13%, and reduces retweets by 10%.

Users who have tweets removed or labeled under this policy are subject to Twitter’s five strikes system. The account owner is given two strikes if their tweet is deleted and one strike if their tweet is labeled. 2-4 strikes results in a temporary account lock and five strikes results in a permanent account suspension.

In addition to censoring tweets, Twitter will also start artificially boosting content that it deems to be “reliable” by displaying this content prominently on the “Home” and “Search” tabs and promoting it in the “Explore” tab.

Twitter’s Civic Integrity Policy resulted in mass censorship in the run-up to the 2020 US presidential election. The rule banning “disputed claims that could undermine faith in the process itself, such as unverified information about election rigging, ballot tampering, vote tallying, or certification of election results” was used to justify much of this censorship with users that discussed election discrepancies often targeted.

Many of former President Trump’s statements about the election were censored under this policy before he was permanently banned. This same policy was also used to mass censor other users and tweets before and after the 2020 election.

August 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

WEF’s “Global Intelligence Collecting AI” to Erase Ideas from the Internet

By Igor Chudov | August 11, 2022

The World Economic Forum is becoming a little concerned. Unapproved opinions are becoming more popular, and online censors cannot keep up with millions of people becoming more aware and more vocal. The censorship engines employed by Internet platforms, turned out to be quite stupid and incapable. People are even daring to complain about the World Economic Forum, which is obviously completely unacceptable.

So, WEF author Inbal Goldberger came up with a solution: she proposes to collect off-platform intelligence from “millions of sources” to spy on people and new ideas, and then merge this information together for “content removal decisions” sent down to “Internet platforms”.

To overcome the barriers of traditional detection methodologies, we propose a new framework: rather than relying on AI to detect at scale and humans to review edge cases, an intelligence-based approach is crucial.

By bringing human-curated, multi-language, off-platform intelligence into learning sets, AI will then be able to detect nuanced, novel abuses at scale, before they reach mainstream platforms. Supplementing this smarter automated detection with human expertise to review edge cases and identify false positives and negatives and then feeding those findings back into training sets will allow us to create AI with human intelligence baked in. This more intelligent AI gets more sophisticated with each moderation decision, eventually allowing near-perfect detection, at scale.

What is this about? What’s new?

The way censorship is done these days is that each Internet platform, such as Twitter, has its own moderation team and a decision making engine. Twitter would only look at tweets by any specific twitter user, when deciding on whether to delete any tweets or suspend their authors. Twitter moderators do NOT look at Gettr or other external websites.

So, for example, user @JohnSmith12345 may have a Twitter account and narrowly abide by Twitter rules, but at the same time have a Gettr account where he would publish anti-vaccine messages. Twitter would not be able to suspend @JohnSmith12345’s account. That is no longer acceptable to the WEF because they want to silence people and ideas, not individual messages or accounts.

This explains why the WEF needs to move beyond the major Internet platforms, in order to collect intelligence about people and ideas everywhere else. Such an approach would allow them to know better what person or idea to censor — on all major platforms at once.

They want to collect intelligence from “millions of sources”, and train their “AI systems” to detect thoughts that they do not like, to make content removal decisions handed down to the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and so on. This is a major change from the status quo of each platform deciding what to do based on messages posted to that specific platform only.

For example, in addition to looking at my Twitter profile, WEF’s proposed AI would also look at my Gettr profile, and then it would make an “intelligent decision” to remove me from the Internet at once. It is somewhat of a simplification because they also want to look for ideas and not only individuals but, nevertheless, the search for wrongthink becomes globalized.

This sounds like an insane conspiracy theory from hell: WEF collecting information on everyone everywhere, and then telling all platforms what posts to remove, based on a global decision-making AI engine that sees everything and can identify individual people and ideas beyond any given platform.

If someone ever told me that it would be contemplated, I would probably think that this person is insane. It sounds like a sick technological fantasy. Unfortunately, this crazy stuff is real, is in a WEF agenda proposal that is officially posted on their website’s “WEF Agenda” section. And WEF is not messing around.

You will have no voice and you will be happy!

August 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Canadian police refuse to say whether it used malware to spy on lawmakers

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 11, 2022

Canada’s RCMP and its commissioner Brenda Lucki are fending off requests to reveal if the police force used malware to also spy on members of the country’s parliament (MPs).

The bombshell question was posed in a request filed by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy, and Ethics – but Lucki’s response provided no useful response.

When it comes to wiretapping MPs and other employees of the parliament – “this information will not be provided by the RCMP,” Lucki brushed the question off, according to media reports out of Canada.

Earlier, these reports noted that the RCMP have been using spyware for a decade now (on-device investigation tools, ODITs, that not only record communications, but are installed on the targeted mobile devices) – to access cameras and microphones; and the law enforcement agency confirmed it.

