Lorena Gonzales Versus Frank Wilkinson
How the Democrats Learned to Love Big Brother
By Carl Boggs | Unz Review | March 4, 2021
The mounting Democratic assault on free speech is finally producing blowback – most lately, from a bill proposed by California State Senator Melissa Melendez to protect diversity of political belief and affiliation. Her much-overdue legislation (Senate bills 238 and 249) are together known as the Diversity of Thought Act, which seeks to modify both California Government and Education Codes, ensuring citizens cannot be discriminated against based on political views. That such a bill is needed speaks loudly to the sad deterioration of American political culture. In an age of multiculturalism, wokism, and identity-politics mania it appears that every known human property has been legally protected but one: that of political belief.
In the supposed land of freedom and democracy, Californians – like other Americans – do in 2021 require special legislation to protect free speech. A brief glance at U.S. history reveals a tortured legacy of political repression directed against those daring to hold unpopular beliefs: suffragists, anarchists, socialists, Communists, antiwar and civil rights activists to name some. Now? Well, after years and decades of free-speech activism in defense of First Amendment rights, the country has once again descended into a reign of bigotry and censorship – this time orchestrated by sanctimonious Democratic elites and their shills in the media and Big Tech.
Melendez notes that “it is unfathomable to me that corporations and members of the public would ruin a person’s career, business, and family because of their political ideology. A free society should not allow thoughts and ideas to be censored. Free speech covers all speech –not just that with which you agree.” But thanks to small-minded Democratic politicians, censorship has indeed been the order of the day, and it’s getting steadily worse in schools, on college campuses, in businesses, in the political system, across Silicon Valley and the corporate media. Though scarcely necessary, the Senator added: “A climate of intolerance has been established and has stifled healthy and normal debate.”
As if to immediately validate Melendez’ claims, Democratic Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzales, based in San Diego, fired back on Twitter: “I don’t know who needs to hear this today, but your racist, pro-domestic terrorism, xenophobic, misogynist views do not warrant protection from discrimination. Your choice to hate does not make you part of a protected class.” If this crude outburst happened to be directed specifically at Melendez, then charges of racism and misogynism, not to mention “domestic terrorism”, could be nothing more than another mindless episode of hate speech. In fact Gonzales never identified any concrete example related to Melendez, so best to assume she has in mind some larger targeted collective.
Xenophobia? Can Gonzales be taken seriously? She is a fiercely partisan member of a party that has spent five years promoting the nonstop Russiagate hoax – probably the most disgraceful episode of media-fanned xenophobia in American history. Here was an entirely contrived hatred that brought the U.S. and Russia, heavily-armed nuclear states, disturbingly close to military conflict. There is no sign that Gonzales ever spoke out against such national outrage, which continues into the present. Further, if she has condemned the months of ongoing domestic terrorism carried out by Antifa and Black Lives Matter, still visible in a few cities, we have no record of it.
Being free to speak one’s political mind, without fear of retribution, has deep psychological meaning for me. I happened to be one of those students who occupied Sproul Hall to protest crackdowns on free speech at U.C., Berkeley in fall 1964. I still own the original hand-painted button that spells “FSM”. Later, for the crime of political deviance (as a Gramscian Marxist) I was purged from my reputedly safe job as professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Calling the shots for the university were three giant corporations – Monsanto, McDonnell-Douglas, Ralston-Purina. Aside from my activism against the Vietnam War during the early 1970s, I helped organize the infamous McDonnell-Douglas Project as well as the local underground newspaper, The Outlaw. Any right to combat political repression I had was strictly formal – and my fate was hardly unusual.
It turned out that this personal experience would soon intersect with the life and work of Frank Wilkinson – for decades known as “Mr. First Amendment” – lasting more than 30 years. We were close friends. As visiting professor at Carleton University in Ottawa during 1985, I invited Frank (a spellbinding orator on behalf of free speech) for a lecture tour of Ontario. Wilkinson passed away in January 2006 after a prolific career of speaking, writing, and activism dedicated to First Amendment rights. Knowing him as I did, he would be outraged today at the despotic attitude of Lorena Gonzales and other Democratic admirers of Big Brother.
For more than 50 years, Wilkinson was indefatigable and uncompromising: he knew that, without free speech, efforts to challenge any power structure were doomed. So too were any prospects for personal freedom. At the time of his death, ACLU president Nadine Strossen would describe Wilkinson as “a towering and inspiring figure throughout his entire career, starting from when he was a young person advocating for equal rights for the poor and racial minorities.” She added: “He was constantly challenging governmental power to restrict First Amendment freedoms of belief, speech, and association, as well as privacy, which continues to be relevant today.” For his tireless work, Wilkinson was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Joe McCarthy, and the same intelligence agencies that Democrats today have come to embrace.
In 1958, during a visit to Atlanta in support of civil-rights activists called before the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, Wilkinson was subpoenaed and then cited for contempt of Congress when asserting his own First Amendment right to refuse to testify. He was sentenced to one year in federal prison, serving nine months.
Wilkinson helped form the National Committee to Abolish HUAC in 1960, later renamed the National Committee against Repressive Legislation (NCARL) in 1975, when HUAC was finally disbanded. Wilkinson took serious personal risks to ensure political dissent would be protected — the same protection Gonzales and her righteous party hacks now want to destroy. The dark, repressive side of American history associated with Hoover and McCarthy, the FBI and CIA, is now being revived with sanctimonious fury by current defenders of unfettered corporate-state power.
For Wilkinson – in stark contrast to the bigoted, iron-fisted Gonzales – the Bill of Rights was a living document in need of constant renewal. In 1986 he filed a Freedom of Information Act suit against the FBI and eventually was sent 132,000 pages of files spanning 38 years of federal surveillance and espionage. The story of Wilkinson’s ordeal would find its way into Robert Sherrill’s appropriately-titled biography, First Amendment Felon, in 2005.
In the 15 years since Wilkinson’s death, matters have only gotten worse; the Gonzales diatribe, unfortunately, perfectly fits the Democratic modus operandi. Ordinary conservatives are denounced as “white supremacists”, “Nazis”, and “domestic terrorists”, many targeted for personal ruin even where evidence of such transgression is nowhere to be found. Collective guilt is blithely imputed to broad groups of people simply going about their everyday lives. Medical professionals daring to veer from official narratives are smeared and cancelled, their jobs and careers jeopardized. Vaccine doubters can encounter a similar fate. Questionable opinions expressed years in the past nowadays come back to haunt, if not destroy. Anyone brazen enough to criticize the actual domestic terrorism of Antifa and BLM — spanning several months, not a few hours — will be smeared as a vile “white nationalist”.
While Red Scares of earlier years originated from the pathetic schemes of Hoover and McCarthy, today the threats are far more pervasive, cloaked (as before) in the language of moral enlightenment. Dissidents are nowadays savaged as wretched haters, extremists, terrorists – not to mention, in a period of extreme Russiaphobia, as “foreign agents” or “traitors”. CNN pundits, typically at the forefront, routinely parrot blind hate when referring to Russians, oblivious to meaningful facts and context. Centers of power work to impose ideological conformity: corporate media, Wall Street, deep state, Big Tech, academia, military-industrial complex. Stripped of binding protections, individuals and groups targeted are much too weak and isolated to effectively fight back.
In earlier days dissent was said to be the work of “heretics” or “subversives”, marginal Commies readily hunted down by the Feds. (In American society, the CPUSA was always something of a joke, yet still targeted for years as a major threat.) Nowadays the morality police, backed by the usual oligarchs and billionaires, are ready to pounce on sinful transgressions large and small: white supremacy, transphobia, Covid denial, scheming with the Russians. Those stepping outside the ideologically-vetted discourses of CNN, Washington Post, and New York Times will be identified, demeaned, censored, and (where possible) punished. Reality cops guard against the evils of “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and “conspiracy theories” that undermine “our democracy”. In the case of California, the bill proposed by Melendez will be seized upon by Gonzales and identity-politics fanatics as a sign of guilt, of sinful deviance.