Naturally, those holding public office in Canada, particularly those from the ranks of the opposition, then wanted to know if they, by any chance, had been subjected to this type of surveillance via government-deployed spyware.

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino reportedly avoided responding, unlike Lucki who’s now unapologetically suggesting that Canada’s democracy doesn’t stretch quite as far as providing this type of information to its legislators.

Opposition Conservatives are rattled by the whole affair. MP Pat Kelly noted that a parliamentary committee should have unfettered powers to request these documents.

“A blanket refusal to a committee is troubling,” Kelly is quoted as saying.

And a troubling development of this kind in any parliamentary democracy raises so many questions. One came from a Bloc Québécois MP – who asked RCMP commissioner for national security Mark Flynn if the office of the Federal Privacy Commissioner was involved in evaluating if the spyware in question was in compliance with Canada’s Privacy Act.

Flynn’s response was, “No.”

But one of Canada’s former privacy commissioners, Daniel Therrien, was far more forthcoming when he commented on RCMP’s collection of citizens’ personal data via ODITs to call that an extremely intrusive practice.

The authorities’ persistent policy of obscuring the details of the spyware-utilizing surveillance tools is “a crisis of accountability” – that’s how the Canadian Civil Liberties Association non-profit described the situation.

Transparency around such issues in Canada these days apparently goes as far – and no further – than the government stating that it is “not using NSO’s Pegasus.”

August 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Freedom Itself Is Gravely in Peril

BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER |  BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | AUGUST 9, 2022

The FBI has raided Donald Trump’s home in Florida and opened a private safe, hanging around for hours looking for classified material that might be there. They were likely looking for items that Trump believed he had declassified – the president can do this with anything – but is still holding in his possession. Top officials of the National Archives, the DOJ, and the FBI believed otherwise and thus sought the search warrant.

If the New York Times is correct, then, this is really about state secrets. Trump wanted them public. Others inside the deep-state machinery disagreed.

The scene in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, gives rise to images from societies without law and constitutions, places where regimes are merely juntas seeking plunder and revenge. In this case, the problem is complicated by a mass administrative state apparatus that lives outside the democratic process.

“Aides to President Biden,” reports the Times, “said they were stunned by the development and learned of it from Twitter.” This is likely true. But it gives rise to the more fundamental question: who is actually running government?

If we didn’t before realize the extent of the multivariate crisis gathering all around us, now is the time. It’s a time for analysis and understanding. It’s also the time to make a decision concerning what we are all going to do about it.

Even those of us who are not fans of Trump – I wrote one of the first articles from 2015 warning against his ideological leanings which later become a full book – see the deeper implications. The betting odds favor him for the presidency in 2024. Someone somewhere wants to make this impossible. So all the forces of the administrative state – the actual rulers of this country – have coalesced around crushing him and his legacy, Soviet like.

In the background of all of this is the real struggle that will define American politics for years to come. Two weeks before he left office in 2020, Trump issued an executive order that would have put a major dent in the power of the administrative state in this country, taking the first steps toward returning government to the people after a century in which it gradually slipped away.

In some people’s view, this is intolerable.

Trump, for all his failings, among which was green-lighting the lockdowns that started this social and economic crisis, has become over time a symbol of resistance. The raiding of his private home sends a message about who is in charge. It’s a warning for everyone. An intimidation tactic.

We are used to this but we should not become so.

Biden has once again declared a national emergency in the name of virus control. Such a declaration effectively enshrines the permanent bureaucracy to rule the country at all levels in whatever ways they desire, at least until courts stop them. The extension of the declaration hardly made the news.

Have we forgotten what normalcy is? It was only three years ago. Yes, there were political arguments and enormous problems but it still felt like a nation of laws with a government subject to the people.

Already, there was something in the air in mid-March 2020, something that suggested that everything was changed. Governments all over the world dared to do the unthinkable, partly under the influence that it happened in the US, and under a Republican administration. Countless millions found themselves locked in their homes. The churches were forcibly closed. Businesses and schools too.

You know the story. It was not only a sweeping use of state power without precedent. It foreshadowed dark times ahead. Here we are two-and-a-half years later and the state is on the march in ways we never imagined possible three years ago. The raiding of Trump’s home is but a sign and symbol: none of our homes are safe. And haven’t been for years now.

Even now, in the land of the free, people are being pressured to accept the shot or get fired. We all have unvaccinated friends who want to visit us but cannot because the US government blocks them. Our health authorities have only expressed regret in one area: for not having locked down more. And they are creating a bureaucratic machinery to make doing so next time more ferocious and better enforced.