Recently two California members of the U.S. Congress, Democrats Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, sent letters to twelve cable, satellite, and streaming companies – AT&T, Verizon, Apple, Alphabet among them – urging management to shut down centers of “misinformation”, starting with FOX TV. These ideological guardians believe media outlets are contributing to a “polluted environment”, spewing lies that lead to “seditious behavior” and, worse, Covid “science denial”. The problem for Eshoo and McNerney, however, is that pandemic tropes advanced by their favorite corporate-media outlets veer toward fear-rattling propaganda more than established medical science: false computer projections, wildly-inflated death rates, unscientific lockdown orders, needless school closings, mixed signals on facemasks, over-hyping of vaccines. Eshoo and McNerney are best advised to look closer to home, to their own conduits of false information.
Could liberal Democrats, in past years known as champions of free speech and civil rights, have now become so embedded in the power structure that their authoritarian impulses reflect a new-found hubris? Could Gonzales and her anointed elites be imbued with the level of political certitude their censorship zeal seems to imply? Could the party that has carried out years of witch hunts linked to debunked tales of Putin-Trump collusion actually believe in its political integrity? My guess is that Democratic righteousness really masks insecurity and deceit: those responsible for the endless lies and myths must know those lies and myths cannot survive the test of open debate. Easier to denounce your critics as “white nationalists”, cancel their speech platforms, then close off discussion. The shutting down of oppositional speech reflects acute intellectual weakness, not strength.
In the end, the “diversity” and “inclusion” that Gonzales and Democrats piously celebrate is nothing but a sham. Those words have relevance only within a single narrative – a tightly-regulated, fiercely-guarded worldview consistent with elite agendas. Where real diversity should matter most – regarding conflict over how power is exercised, over economic policy and job concerns, over matters of war and peace – genuine debate is largely absent, overridden by an ensemble of authoritarian codes, norms, and practices. Corporate-state rulers manage what is truly important. As with earlier lies and myths about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or “humanitarian crises” in Serbia and Libya, years of Russiagate tales of a stolen election would never be “fact-checked”, but instead repeated monotonously by liberals and their stable of media propagandists. According to Gonzales, all this deceitful manipulation at the hands of Democrats must fall into the category of “protected speech”.
Oligarchical power rules American society more thoroughly than ever, its conformist ideology the true measure of political speech. Identity politics furnishes an opportune facade behind which those in control can expand their power, wealth, and technological advantage never having to worry about anti-system insurgency (keeping mind that January Sixth was no more than a primitive revolt). Supposedly progressive figures like Gonzales, fearing real diversity, serve as valuable instruments of such rule and its legitimation, which those figures always embellish with an ethos of righteous arrogance.
In years past the break with political orthodoxy was denounced as un-American, disloyal, a fifth-column menace, targeted now and then for blacklisting. Nowadays even moderate dissidents are accused of “domestic terrorism” – a charge dutifully repeated by Gonzales. Contemporary dissidents are in fact no better than Nazis, or at least neo-Nazis, meaning they are eligible to be “de-platformed”, sent before a “Reality Czar”. Yet it is Gonzales and her power-mongering ideologues who wind up closer to the monolithic, hateful spirit of fascism than their hapless targets of collective guilt owing to mere association with a political party or outlook. Those ideologues turn out to be the biggest threats to “our democracy”. As Wilkinson had long ago recognized, the struggle against such malevolence is not simply legal but cultural and political – and is never finished.
Sweden Moves To Protect Academic Freedom After Professor Quits Covid Research Due To Harassment
By Jonathan Turley | March 2, 2021
We have been discussing erosion of free speech and academic freedom protections at colleges and universities around the United States. Most faculty have been conspicuously silent as their colleagues are attacked, suspended, or even fired for taking opposing views on systemic racism, police brutality, or movements like Black Lives Matter. In Sweden, the response has been quite different after Professor Jonas Ludvigsson, announced that he would stop all further research on Covid-19 after a campaign of abuse and harassment following his study on the low threat that the virus poses to children and teachers. The country is ramping up protections for academics to combat such cancelling campaigns.
Ludvigsson researches and teaches clinical epidemiology at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. His research is consistent with studies that have long found a low risk to students and teachers. This research was highlighted during the Trump Administration in a call for the resumption of classes but largely ignored by the media. The argument for reopening schools, particularly for young children, was portrayed as political and “not following the science.” Commercials ran [stating] that calls to returning to the classroom were tantamount to “murder.” However, the science has been overwhelmingly supportive of such reopening. Indeed, Catholic and other private schools in many states never closed without surges in the virus.
Ludvigsson looked at children from age 1 to 16 during the first wave of COVID-19 and found that only 15 children went to the ICU, for a rate of 0.77 per 100,000. Moreover, in the 1-16 age group, there was only a slight increase from the four-month period before the pandemic to the four-month period following the period.
Such studies contradict the media narrative and the position of teacher unions, including many which continue to oppose a return to the classroom despite the science. Accordingly, Ludvigsson was attacked and hounded out of further research.
The response of the country however has been different from the response in the United States. Various academic leaders and groups are pushing for legislation designed to protect academic freedom. They are citing a Swedish government study in 2018 found “21 out of 26 universities said that there is a risk that researchers will be exposed to harassment, threats and violence.”
The response in the United States is strikingly different. We have been discussing efforts to fire professors who voice dissenting views on various issues including an effort to oust a leading economist from the University of Chicago as well as a leading linguistics professor at Harvard and a literature professor at Penn. Sites like Lawyers, Guns, and Money feature writers like Colorado Law Professor Paul Campus who call for the firing of those with opposing views (including myself). Such campaigns have targeted teachers and students who contest the evidence of systemic racism in the use of lethal force by police or offer other opposing views in current debates over the pandemic, reparations, electoral fraud, or other issues.
Faculty have largely stayed silent as campaigns targeting these professors and teachers. While some may relish such cleansing of schools of opposing voices, many are likely intimidated by such campaigns and do not want to be the next targeted by such groups. We have often defended the free speech rights of faculty on the left who have made hateful comments about whites, males, and conservatives. Yet, there is an eerie silence when conservatives are targeted for their own views. Sweden has shown how this is a global issue but that the response outside of the United States has been markedly different.
House Republicans Propose Legislation to Allow Biden to Ban Sanctioned Foreign Leaders From Social Media
By Kirill Kurevlev – Sputnik – 03.03.2021
US House Republicans are introducing legislation that would broaden US sanctions law to ban social media platforms from letting foreign persons or organizations which were put under sanctions for terrorism from using their services, Fox News reported Tuesday citing a copy of the bill.
The law bill is reportedly proposed by representatives Andy Barr, Jim Banks, and Joe Wilson, and is reportedly co-sponsored by 40 other members of the House Republican Study Committee. The social media platforms mentioned in the proposed law include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
“US law gives big tech a free pass to provide platforms to terrorist groups and dictators,” Representative Barr of Kentucky is quoted in the report as saying. “Social media companies should not provide a vehicle for terrorist groups like ISIS to raise money or for dictators like the Ayatollah of Iran to spread propaganda.”
The bill reportedly aims to clarify the current sanctions legislation by empowering the president with authority to limit the “provision of services,” including the management of accounts by Big Tech platforms to foreign persons or organizations sanctioned for terrorism by the US, and top officials of states, which are listed as sponsors of terrorism.
“Economic sanctions prohibiting the provision of services to individuals and entities sanctioned for terrorism should apply to social media platforms, while still supporting the free flow of information and maintaining the important principle that information should remain free of sanctions,” the legislation reportedly reads.
The bill also reportedly encourages the Treasury Department to “ensure that consumer communications technologies, as well as tools to circumvent government censorship, are available to civil society and democratic activists in such countries.”
Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus within the House, claimed because of “outdated sanctions laws, social media platforms are able to ban President Trump and other conservatives but let the Iranian Supreme Leader and President Bashar Assad of Syria continue having accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.”
“Thanks to Rep. Barr, we have a bill that would fix this double standard and hold Big Tech accountable to the same sanctions laws other American companies are required to follow,” Banks said.
Controversially enough, the lawmakers claim at the same time that the US Department of Treasury “should encourage the free flow of information in Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, and other countries,” which, according to Washington, are “controlled by authoritarian regimes,” in order to counter them.
Under the existing law, the US president does not have the authority to compel social networks to comply with US sanctions law as it pertains to designated terrorists due to the International Economic Emergency Powers Act of 1976, and especially the so-called Berman Amendments, adopted in 1988 and revised in 1994 to include electronic media. Those amendments forbid the president from even implicitly restricting or banning anything that deals with the free flow of informational services.
Republicans have repeatedly challenged social media’s liability protections under Section 230 that shield social networks from being held responsible for the content posted on their platforms, while enabling them to moderate it.
Tech giants have incurred criticism for the permanent suspension of then-President Trump’s accounts from social media platforms in the aftermath of the violent events on January 6 at the US Capitol. Particularly, Trump’s ban on Twitter has raised concerns that Big Tech could silence practically everybody online, even a country leader.
Following the criticism, Twitter suspended the account of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and removed the tweet where he said that Western COVID-19 vaccines were “completely untrustworthy.”
YouTube Removes RT’s Video of Trump’s ‘Violative’ CPAC Speech – yet it’s ok when posted by Western outlets
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | March 2, 2021
Having a video of former US President Donald Trump’s speech at CPAC may get you warnings and a deletion from YouTube, but apparently only if you’re RT, as the platform seems to selectively apply its arbitrary and capricious rules.
On Tuesday, RT and its German-language channel RT DE got a notice from YouTube that the video of Trump speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Florida on Sunday was being flagged for a “strike” under the platform’s rules on “supporting the 2020 US presidential election” announced in December.
Those rules say any questioning of the 2020 US presidential elections or claims of fraud is verboten. However, YouTube explicitly says “news coverage and commentary on these issues can remain on our site if there’s sufficient education, documentary, scientific or artistic [EDSA] context.”
A live-streamed public address by a former US president is the very definition of “news coverage.” According to one estimate, over 31 million people watched in on various social media platforms.
Yet when asked for a clarification, YouTube responded that the video lacks “enough context that additionally describes and demonstrates that this is Trump’s violative CPAC speech” and that “more details and explanatory information must be provided.”
There was no answer as to how such details and explanations should be provided in a live feed that did not have a correspondent commenting, or if it would be enough to include it in the text description underneath – something RT and our video news agency Ruptly have repeatedly asked about, without ever getting a response.
After RT’s inquiry YouTube proceeded to delete the video outright, for violating its “spam, deceptive practices and scams policy.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s speech was posted on YouTube by multiple other outlets – Reuters, ABC and The Independent, for example – without any of the aforementioned “context” or disclaimers. While it’s impossible for us to know if they also got warnings or strikes, their videos are still up, so it certainly appears that RT was singled out for enforcement.
Back in December, YouTube said it would boost “authoritative news” and suppress “problematic misinformation.” It now seems that the same exact video is treated as “problematic misinformation” when it comes from RT or RT DE, but as “authoritative news” when it comes from a Western corporate outlet.
It would be one thing if YouTube demanded that anything showing what Trump says be labeled as lies, or come with a disclaimer. Admittedly, that is the behavior of a publisher and not a platform, as YouTube claims to be in order to enjoy the protections of the infamous Section 230. Singling out RT channels for enforcement, while giving Western establishment outlets a free pass, however, is far more troubling. If that is indeed the case, then the Alphabet subsidiary is telling the world it does not judge videos on the basis of their content, but on the identity of their uploader.
That this sort of discrimination is posing as YouTube’s “community guidelines” and policies aimed at “supporting” – or would that be “fortifying”? – the US presidential elections, speaks volumes about the platform, but also the state of American democracy.
Amazon Banned These 9 Academic Books Questioning Certain Aspects of the ‘Holocaust’. Why?
By Mark Becker – Russia Insider – March 8 2019
This doesn’t look like extremist hate speech to us. Judging from these blurbs and titles, it looks like pretty balanced and fair discussion of a very serious, and vehemently disputed, allegation.
The first one in the list below even presents both sides of the argument in an attempt to get to the bottom of who is telling the truth.
Why are some people so afraid of a fair and open discussion?
These books were banned from Amazon in March of 2017, but are easily available online at other sellers. Take a look at the blurbs describing these books. They are an eye-opener.
Thomas Dalton
Mainstream historians insist that there cannot be, may not be a debate about the Holocaust. But ignoring it does not make this controversy go away. Traditional scholars admit that there was neither a budget, a plan, nor an order for the Holocaust; that the key camps have all but vanished, and so have any human remains; that material and unequivocal documentary evidence is absent; and that there are serious problems with survivor testimonies. Dalton juxtaposes the traditional Holocaust narrative with revisionist challenges and then analyzes the mainstream’s responses to them. He reveals the weaknesses of both sides, while declaring revisionism the winner of the current state of the debate. 3rd edition.
332 pp. pb., 6”×9”, b/w ill., bibl., index, £20/25 (2017)
By Carlo Mattogno
An overview of the many rumors, myths and lies about Auschwitz spread during and right after the war, which mainstream historians today reject as untrue: murder by gas bombs, electrocution chambers, gas showers, pneumatic hammer systems, electrocution conveyor belts; oils, grease and soap made of murder victims; 4 million victims; crematoria with a capacity of up to 400 million bodies… It then explains by which ridiculous methods some claims about Auschwitz were accepted as true and turned into “history,” although they are just as untrue.
124 pp. pb., 5”×8”, b/w ill., bibl., index, £8/$10 (2018) | Free eBook version available
By Ingrid Weckert
Historical writings to date give at times the impression that Jews who wished to leave Third Reich Germany had to sneak over the borders in defiance of the German authorities, and leave all their possessions and wealth behind. The truth is that the emigration was welcomed by the German authorities, and benefitted from encouragement and assistance that increased over time. Until the outbreak of the war, emigration was not some kind of wild flight, but rather a lawfully conducted and regulated matter. Weckert’s booklet elucidates the emigration process in law and policy, thereby correcting the traditionally received picture of Jewish emigration from Germany significantly. 2nd expanded edition.
130 pp. 6”×9”, b/w ill., bibl. index, pb, £10/$14 (2016) | Free eBook version available
By Don Heddesheimer
This compact but substantive study documents propaganda spread prior to, during and after the FIRST World War that claimed East European Jewry was on the brink of annihilation. The magic number of suffering and dying Jews was 6 million back then as well. The book details how these Jewish fundraising operations in America raised vast sums in the name of feeding suffering Polish and Russian Jews but actually funneled much of the money to Zionist and Communist groups, including Communist revolutionaries in Russia. 5th, revised edition.
200 pp. pb., 6”×9”, b/w ill., bibl., index, £13/$18 (2018) | Free eBook version available
By Nicholas Kollerstrom
In 1941, British Intelligence analysts cracked the German “Enigma” code. Hence, in 1942 and 1943, radio communications between German concentration camps and Berlin were decrypted. The data reveals that the Germans were desperate to reduce the death rate in their labor camps, which was caused by catastrophic typhus epidemics. Dr. Kollerstrom, a science historian, has taken these intercepts and a wide array of mostly unchallenged corroborating evidence to show that “witness statements” supporting the human gas-chamber narrative clearly clash with the available scientific data. Kollerstrom concludes that the history of the Nazi “Holocaust” has been written by the victors with ulterior motives. With a foreword by Prof. Dr. James Fetzer. 4th edition.
270 pp. pb., 6”×9”, b/w ill., bibl., index, £20/$25 (2017)
By G. Rudolf (ed.)
During World War Two both German and Allied reconnaissance aircraft took countless air photos of places of tactical and strategic interest in Europe. Some of these photos provide evidence for the investigation of the Holocaust. Air photos of locations like Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Babi Yar etc. permit an insight into what did or did not happen there. The author has unearthed many pertinent photos and has thoroughly analyzed them. This book is full of air-photo reproductions and schematic drawings explaining them. According to the author, these images refute many of the atrocity claims made by witnesses in connection with events in the German sphere of influence. 3rd revised and expanded edition. With a contribution by Carlo Mattogno.
5th ed., 178 pp. pb., 8.5”×11”, b/w ill., bibl., index, £18/$20 (2018) | Free eBook version available
By Germar Rudolf
A compendium of past and present controversies about the mainstream Holocaust narrative. A comprehensive, up-to-date overview of the critical research into the Holocaust: physical traces, forensic examinations, demographies, document analysis, critique of witness testimony. Rudolf introduces the most-important arguments for his findings, and his audience reacts with supportive, skeptical and also hostile questions. Of the thousands of books on this topic, this one gives the most-comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the critical research into the Holocaust. With its dialog style, it is pleasant to read, and with its logical organization and index, it can even be used as an encyclopedic compendium.