All of this is taking place without a scrap of evidence that any of it makes any scientific and/or medical sense. The scientists who resist have been canceled. Only one view is permitted to ascend. Everyone with doubt is being marginalized and silenced.

Congress itself became addicted to authorizing trillions in spending, and they keep doing it again and again. This adds pressure on the Federal Reserve to enter the markets and buy the resulting debt with freshly printed money just as rates are being pushed up to clean up its disastrous balance sheet. No one knows, least of all the Fed, how long this grueling inflation will continue but regardless, the damage is done.

The labor markets, despite the propaganda from the White House, reveal alarming weakness. Fewer full-time jobs. More part-time jobs. More people with two jobs. And fewer workers overall, as labor-market participation and worker/population ratios fall and fall. Not only have these markets not recovered from lockdowns. The trends are getting worse, with fully one million dropped out completely from the labor force since March of 2022, which is highly suggestive of a demoralized workforce lacking in ambition and hope for the future.

Wages and salaries in real terms are falling more than the nominal rates can cover. There is a debate about whether we are in a recession because the GDP has fallen for two straight quarters. But looking at the broad trends, there can be no mistaking what is happening. American prosperity is fundamentally threatened. The relationship between freedom and prosperity is one of the most well-established truths in economic literature. It should not be surprising that both decline in tandem.

Complain too much and you will find yourself without a voice on social media. The tech companies developed a deep relationship with the administrative state over the last two years, corresponding with each other, sharing insights, making enemies lists, and silencing dissidents of all sorts.

Clearly, the lockdowns did not achieve the goal, as the virus came and has gradually become endemic regardless of external interventions including mass vaccination mandates. What they did do was test society’s tolerance for despotism. Tragically, they got away with it all, much more easily than most of us might have expected.

Even now, even though the ruling class has never been less popular with the public, too many have adapted to the new normal. For many people, this is by necessity: what, after all, can anyone really do when freedom is slipping away and even core functioning of civilization (safe streets, vibrant cities, class mobility) is something we can no longer take for granted?

Let history record that lockdowns triggered this. All of it. Yes, there were problems before but they seemed within the realm of fixable. There appeared to be in the old days (three years ago) some relationship between public opinion and regime priorities. That was blown away with lockdowns. Now it is no longer clear whether and to what extent public opinion matters at all to the masters and commanders of our societies. They are leading us to ever greater crises and yet we feel powerless to do anything about it.

In the most incredible of ironies, it was Trump himself, now targeted for destruction by the bureaucrats he sought to control, who enabled this in the dreadful year of 2020. Realizing but never admitting his error, he flipped in the other direction late in the season, arguing for openness and normalcy. But it was too late. He already lost control, as Deborah Birx’s book makes clear. The deep state that he had loathed needed to prove its hegemony. This raid on his own home underscores the point.

One read of history is that such times lead inexorably to the forward march of tyranny. Certainly interwar political history teaches us this. The crisis in Germany began in an economic crisis that cried out for a strongman, but Germany was hardly alone in this. The same inexorable push toward centralization and against freedom took place the world over in these horrible years: Spain, Italy, France, China, the US.

Read the popular and scholarly literature from the early 1930s: freedom and democracy was out and central planning was in. I read all of this in college and was grateful that those days were gone forever. We are so much more enlightened now! How wrong I was. The same themes are back again today as entrenched elites clamor to hold on to power regardless of public opinion.

In the 1930s, the extremist political left threatened many countries and the extremist political right arrived to prevent that from happening and then erected their own despotisms, always under the cover of emergency. It became a kind of civil war between two opposing camps with their own plans for people’s lives. Freedom was lost in the struggle.

We had hoped those days were long behind us. But the allure of power has proven too tempting for the worst among us. We are all watching as all the things we love – the way of life that many generations have fought to protect – are being swept away. And it is happening with not nearly enough explanation or protest.

These are not the most terrifying times in history but they are among the most terrifying in our lifetimes in the West. Where are the parties and movements that defend freedom as a first principle? Where are the successors to Voltaire, Locke, Goethe, Paine, and Jefferson, among the many great thinkers who sacrificed so much for the liberal vision of a social order in which people manage their own lives?

Such people are here, many of them writing for Brownstone among other venues, and producing books and podcasts to get around the opinion cartel being built by censors public and private.

What difference can they make and how? This much is true: what man has made, man can unmake and make something new: a new Magna Carta, whether formal or de facto. The urgency has never been more intense. A state without an acquiescing populace is powerless in the end. But not without struggle. And that struggle is ultimately an intellectual one. It’s about what we believe and what kind of society we want to live in.

Our prayer today should be for freedom above all else, a society and a world in which powerful elites do not rule the rest of us and forever fight amongst themselves for the right to do so, with the people deployed as fodder in their struggles, and while hope and prosperity slip ever deeper into memory.