3rd, rev. ed., 596 pp. pb., 6”×9”, b/w ill., bibl., index, £25/$30 (2017) | Free eBook version available
By Thomas Dalton
Six million Jews, we are told, died. Although much has been written about this, much remains a mystery. For example, we would like to know: Where did the six million figure come from? Why do we have so little physical evidence from major death camps? Why has there been so much suppression and censorship on this topic? In a sense, the Holocaust is the greatest murder mystery in history which can point us to deeper truths about our contemporary society. Let’s explore the evidence, and see where it leads.
128 pp. pb., 5”×8”, b/w ill., bibl., index, £8/$10 (2016)
This book applies state-of-the-art scientific technique and classic methods of detection to investigate the alleged murder of millions of Jews by Germans during World War II. In 22 contributions—each of some 30 pages—the 17 authors dissect generally accepted paradigms of the “Holocaust.” It reads as excitingly as a crime novel: so many lies, forgeries and deceptions by politicians, historians and scientists are proven. This is the intellectual adventure of the 21st century. Be part of it!
2nd, rev. ed., 620 pp. pb., 6”×9”, b/w ill., bibl., index, £19.95/$25.50 (2003) | Free eBook version available
Afraid of open debate
Covid-19: Murder by Misinformation
By Janet Menage, GP retired | Wales, UK
Dear Editor
History is littered with examples of the atrocities which ensue when doctors abandon their traditional principles and judgement in favour of unquestioning subservience to government diktat – medical involvement in torture, human experimentation and psychiatric punishment of political dissidents being familiar examples.
Abbasi takes as axiomatic that there was no prior immunity in the population, that lockdowns are effective, that computer modelling is realistic, that statistics have been accurate and that WHO statements are reliable. All of these parameters have been widely challenged by knowledgeable and conscientious researchers whose findings were often disregarded, censored or vilified.
From a medical perspective, it was clear early on in the crisis that disregarding clinical acumen in favour of blind obedience to abnormal ventilation measures, reliance on an unsuitable laboratory test for diagnosis and management, and abandoning the duty of care to elderly hospitalised patients and those awaiting diagnosis and treatment of serious diseases, would create severe problems down the line.
Doctors who had empirically found effective pharmaceutical remedies and preventative treatments were ignored, or worse, denigrated or silenced. Information regarding helpful dietary supplements was suppressed.
This was further compounded by rule-changes to death certification, coroners’ instructions, autopsy guidelines, DNR notices and the cruel social isolation policy enforcement regarding family visits to the sick and dying.
When medical professionals allow themselves to be manipulated by corrupt politicians and influenced by media propaganda instead of being guided by their own ethical principles and common sense based on decades of clinical experience, the outlook becomes very bleak indeed.
Historically, public respect for and trust in doctors has exceeded that awarded to politicians. The unquestioning capitulation of medicine to an authoritarian executive and predatory corporate power may have undermined the doctor-patient relationship for a generation.
Competing interests: No competing interests
Important editorial notice for readers: This is a rapid response (online comment by a third party) and not an article in The British Medical Journal. It is attributed in a misleading way on certain websites and social media. The Editor, 10/02/2021.
Russian Foreign Ministry: Twitter no longer independent social media, but a tool of ‘digital diktat’ under control of West
By Jonny Tickle | RT | February 26, 2021
Twitter is rapidly changing from an independent platform into a tool of Western countries to impose a dictatorship over the internet. That’s according to the Russian Foreign Ministry, following a recent ban of Russian accounts.
Speaking on Friday, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova blasted the US tech giant for removing 100 accounts allegedly linked to the Kremlin. On Tuesday, the site’s owners announced that 69 were deleted for “undermining faith in the NATO alliance,” with a further 31 banned for “targeting the United States and European Union.”
“We once again can’t help but notice that Twitter is rapidly degenerating from an independent discussion platform into a tool of global digital diktat in the hands of the Western establishment,” she told journalists, noting that accounts from NATO members haven’t been victims of similar operations.
“Assumptions and unproven insinuations were once again presented as justifications,” she continued. “The reasoning in Twitter’s own report is absurd: the accounts allegedly broadcast messages related to the Russian government, undermined trust in NATO, and influenced the United States and the EU.”
In her opinion, the blocks were “arbitrary” and “illegal,” based on “opaque criteria.”
Following the ban, Russian regulator Roskomnadzor wrote to Twitter to demand a list of the blocked accounts and justifications for why Twitter blocked them.
On the same day, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested the creation of national and international rules to regulate social networks to avoid censorship.
“We are increasingly concerned about the non-transparent policies of social media platforms, which, at their discretion, prohibit or censor user content, openly manipulating public opinion,” he said.
‘Undermining faith in NATO’ is now grounds for Twitter ban, because certain kinds of politics have become a religion
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | February 25, 2021
Heresy against NATO has apparently joined the ever-expanding list of sins that will get one erased from Twitter, as Big Tech mounts a crusade against infidels at home and abroad on behalf of values of Our Democracy.
Twitter announced bans on 373 accounts it connected to “state-linked information operations” on Tuesday. Some of them, the company said, “amplified narratives that were aligned with the Russian government” or “focused on undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.”
Twitter is a US-based company, and the First Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees freedom of speech as well as religion. Under that set of rules, anyone’s faith in NATO – or lack thereof – would be none of Twitter’s business.
Then again, that set of rules isn’t exactly in effect anymore. Twitter has long abandoned its “free speech wing of the free speech party” shtick to become a cudgel for Our Democracy to beat its critics with. Or did you miss the part where they censored a sitting president of the United States over how he “might be perceived and interpreted” and meddled in the election by blocking a newspaper over a true story they falsely claimed was based on hacked materials?
Assuming for the sake of argument that these things were all part of “fortifying” the election – as TIME magazine put it – and defending Our Democracy from the evils of the constitutional republic, that might explain the repudiation of free speech and free press.
Which leaves religion, and still doesn’t answer why Twitter is now embarking on a jihad to protect NATO from heretics.
Last I checked, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was not a god, but a military alliance. It hardly needs anyone’s “faith” – or Big Tech protection thereof. Not only is it armed to the teeth but commands its own legions of “disinformation” hunters and propaganda shops. Why, one of Twitter’s executives is literally an officer in a psychological warfare outfit of the UK military – a member of NATO, if anyone hasn’t been paying attention.
Big Tech is also working hand in glove with an entire cottage industry of “disinformation researchers” such as Ben Nimmo – an alum of the Atlantic Council, a think-tank serving as a NATO cut-out – and Renee DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory.
DiResta ought to be notorious because her old firm, New Knowledge, was exposed for literally running a bunch of fake accounts posing as ‘Russian bots’ during a 2017 special US Senate election in Alabama. Because that helped a Democrat, NK was allowed to quietly rebrand and DiResta failed upward to land at Stanford. These are not the “Russians” you are looking for, move along, that sort of thing.
So it’s ironic that DiResta’s new outfit has provided more information about Twitter’s newest crusade, as well as where it might be headed. Based on information they were provided by Twitter, some of the accounts in one of the “Russian networks,” the SIO says, “appear to have been linked to the operations primarily via technical indicators rather than amplification or conversation between them.”
Notice the weasel phrasing such as “appear to be linked,” or “show signs of being affiliated” in Twitter’s original blog. It’s simply amazing how the same people who demand irrefutable evidence of, say, US election irregularities suddenly need no evidence whatsoever for their own assertions.
SIO also offers a glimpse into the future of this crusade, noting that while Twitter, Facebook and Medium “chip away” at accounts “pushing Russia-aligned narratives about Syria and NATO,” such activity persists on LiveJournal and Telegram.
No doubt these two platforms – one bought by a Russian company back in 2007, the other founded by a Russian national but currently operating out of Dubai – will find themselves in the crosshairs soon enough.
“Censorship is an intoxicating power that endlessly expands until it’s smashed,” as independent journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out.
Especially since enforcing “faith” means this isn’t about differences of opinion anymore. Forget about things such as free speech, or due process, or debate that’s the cornerstone of an actual democracy. Politics of a certain kind is now religion.
In a move that should surprise no one, this religious war against heretics who dare doubt NATO and other “Russian” wrongthink was hailed by such luminaries of the US establishment as former ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul.
Lest you think he’s an outlier, the US embassy in Kiev applauded the Ukrainian government’s order to close down three opposition TV stations earlier this month. Democrat lawmakers are currently pushing for similar censorship at home.
Just last week, the newly installed US President Joe Biden told European allies that “the transatlantic alliance is back,” pledging his renewed support for NATO. Biden has also said he would govern based on “values.” The thing to understand is that those values aren’t necessarily what the Constitution of the American Republic, now effectively replaced by what has been dubbed Our Democracy, says they are.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator
Amid ‘political repression,’ Ukraine becoming American ‘colony’ in Europe: sanctioned opposition leader Medvedchuk
By Gabriel Gavin | RT | February 25, 2021
Moscow – A few weeks ago, Viktor Medvedchuk was celebrating as his party, Ukraine’s largest opposition bloc, topped a nationwide opinion poll. Now, he’s facing charges of funding terrorism that could land him behind bars for over a decade.
In an exclusive interview with RT, the MP and chairman of Opposition Platform — For Life, which advocates better ties with Moscow, insisted that the allegations were a tool of political persecution.
According to him, they are part of a wider pattern of repression linked to Kiev’s recent moves to shut down Russian-language media that has been critical of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. The embattled administration has seen its approval ratings nosedive amid worsening economic woes and a chaotic response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Very serious accusations
Last week, the country’s National Security and Defense Council announced it would seize properties belonging to seven people, including multimillionaire Medvedchuk and his wife, TV presenter Oksana Marchenko, for allegedly financially supporting terrorist organizations. Details of the charges have not yet been made public, but they could carry a 10-12 year prison sentence if he is found guilty.
“These are very serious accusations,” the politician said. “Especially given they are without any foundation at present.” The sanctions, he argued, “are expressly prohibited” by Ukrainian law and in contravention of the Constitution.
“Unfortunately, [prosecution for] crimes like treason and espionage is commonplace. Just as at one time there was a charge of hooliganism, now we can be charged with treachery or spying,” he said. However, despite believing his political opponents are abusing the justice system, any suggestion that the man once described as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ‘favorite Ukrainian’ might flee abroad gets short shrift. “In spite of all of this, I feel like I’m ready to fight – to fight against arbitrariness, against repression, against falsification… I am prepared to stand up to these threats,” he said.
Just a few hours before Medvedchuk spoke to RT, the Kiev-based research group Rating published a poll which they claim shows more than half of all respondents across the country supported the action against the politician and his family. “They say 58 percent agree with the sanctions, but they have not seen any evidence or arguments,” he said incredulously. “So, what can you really say about this figure?”
Again though, he refuses to write off the prospects of healing political divisions in a country where more than half of the population would seemingly relish the prospect of putting him behind bars. “The split can be overcome,” Medvedchuk insisted, “because the East-West divide has existed for a long time. Since independence, even. Yes there are regions… that differ in mentality and attitudes, but that’s not such a terrible thing if there is a wise state policy with solid structures and good governance.”
“We can find shared ground when it comes to the development of the country’s economy, its social sphere, income growth and prosperity.”
External influence
As one of the flag bearers for a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 foreign policy, which pursued closer relations with Moscow until the bloody events of the Maidan uprisings, Medvedchuk is often characterized as being ready to give away the country’s independence to the Kremlin. However, he insists that it is Zelensky’s government, and its Western allies, that presents the real threat to Ukrainian nationhood.
“We live in an independent sovereign state,” he said. “Or, at least, we used to live in one. Now, both independence and sovereignty are being undermined by external influence and most importantly by external political systems imposed by Washington.”
The American embassy in Kiev raised eyebrows internationally earlier this month when it backed an order signed by Zelensky’s government to shut down a group of television channels and news sites owned by one of the country’s elected MPs, Taras Kozak, a member of Medvedchuk’s party. In a media landscape dominated by wealthy oligarchs, Kozak’s ‘Novosti’ media empire carved out a niche with Russian-language programming made and broadcast in Ukraine. Around one in three people in the country speak the language natively at home, and the vast majority of Ukrainians could be considered fluent. Despite this, under laws put in place in 2014, swathes of programming in Russian from Ukraine’s vast eastern neighbor are already banned.
“When you see that the US Embassy supported both the closure of the channels and the sanctions against me,” Medvedchuk said, “it causes real outrage.” He explained that Washington is “used to creating the image that they are the paragon of democracy, but it is their authorities who have imposed external governance and who are now running Ukraine as their colony,” adding, “They will of course target those who push back against external influence.”
The opposition leader reiterated that 2014 was the turning point, explaining that, since then, “the US has imposed its political power, and it has not benefitted my country or the Ukrainian people… nor will it ever be able to.”
Only a court of law can judge us
The shuttering of the Novosti Group’s media channels, Medvedchuk claims, was an extrajudicial act of repression. Having the backing of the country’s National Security and Defense Council, the same body that ordered the most recent sanctions against him, is not sufficient under Ukrainian law, he maintains.
“Did the Security Council have the right to sign a decree after applying restrictions and blocking channels? No!”
Three broadcasters were taken off air almost immediately and several news sites were banned, which Medvedchuk, who holds a doctorate in legal practice, says was unlawful. “There is nothing in the sanctions that enables them to stop broadcasting, or stop internet resources,” he said. “The law knows no such sanctions.”
At the time, Mikhail Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, explained the move, saying, “it’s clear that sanctions on Mr. Medvedchuk’s TV channels are not about the media and not about freedom of speech… it’s just about effectively countering fakes and foreign propaganda.” Without action, he argued, the opposition media would “kill our values.”
Medvedchuk, however, rejects this as arbitrary and political, when only a judicial decision should apply. “They should go legal,” he insisted. “If you think someone is wrong, go to court. The channels can be defended in court – those who think there are arguments can present them. It is the court that decides who is right and who is wrong, not you, not me, or a government representative who thinks it is bad for the interests of the country when I say it is good for the interests of the people.”
“Only a court of law can judge us,” he concluded. “This is the procedure in all legal systems, and this is real, effective democracy. Everything else is evil!”
The American Embassy in Kiev, however, insisted that the move was “in line with Ukrainian law,” and that it supported Zelensky’s efforts “to counter Russia’s malign influence.”
“We must all work together to prevent disinformation from being deployed as a weapon in an info war against sovereign states,” a tweet from the diplomats argued.
Violating the principles of democracy
When the sanctions against him were first announced, Medvedchuk issued a fiery statement in which he accused the president of taking the country “down the path of establishing a “dictatorship and usurping power.” The government was, he insisted, “seeking to crack down on the parliamentary opposition legally elected by the Ukrainian people.”
No matter how evocative that rhetoric might be, however, the reality is that few in the West can imagine Zelensky as a budding despot, at least at the moment. When elected with more than 73 percent of the vote in 2019 after an unlikely rise from television celebrity to politics, he declared that he would only ever serve one term in the top job.
When pushed on whether his political opponent would really go back on that pledge, Medvedchuk insisted that “it all still looks cloudy and foggy.” However, Zelensky’s plans would become clearer, he said, at the next elections. But, in either case, whether the incumbent would succeed in a re-election bid, he said, “I have my doubts.”
The president’s falling popularity, which has seen support for his party drop in a recent poll to around half the level of Medvedchuk’s, “is the result of unprofessional management of the economic and social spheres, as well as the fight against coronavirus,” he said. “It is because of the lack of peace that he promised in the elections, the lack of return of Donbass to Ukraine.”
“And I think that political repression, the establishment of a dictatorship, the closure of channels, the policy of discrimination against the Russian language, the policy of Russophobia and the policy of usurping power are the result of him struggling to maintain and increase his authority and his ratings,” the opposition leader continued. “This is exactly the kind of illegal and unconstitutional way that violates the current legislation of our country, going out of the legal framework and really violating all the principles of democracy.”
European values
For all Medvedchuk’s talk about Zelensky’s undermining of Ukrainian democracy, the country’s president would likely throw those accusations straight back at him. Advocates of a tough line against both Russia and those Kiev politicians who seek better ties with the country argue that the Kremlin will always pose an existential threat to Ukraine’s nationhood.
Unless it finds its own distinct identity, they argue, through elevating the Ukrainian language and advocating an interpretation of the country’s history as separate to Moscow’s, it will forever be sucked into the orbit of its far larger neighbor. The Russian-language broadcasters that Medvedchuk points to as an example of Kiev’s growing autocracy are, to Zelensky’s supporters, a leash that would lead the country back to control from the East. For them, Ukraine’s future lies only in turning to the West.
The opposition leader, however, shrugged off the suggestion that the country could strengthen the president’s ambitions to join Western institutions like the EU and NATO by simply blocking opposing voices. “When he says he is leading the way to European democracy and is trying to break down the barriers to that, it is just seen as utter absurdity,” the MP argued. “If this democracy is about closing down channels alone, then I don’t know what his idea of European democracy is. European democracy has a mechanism for stopping broadcasting – and we’ve already talked about it – through the courts.”
“But what Zelensky is doing – imposing sanctions on his citizens, restricting constitutional rights extrajudicially, shutting down broadcasters illegally – is not democracy, European or otherwise,” he added. “This is the establishment of dictatorship and a way to seize power.”
“Note that the resolution adopted by the European Parliament in matters related to the association agreement between Ukraine and the EU, in several paragraphs it explicitly states that there can be no extrajudicial closure of television broadcasters. There can be no politically motivated action against the opposition – this is also explicitly stated.”
The Ukrainian Ministry of Justice was approached for comment on whether the sanctions against politicians and broadcasters were within the law. No response has been received.
Though Medvedchuk and Zelensky might lead warring factions, they share the same country, divided as it is. The great irony would be if, by trying to break the deadlock between them with promises of a bright, liberal and democratic future, the president and his supporters delivered the kind of autocracy that they have always accused the other side of wanting to install.
The Vaccine (Dis)Information War
By CJ Hopkins | Consent Factory Inc. | February 23, 2021
So, good news, folks! It appears that GloboCap’s Genetic Modification Division has come up with a miracle vaccine for Covid! It’s an absolutely safe, non-experimental, messenger-RNA vaccine that teaches your cells to produce a protein that triggers an immune response, just like your body’s immune-system response, only better, because it’s made by corporations!
OK, technically, it hasn’t been approved for use — that process normally takes several years — so I guess it’s slightly “experimental,” but the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency have issued “Emergency Use Authorizations,” and it has been “tested extensively for safety and effectiveness,” according to Facebook’s anonymous “fact checkers,” so there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.
This non-experimental experimental vaccine is truly a historic development, because apart from saving the world from a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms (or, more commonly, no symptoms whatsoever) in roughly 95% of those infected, and that over 99% of those infected survive, the possibilities for future applications of messenger-RNA technology, and the genetic modification of humans, generally, is virtually unlimited at this point.
Imagine all the diseases we can cure, and all the genetic “mistakes” we can fix, now that we can reprogram people’s genes to do whatever we want … cancer, heart disease, dementia, blindness, not to mention the common cold! We could even cure psychiatric disorders, like “antisocial personality disorder,” “oppositional defiant disorder,” and other “conduct disorders” and “personality disorders.” Who knows? In another hundred years, we will probably be able to genetically cleanse the human species of age-old scourges, like racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, etcetera, by reprogramming everyone’s defective alleles, or implanting some kind of nanotechnological neurosynaptic chips into our brains. The only thing standing in our way is people’s totally irrational resistance to letting corporations redesign the human organism, which, clearly, was rather poorly designed, and thus is vulnerable to all these horrible diseases, and emotional and behavioral disorders.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. The important thing at the moment is to defeat this common-flu-like pestilence that has no significant effect on age-adjusted death rates, and the mortality profile of which is more or less identical to the normal mortality profile, but which has nonetheless left the global corporatocracy no choice but to “lock down” the entire planet, plunge millions into desperate poverty, order everyone to wear medical-looking masks, unleash armed goon squads to raid people’s homes, and otherwise transform society into a pathologized-totalitarian nightmare. And, of course, the only way to do that (i.e., save humanity from a flu-like bug) is to coercively vaccinate every single human being on the planet Earth!
OK, you’re probably thinking that doesn’t make much sense, this crusade to vaccinate the entire species against a relatively standard respiratory virus, but that’s just because you are still thinking critically. You really need to stop thinking like that. As The New York Times just pointed out, “critical thinking isn’t helping.” In fact, it might be symptomatic of one of those “disorders” I just mentioned above. Critical thinking leads to “vaccine hesitancy,” which is why corporations are working with governments to immediately censor any and all content that deviates from the official Covid-19 narrative and deplatform the authors of such content, or discredit them as “anti-vax disinformationists.”
For example, Children’s Health Defense, which has been reporting on so-called “adverse events” and deaths in connection with the Covid vaccines, despite the fact that, according to the authorities, “there are no safety problems with the vaccines” and “there is no link between Covid-19 vaccines and those who die after receiving them.” In fact, according to the “fact-checkers” at Reuters, these purported “reports of adverse events” “may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable!”
Yes, you’re reading between the lines right. The corporate media can’t come right out and say it, but it appears the “anti-vax disinformationists” are fabricating “adverse events” out of whole cloth and hacking them into the VAERS database and other such systems around the world. Worse, they are somehow infiltrating these made-up stories into the mainstream media in order to lure people into “vaccine hesitancy” and stop us from vaccinating every man, woman, and child in the physical universe, repeatedly, on an ongoing basis, for as long as the “medical experts” deem necessary.
Here are just a few examples of their handiwork …
- In Norway, 23 elderly people died after receiving the Pfizer vaccine. However, according to Reuters’ “fact-checkers,” it turns out, old people just die sometimes, especially in nursing homes, from a variety of causes … unless they haven’t been vaccinated, in which case they definitely died of Covid, regardless of what they actually died of. For example, a 99-year-old man suffering from dementia and emphysema, who tested negative for the virus three times, was added to the “Covid deaths” figures because a nursing home doctor “assumed” it was Covid (which GloboCap has expressly instructed him to do).
- In Germany, 13 of 40 residents of one nursing home died after being vaccinated, but this was just a “tragic coincidence,” which had absolutely nothing to do with the vaccine.
- In Spain, in another “tragic coincidence,” 46 nursing home residents who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine died within the course of one month. A further 28 of the 94 residents and 12 staff members subsequently tested positive.
- In Florida, a healthy middle-aged doctor died from an unusual blood disorder two weeks after receiving the vaccine, but, according to the experts, the sudden onset of this rare immunological blood disorder (i.e., immune thrombocytopenia) “should not be interpreted as linked to the vaccine,” and was probably just a total coincidence.
- In California, a 60-year-old X-ray technologist received a second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. A few hours later he had trouble breathing. He was hospitalized and died four days later. His widow says she’s not ready at this point to link her husband’s death to the vaccine. “I’m not putting any blame on Pfizer,” she said, “or on any other pharmaceutical company.” So, probably just another coincidence.
- A 78-year-old woman in California died immediately after being vaccinated, but her death was not related to the vaccine, health officials assured the public. “(She) received an injection of the Covid-19 vaccine manufactured by Pfizer around noon. While seated in the observation area after the injection, [she] complained of feeling discomfort and while being evaluated by medical personnel she lost consciousness.” Despite the sudden death of his wife, her husband intends to receive a second dose.
- A former Detroit news anchor died just one day after receiving the vaccine, but it was probably just a coincidental stroke, which the “normal side effects of the vaccine may have masked.”
- Also in Michigan, a 90-year-old man died the day after receiving the vaccine, but, again, this was just a tragic coincidence. As Dr. David Gorski explained, “the baseline death rate of 90-year-olds is high because they’re 90 years old,” which makes perfect sense … unless, of course, they died of Covid, in which case their age and underlying conditions make absolutely no difference whatsoever.
- In Kentucky, two nuns at a monastery died, and more than two dozen others tested positive, in a sudden “Covid-19 outbreak” that began two days after the nuns were vaccinated. The monastery had been completely closed to visitors and Covid-free up to that point, but the nuns were old and had “health issues,” and so on.
- In Virginia, a 58-year-old grandmother died within hours after receiving the vaccine, but, as Facebook’s “fact checkers” prominently pointed out, it had to be just another coincidence, because the “vaccines have been tested for safety extensively.”
And then there are all the people on Facebook sharing their stories of loved ones who have died shortly after receiving the Covid vaccine, who the Facebook “fact checkers” are doing their utmost to discredit with their official-looking “fact-check notices.” For example …
OK, I realize it’s uncomfortable to have to face things like that (i.e., global corporations like Facebook implying that these people are lying or are using the sudden deaths of their loved ones to discourage others from getting vaccinated), especially if you’re just trying to follow orders and parrot official propaganda … even the most fanatical Covidian Cultists probably still have a shred of human empathy buried deep in their cold little hearts. But there’s an information war on, folks! You’re either with the Corporatocracy or against it! This is no time to get squeamish, or, you know, publicly exhibit an ounce of compassion. What would your friends and colleagues think of you?!
No, report these anti-vaxxers to the authorities, shout them down on social media, switch off your critical-thinking faculties, and get in line to get your vaccination! The fate of the human species depends on it! And, if you’re lucky, maybe GloboCap will even give you one of these nifty numerical Covid-vaccine tattoos for free!
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House Democrats, Targeting Right-Wing Cable Outlets, Are Assaulting Core Press Freedoms
By Glenn Greenwald | February 23, 2021
Not even two months into their reign as the majority party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress, key Democrats have made clear that one of their top priorities is censorship of divergent voices. On Saturday, I detailed how their escalating official campaign to coerce and threaten social media companies into more aggressively censoring views that they dislike — including by summoning social media CEOs to appear before them for the third time in less than five months — is implicating, if not already violating, core First Amendment rights of free speech.
Now they are going further — much further. The same Democratic House Committee that is demanding greater online censorship from social media companies now has its sights set on the removal of conservative cable outlets, including Fox News, from the airwaves.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday announced a February 24 hearing, convened by one of its sub-committees, entitled “Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media.” Claiming that “the spread of disinformation and extremism by traditional news media presents a tangible and destabilizing threat,” the Committee argues: “Some broadcasters’ and cable networks’ increasing reliance on conspiracy theories and misleading or patently false information raises questions about their devotion to journalistic integrity.”
Since when is it the role of the U.S. Government to arbitrate and enforce precepts of “journalistic integrity”? Unless you believe in the right of the government to regulate and control what the press says — a power which the First Amendment explicitly prohibits — how can anyone be comfortable with members of Congress arrogating unto themselves the power to dictate what media outlets are permitted to report and control how they discuss and analyze the news of the day?
But what House Democrats are doing here is far more insidious than what is revealed by that creepy official announcement. Two senior members of that Committee, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Silicon-Valley) and Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) also sent their own letters to seven of the nation’s largest cable providers — Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox and Altice — as well as to digital distributors of cable news (Roku, Amazon, Apple, Google and Hulu) demanding to know, among other things, what those cable distributors did to prevent conservative “disinformation” prior to the election and after — disinformation, they said, that just so happened to be spread by the only conservative cable outlets: Fox, Newsmax and OANN.
In case there was any doubt about their true goal — coercing these cable providers to remove all cable networks that feature conservative voices, including Fox (just as their counterparts on that Committee want to ban right-wing voices from social media) — the House Democrats in their letter said explicitly what they are after: namely, removal of those conservative outlets by these cable providers:
Congresswoman Eshoo boasted on her official site about these efforts, lauding herself and McNerney for “urging 12 cable, satellite, and streaming TV companies to combat the spread of misinformation and requesting more information about their actions to address misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies spread through channels they host.”
For the last four years, we were inundated with media messaging that Trump posed an unprecedented threat to press freedoms. The Washington Post even flamboyantly adopted a new motto to implicitly ratify that accusation (while claiming it was not Trump-specific). Other than the indictment of Julian Assange — which most Washington Democrats cheered — what did the Trump administration do in the way of attacking press freedoms that remotely compares to Democrats abusing their majoritarian power to force the removal of conservative cable outlets from the airwaves, just days after doing the same with dissident voices online?
There is not a peep of protest from any liberal journalists. Do any of the people who spent four years pretending to care so deeply about the vital role of press freedom have anything to say about this full frontal attack by the majority party in Washington on news outlets opposed to their political agenda and ideology?
Evidently not. While many conservative outlets are covering this story, it is difficult to find any liberal outlets writing about it at all. An article from The New York Times was one exception, though it largely attempted to justify these censorship efforts, with paragraph after paragraph purporting to demonstrate the dangerous misinformation spread by these channels. The only nods to the dangers for press freedoms in the article came from statements by Fox News and a GOP member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Revealingly, these same two members of Congress who sent this threatening letter to cable providers said during the Trump years that freedom of the press must be safeguarded at all costs. “The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making laws that abridge the freedom of the press, and we cherish our country’s culture of free expression,” they intoned when writing to the FCC in 2019 to complain that Russian news outlets were concealing their affiliation with the Kremlin. “We’re not requesting any press censorship,” they assured the FCC under Trump. Yet they are clearly doing exactly that now.
In a statement he emailed to me and publicly posted, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr denounced the Democrats’ actions as a “marked departure from First Amendment norms.” He said “it is a chilling transgression of the free speech rights that every media outlet in this country enjoys.” In response to my inquiries, Commissioner Carr added in a separate statement to me:
The greatest threat to free speech in America today is not any law passed by the government—the First Amendment stands as a strong bulwark against that form of censorship by state action. The threat comes in the form of legislating by letterhead. Politicians have realized that they can silence the speech of those with different political viewpoints by public bullying. The letter sent by two senior Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee to cable companies and other regulated entities, and the Committee’s own hearing this week on “disinformation in the media,” are the latest examples. They are singling out selected newsrooms for their coverage of political events and sending a clear message that these media outlets will pay a price if they do not align their viewpoints with Democrat orthodoxy. That is a chilling transgression of free speech and journalistic freedom. No government official has any business inquiring about the ‘moral principles’ that guide a private entity’s decision about what news to carry.
Carr’s GOP colleague on the FCC, Commissioner Nathan Simington, similarly accused House Democrats of seeking to “intimidate into silence those who would distribute on their platforms disfavored points of view.”
The way Democrats justify this to themselves is important to consider. They do not, of course, explicitly acknowledge that they are engaged in authoritarian assaults on free speech and a free press. Not even the most despotic tyrants like to think of themselves in that way. All tyrants concoct theories and excuses to justify their censorship as noble and necessary.
Indeed, the justifying script Democrats are using here is the one most commonly employed by autocrats around the world to silence their critics. Those they seek to silence are not merely expressing a different view, but are dangerous. They are not merely advocating alternative ideologies but are destabilizing society with lies, fake news, and speech that deliberately incites violence, subversion and domestic terrorism.
In her boastful posting, Rep. Eshoo says her efforts targeting these cable outlets are necessary because “misinformation on TV has led to our current polluted information environment that radicalizes individuals to commit seditious acts and rejects public health best practices, among other issues in our public discourse.” This is the rationale invoked by virtually every repressive state to imprison journalists and ban media outlets.
The Democrats sound a great deal like the Egyptian regime of Gen. Abdel el-Sisi. Just two weeks ago, Sisi’s regime finally released an Al Jazeera journalist who had been imprisoned for four years based on accusations that he had “spread false news” and was guilty of “incitement against state institutions and broadcasting false news with the aim of spreading chaos.” Sound familiar? It should, since that is precisely what House Democrats are saying to ennoble their multi-pronged assault on free expression.
International Federation of Journalists, Feb. 5, 2021
Accusing one’s domestic opponents of being subversives and domestic terrorists is by far the most common way that despots on every continent justify their censorship and silencing campaigns of oppositional media outlets. In 2014, the French journalist Valeria Costa-Kostritsky warned in the Index on Censorship that anti-terrorism laws and accusations of promoting subversion were becoming the primary means which authoritarian states from Turkey and Jordan to Russia and the UAE use to justify the silencing of journalists:
Anti-terror legislation seems to be the perfect tool for a state seeking to crack down on opposition. “It’s so elusive. You can [see] anything as terrorist propaganda. There needn’t be any evidence of violence, any praise of violence. Plus, if you blame someone for having a connection with the [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] the public buys that argument easily, especially in a country that is suffering from terrorism, as Turkey is,” said Sevgi Akarçeşme, former editor-in-chief of Turkey’s Today’s Zaman (the English-language edition of daily Zaman), who had her newspaper taken over by the government in March 2016.
A similar means used by repressive governments to silence disfavored media outlets is to claim they are promoting “extremism.” As Costa-Kostritsky detailed:
There’s another word one can use to browse through reports published on the [Mapping Media Freedom] map: “extremism”. Anti-extremism legislation is used to intimidate journalists in post-Soviet countries, particularly in Russia. On the map, of the 35 incidents flagged with “extremism”, 11 took place in Russia, and seven in Crimea, others include Belgium, Italy, Hungary, France and Spain. Five reports connecting the media to “extremism” took place during the first half of 2016. They include website closures and journalists being put on a list of extremists. In Russia, most cases using anti-extremism legislations against journalists happen via Roskomnadzor, the national media regulator.
When China arrests journalists it typically justifies its actions by accusing them of fomenting extremism that jeopardizes national security.
And accusing journalists of spreading “fake news” — always a dangerously vague term from its inception — is equally commonplace when government authorities want to silence media outlets. The Washington Post reported that “as 2019 draws to a close, there are 30 journalists in jail worldwide on charges of ‘false news’ — or, as it’s also called these days, ‘fake news.’” In sum:
It has now become commonplace to throw around fake-news accusations in the United States. But in other countries around the world — like Egypt, Turkey, Somalia and Cameroon — such charges can have very chilling and stifling impacts on the press, according to an annual report by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
In Egypt — where General-turned-President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi has been overseeing a crackdown that human rights groups say is harsher than any before — there are 21 journalists in jail for allegedly publishing “false news,” according to the CPJ’s data. In practice, press freedom advocates say, these charges stem from a simple fact: The journalists published news that Sisi didn’t like.
In a passage that the Post would only publish about foreign countries but never about House Democrats, even though it now applies equally, they observed: “There is a serious global problem of disinformation spreading online and sowing distrust and sectarianism. The problem, say press advocates, is that the laws regulating fake news all too often are a means of stifling the media rather than fostering a more transparent environment online.”
This framework is hardly rare in the west either. When the Obama administration collaborated with the UK Government in 2013 to detain my husband David Miranda at Heathrow Airport in connection with the work he was doing in the Snowden reporting, they cited an anti-terrorism law to justify his detention, and repeatedly threatened to prosecute him for terrorism if he did not cooperate by providing all of his passwords to them. He ultimately prevailed in his lawsuit against the U.K. Government on the ground that it constitutes an illegal assault on press freedoms and human rights to abuse anti-terrorism frameworks to intimidate or silence journalists.
Justifying the silencing of journalists by accusing them of inciting domestic terrorism and extremism is now the most common means used globally for censorsing the press. The Committee to Protect Journalists in 2013 said they had “tracked a significant rise in journalist imprisonments.” The culprit, said the group, was “the expansion of anti-terrorism and national security laws worldwide” after the 9/11 attack, which had been repeatedly abused to criminalize media outlets. “The number of journalists jailed worldwide hit 232 in 2012, 132 of whom were held on anti-terror or other national security charges.” In sum: “CPJ’s analysis has found that governments have exploited these laws to silence critical journalists.”
Are there conspiracy theories and disinformation sometimes found on the conservative cable outlets which House Democrats want taken off the air? Of course there are: all media outlets disseminate conspiracy theories and fake news at times. MSNBC and CNN spent four years endorsing the most deranged conspiracy theory imaginable, one with very toxic roots in the Cold War: namely, the McCarthyite script that the Kremlin had taken over control of key U.S. institutions through sexual blackmail over the President, invasions into the nation’s heating system and electric grid, and criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the Trump campaign to hack into Democrats’ emails.
All of that was false, just as the one-month tale told over and over by the media about a pro-Trump mob murdering Brian Sicknick by bludgeoning him to death with a fire extinguisher was false — a story which remains unretracted or corrected by most who spread it.
Just imagine if, during the Trump years, the GOP Senate had abused its power to bully cable outlets into removing MSNBC from their platforms, or banning liberal journalists and activists from using social media platforms, on the grounds that they were spreading conspiracy theories and fake news. It is hard to overstate how extreme the rhetoric would have been that Trump and the Republicans were engaged in authoritarian measures to destroy free speech and a free press.
And I would have joined in those denunciations (as I did with the Assange prosecution): as much as I loathe so much of what those outlets do, it is not the role of the government to regulate let alone silence them. The corrective is for journalists to rebuild trust and faith with the public by exposing their misinformation and proving to the public that they will do accurate and reliable reporting regardless of which faction is aggrandized or angered.
But corporate media outlets and Democrats (excuse the redundancy) who spent the last four years posturing as virulent defenders of press freedoms never meant it. Like so much of what they claimed to believe, it was fraudulent. The proof is that they are now mute, if not supportive, as Democrats use their status as majority party to launch an assault against press freedoms far more egregious than anything Trump got close to doing.
Democrats ask cable operators why they don’t CENSOR Fox News, OAN & Newsmax
RT | February 22, 2021
In a move condemned by Republicans as a “troubling” attack on free press, Democrats have asked cable and digital operators to justify carrying Fox News, OAN and Newsmax ahead of a hearing on media “disinformation and extremism.”
“Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, OANN, and Newsmax on your platform both now and beyond the renewal date?” a letter sent Monday by California Democrats Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney asked major cable and digital TV providers in the US.
“If so, why?”
The letter was addressed to cable and satellite providers Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox and Altice, as well as digital carriers Amazon, Apple, Google, Hulu and Roku.
Eshoo and McNerney also asked what steps the providers took prior to and after the November 3, 2020 election and the January 6 Capitol riot “to monitor, respond to, and reduce the spread of disinformation, including encouragement or incitement of violence by channels your company disseminates to millions of Americans?”
This was a reference to the three networks giving space to President Donald Trump and his supporters to make accusations of irregularities in the 2020 election, which the Democrats have blamed for what they claim was an “insurrection” at the Capitol.
McNerney and Eshoo sit on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, whose subcommittee on Communications and Technology is scheduled to hold a hearing on “traditional media’s role in promoting disinformation and extremism” on Wednesday. While the subcommittee did not name any names, they said the “increasing reliance on conspiracy theories and misleading or patently false information” at some networks “raises questions about their devotion to journalistic integrity.”
The letter attracted the attention of Brendan Carr, the lone Republican on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), who condemned it as “a chilling transgression” of free speech rights in the US.
Democrats are “sending a message that is as clear as it is troubling—these regulated entities will pay a price if the targeted newsrooms do not conform to Democrats’ preferred political narratives,” Carr added.
A newsroom’s decision about which stories to cover and how “should be beyond the reach of any government official, not targeted by them,” Carr argued, asking his FCC colleagues to “join me in publicly denouncing this attempt to stifle political speech and independent news judgment.” As of Monday afternoon, they have not done so.
Democrats are “saying it explicitly” that they want to “police and censor both social media and cable news,” journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted on Monday, as the issue came up during the Senate confirmation hearings of Merrick Garland, nominated to serve as attorney general in the Biden administration.
While the menacing letter to cable operators may not have said so explicitly, the lawmakers appeared to be contrasting their supposed inaction with the sweeping restrictions social media companies such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube imposed on their users prior and following the election, including the ban on President Trump and pre-labeling any claims about election results or integrity as false.
Reporting on the Eshoo-McNerney letter, the New York Times approvingly noted that while “defamation lawsuits filed by private companies have taken the lead in the fight against disinformation promoted on some cable channels,” pointing to Dominion Voting Systems suing Trump lawyers who appeared on the three networks, as well as pillow manufacturer Mike Lindell.
The First Amendment of the US Constitution explicitly prohibits Congress from restricting freedom of religion, speech, and press. Though this is presumably a fundamental American value, of the kind President Joe Biden said would guide his policies, the US embassy in Ukraine cheered earlier this month when the government in Kiev banned several local TV networks, saying it was a proper move to “counter Russia’s malign influence.”
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From the Archives
Mutually Assured Delusion (MAD)
By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | November 5, 2013
Groupthink: A pattern of thought charaterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.
Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets, by Roland Benabou, published in the Review of Economic Studies. Benabou also has a talk (ppt slides) on this subject.
First, a definition of groupthink (from the ppt slides):
Janis (1972)’s eight symptoms [of groupthink]:
- illusion of invulnerability
- collective rationalization
- belief in inherent morality
- stereotyped views of out-groups
- direct pressure on dissenters
- self-censorship
- illusion of unanimity
- self-appointed mind guards
Sound like any groups that we know? … continue
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