These are very dangerous times, with a toxic mix as backdrop: a growing economic crisis, a spitefully supercilious ruling class, and a vengeful administrative state determined to crush all enemies before it. Something has got to give. May the USA defy the historical odds, find its way back to simple liberty, and begin to restore what has been lost so dramatically and so quickly. Otherwise, all truth will be declared a state secret and our homes will never be safe from invasion.

August 9, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Missouri and Louisiana Attorneys General Sue the Biden Administration Over Free Speech

BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE – AUGUST 8, 2022

Brownstone Institute has repeatedly reported on the unholy alliance between the administrative state and Big Tech with the censorious results of free speech suppression. We’ve published a full articles of inquiry as a template for further investigation into these unprecedented actions.

The cooperation between these people during the pandemic response became intense and pervasive. This model is being deployed in other areas too, with a symbiotic relationship between power centers that ends in suppressing dissent. This is contrary to the First Amendment.

The state attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana have filed suit against the Biden administration. Among the plaintiffs are Brownstone Senior Scholars Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and Aaron Kheriaty who have experienced this censorship first hand. The case is joined by the New Civil Liberties Alliance and filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana Monroe Division.

The text of the lawsuit is embedded below. Here is an excerpt.

The aggressive censorship that Defendants have procured constitutes government action for at least five reasons: (1) absent federal intervention, common-law and statutory doctrines, as well as voluntary conduct and natural free-market forces, would have restrained the emergence of censorship and suppression of speech of disfavored speakers, content, and viewpoint on social media; and yet (2) through Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) and other actions, the federal government subsidized, fostered, encouraged, and empowered the creation of a small number of massive social-media companies with disproportionate ability to censor and suppress speech on the basis of speaker, content, and viewpoint; (3) such inducements as Section 230 and other legal benefits (such as the absence of antitrust enforcement) constitute an immensely valuable benefit to social-media platforms and incentive to do the bidding of federal officials; (4) federal officials—including, most notably, certain Defendants herein—have repeatedly and aggressively threatened to remove these legal benefits and impose other adverse consequences on social-media platforms if they do not aggressively censor and suppress disfavored speakers, content, and viewpoints on their platforms; and (5) Defendants herein, colluding and coordinating with each other, have also directly coordinated and colluded with social-media platforms to identify disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content and thus have procured the actual censorship and suppression of the freedom of speech. These factors are both individually and collectively sufficient to establish government action in the censorship and suppression of social-media speech, especially given the inherent power imbalance: not only do the government actors here have the power to penalize noncompliant companies, but they have threatened to exercise that authority.

August 8, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Hampshire UK police end re-education classes as a punishment for tweets

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 8, 2022

The police in the UK continue to struggle with (re)defining their role in society, specifically as to whether or not it includes figuratively, but also at times literally, policing online free speech.

And that includes making sure people are investigated, and even prosecuted and fined for including such “crimes” as sharing memes on social networks.

In at least one instance, in Hampshire Constabulary, the “verdict” now seems to be a “no” – as in, that’s just not right. At least that’s the impression now as a “hate crime awareness reeducation” program has been dropped by the local Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), amid what looks like major controversy.

This constabulary was among three that incorporated the course, designed to “teach” officers how to become aware and then deal with racism, sexism, misogyny, and transphobia.

But it all went very much south in Hampshire when the scheme – that looks as flimsy and ill-thought-through as those deployed elsewhere – caught in its net a 51-year-old army veteran, who was told his choices were to either get “reeducated” – and pay a fine for this “course” – or face legal prosecution.

The vet, Darren Brady, was eventually handcuffed and arrested in his home and after learning about his suspected “crime” was tapping the “share” icon on a meme he saw online. The meme did not seem supportive at all of the “Gay Pride” imagery.

In fact, it was the opposite of the accepted narratives – like memes mostly do. In this case, it showed the “Progress Pride” flags arranged into the shape of a swastika.

The report Brady received by the police contained the accusation of “causing anxiety.”

If the army veteran meant to express that the “thought police” of the “classic” Nazi era were as bad in treating any topic they didn’t like, as those coming after a particular free speech opinion on anything these days – the Hampshire police’s reaction highly likely assured him he was right.

But Darren Brady wasn’t having any of it, though, and maintained that his choice to retweet the meme was legal, and legitimate.

“I am concerned about both the proportionality and necessity of the police’s response to this incident,” Hampshire PCC Donna Jones eventually announced. “When incidents on social media receive not one but two visits from police officers, but burglaries and non-domestic break-ins don’t always get a police response, something is wrong,” Jones said.

August 8, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »