Why Does the US Department of Justice Want to Worsen the Split in the US Population?
By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy | January 13, 2021
The initial charges against those few who entered the Capitol during the Trump rally were “entering a restricted building without permission and engaging in disorderly conduct while inside.” This charge does not carry sufficient punishment for the kind of example the Establishment intends to make of Trump supporters.
Michael Sherwin, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, sees a chance for his 15 minutes of fame. He announced in a press conference that he has built a team of national security attorneys to create sedition and conspiracy charges against Trump “rioters who stormed the Capitol.”
Note that excessive language accompanies excessive charges. Whether those who got into the Capitol were let in or broke in, there was no “storming,” and certainly no conspiracy to commit sedition. Sherwin says that he is “treating this just like a significant international counterterrorism or counterintelligence operation.”
Even the videos shown on anti-Trump news sites, such as The Hill, show the “insurrectionists” in the Capitol walking peacefully and keeping within the roped lane. How is this violent insurrection? There are videos making the rounds that show Trump supporters restraining a man who is trying to break a window in the Capitol. It is clear that the Trump supporters regard the person as an Antifa member.
In any demonstration there will be nutcases and provocateurs. To define a peaceful demonstration by the acts of a few is dishonest. Remember, the presstitutes repeatedly called the Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots that looted and burned business areas of Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Atlanta and other cities “peaceful protests.” When the presstitutes had to acknowledge that there was violence, they blamed it on Trump supporters or white supremacists who had allegedly infiltrated the peaceful protests.
Infiltration does seem to have happened to Trump supporters at the Capitol. According to a report by a person present at the Capitol to film the event that was sent to Professor Mark Crispin Miller at New York University, agitators suddenly appeared with bull horns and provoked Trump supporters to rush up the steps at the back of the Capitol. The relatively few who entered the Capitol apparently entered from the front. Some reports say they were allowed in. Here is the account of the cameraman that I reported on January 7:
“I was in Washington, D.C. today filming the Trump rally and related events. I also ran across your post concerning the Capitol demonstration tonight. Perhaps this short account will help you assess what others are saying in a small way.
“I was also at the Capitol before the crowd appeared setting-up my camera on a stone wall around the perimeter of the back of the capitol (the rear facing Constitution Avenue). Then I waited for President Trump’s speech to end and for supporters to walk-up Constitution Avenue to the Capitol. I was located at the precise location where supporters first rushed up the slope towards the back of the Capitol after casting aside a section of the first Capitol perimeter barrier. Supporters gathered roughly at the center of the back of the capitol, but a circle began to grow around the perimeter as the crowd grew larger. I had no sense that the growing crowd intended to rush the Capitol.
“After a large crowd emerged at the perimeter a man in perhaps his late 30’s or early 40’s showed-up, pacing quickly to his left then to his right before the crowd, and essentially began hurling insults at the crowd challenging their political wisdom. He excoriated the crowd for thinking that their attendance would be taken seriously by members of congress. (Hard to say that he was wrong about that, whoever he was). I cannot recall his precise words, but for a very short period he engaged in a shouting exchange with supporters, and suddenly supporters pushed aside the first barrier and rushed towards the back of the Capitol. Others on the northern edge of the perimeter followed suit. But the first rush was right at the center of the back of the Capitol. I followed the rush to the bottom of the Capitol back steps, and began filming again from atop an inner perimeter stone wall.
“The police, so it appeared, were a little surprised by the rush, and this gave supporters an opportunity to race up the steps. One or two men even made it as far as the steps leading up to the scaffolds on the south side of the Capitol before police arrested them. By this time, five or ten men had climbed to the top of the tall steel tower structure facing the Capitol. Then the police erected and lined-up behind a new barrier perimeter at the foot of the Capitol steps. Police at the top of the Capitol steps aimed rifles down on the crowd (perhaps rubber bullet rifles, I could not tell). The crowd began arguing with police and pressing hard against the new barrier. The police sprayed men pressing directly against the barrier with tear gas from time to time causing them to retreat. “Meanwhile, the men at the top of the tower began rallying the crowd to challenge the new barrier (over bull horns) by filling any gaps between the barrier and the stone wall that I was using as a filming vantage point. Another man worked the crowd with a bull horn immediately in front of me and also encouraged supporters to climb over the inner perimeter stone wall (my filming vantage point) and create a wall of pressure on the new barrier at the bottom of the Capitol back steps.
“After about 30 minutes to an hour I dropped to the bottom of the stone wall to reload my camera when suddenly the barrier gave way and police attempted to fortify it by blasting tear gas into the area between the stone wall and the barrier. I was hit by the gas myself and struggled back over the stone wall in order to breathe. The gas threw many crowd members into a panic. And I was nearly trampled as I struggled to lift my camera and heavy gear bag over the wall after two women began pulling desperately on the back of my coat to pull themselves up and over the moderately high wall in retreat.
“After the second perimeter barrier gave way, the men with the bull horns began working the crowd very hard to fill-up with Trump supporters the steps of the Capitol and the scaffolding on both sides of it. At this point one of the calls, which the men with bull horns repeated from time to time in order to encourage people to climb the Capitol steps was “this is not a rally; it’s the real thing.” Another frequent call was “its now or never.” After about a two hour effort peppered with bull horn calls of this nature the entire back of the Capitol was filled with Trump supporters and the entire face of the Capitol was covered with brilliant small and very large Trump banners, American flags, and various other types of flags and banners.
“Sometime after the rush on the back of the Capitol, people were apparently able to enter the Capitol itself through the front. But I was not witness to anything at the front or inside the Capitol.
“One clearly bona fide Trump supporter who had apparently entered the Capitol himself was telling others emotionally and angrily (including press representatives of some sort, even a foreign newsman) that he witnessed someone inside the Capitol encouraging violence whom he strongly suspected was not a legitimate Trump supporter (apparently on the basis that the man showed no signs at all of Trump support on his apparel). I did not pay that close attention to his claims (for example the precise claim of the violence encouraged) because, naturally, I had not yet read your post and it had not occurred to me that professional outsiders might play a role in instigating particular violent acts in order to discredit the event.
“I overheard one Trump supporter (who followed the rush on the Capitol himself) say aloud, “I brought many others to this rally, but we did not sign on for this” as he watched matters escalate.
“Still, from my seat, I would say that large numbers of very legitimate Trump supporters felt that it was their patriotic duty to occupy the Capitol in light of their unshakable beliefs that (1) the 2020 election was a fraud, (2) that the vast majority of the members of congress are corrupt and compromised, and (3) that the country is in the throes of what they consider a “communist” takeover (although many use the expression “communism” as a synonym for “totalitarianism”). They are also convinced that the virus narrative is a fraud and an essential part of an effort to undermine the Constitution –in particular the Bill of Rights. They have a very real fear that the country and the very conception of any culture of liberty is on the verge of an irreparable collapse. For most (if not a very large majority) rushing the Capitol was a desperate eleventh hour act of partiotism –even of the order of the revolution that created our nation. Some Trump supporters sang the Star Spangled Banner and other patriotic songs as others climbed the Capitol steps. They also demonstrated a measure of respect for the Capitol itself. I saw no attempt by anyone to deface the Capitol simply for the sake of defacing it.
“The incontrovertibly compromised press has called this event a riot. But from what I saw and heard this would indeed be a gross and intentionally misleading oversimplification at best. At least from the standpoint of supporters, if their Capitol event was a riot, then so was the Boston Tea Party. It also seems to me that some professional help (very aware of deep sentiments) might have come from somewhere to make sure that the party happened.”
It was a riot and violent and an insurrection, because that is what the Establishment wants it to be. Overstating what happened turns it into a weapon that can be used against Trump and his supporters as Acting US Attorney Michael Sherwin intends to do.
If Sherwin were to conduct a real investigation, he would probably find that the organized plan he is looking for was an Antifa plan or a plan of some Establishment group to use provocateurs to stampede rally attendees into some action that would discredit Trump and the rally. Of course, this is nothing that Sherwin wants to find.
The violent looters who rampaged through American cities have not been held accountable. Yet the US Justice Department is intent on framing people protesting what they believe was a stolen election as “insurrectionists” with a conspiracy of sedition. If Sherwin and the Establishment he serves had any judgment, they would not throw gasoline on a fire unless they want a bigger fire. It seems that a bigger fire is what they do want.
A bigger fire would help the new domestic terrorism bill that criminalizes dissent. Under this bill, those who challenge Establishment explanations could find themselves charged with terrorism. Law is what prosecutors establish it to be. What is terrorism becomes a subjective judgment and is whatever a prosecutor says it is.
There was no insurrection on January 6, which is puzzling in a way. If tens of millions of Americans believe that their democracy is threatened by a stolen election and nothing was being done about it, who would be surprised if there was an insurrection? It seems to me that everyone but the Establishment and its minons would support such an insurrection.
To charge Trump supporters for something that did not happen, while not charging Antifa for what did happen, is the best way to split the population. Why does Michael Sherwin want to splint the American population?
Israel bans ‘Jenin, Jenin’ film, orders payment of damages to Israel soldier
MEMO – January 13, 2021
The Lod District Court in Israel on Monday banned the screening of a documentary about Israel’s brutal 2002 campaign in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.
‘Jenin, Jenin’ can no longer be aired in Israel after an Israeli soldier who was depicted in the footage stealing from an elderly Palestinian filed a lawsuit against the film.
The judge said Israeli soldier Nissim Magnaji had been “sent to defend his country and found himself accused of a crime he did not commit”. The court ordered director Mohammed Bakri to pay damages to Magnaji of 175,000 shekels ($55,000) as well as 50,000 shekels ($15,936) of court expenses.
In her ruling, judge Halit Silash went on to say some of the representation in the video was untrue.
Bakri, a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, told the AFP news agency the decision was “unfair” and that the judge had acted on instructions “from above.”
“I intend to appeal the verdict because it is unfair, it is neutering my truth,” Bakri told the Walla News website.
Objecting to the court’s ruling, the chairman of the Balad faction in the Joint List party, Member of the Israeli Knesset Mtanes Shehadeh, was quoted by the Times of Israel saying: “It’s not the film that should be shelved, but the occupation and its crimes.”
The documentary shows footage and eyewitness accounts of the massacre committed by the Israeli occupation forces in the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin in 2002. At least 52 Palestinians, including women, children, and the elderly, were killed in the rampage that unfolded over a two-week period in a refugee camp, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigation.
Some 23 Israeli soldiers were killed at the time.
US Prof Faces ‘Cancellation’ For Teaching Students to Question Propaganda Amid COVID-19
© CC BY 3.0 / The Open Center
By Mohamed Elmaazi . Sputnik . 12.01.2021
Hostility to dissenting perspectives has become increasingly recorded over the past few years, but particularly since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. One apparent victim of this shrinking space for differing views is a US professor who teaches a class on propaganda in New York City.
For years, Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University, has been teaching a course on propaganda, during which he encourages students to question dominant ways of thinking being pushed by media and via the government. However, Professor Miller has recently found his post at NYU to be under threat, despite having a secured tenured position, after he was accused of discouraging students from wearing masks, a charge he vigorously denies.
In a detailed interview, Professor Miller explains to Sputnik the background of his case as well as what it represents in an age where freedom of speech and academic independence appear to be under increasing attack amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sputnik: Explain your role as a professor at NYU and the kinds of courses that you teach.
Professor Mark Crispin Miller: I’ve been teaching media studies at NYU since 1997, after 20 years at [University of Pennsylvania from 1977 to 1983] and then Johns Hopkins [until 1997]. At NYU I’ve mainly taught a course on propaganda, and a course on film, as well as “The Culture Industries”, which looks into the pressures faced by people trying to do good work in journalism, entertainment and the arts.
The courses are all quite popular with students, whose reviews are, for the most part, very positive. This fact is highly relevant to my predicament at NYU right now.
Sputnik: You’ve recently found yourself in a difficult situation after a student filed a complaint against you. Could you describe what led to this current situation?
Professor Mark Crispin Miller: In late September, a student in my propaganda course was enraged by my encouraging the class to look into the scientific basis for the mask mandates—specifically, eight randomised, controlled studies, conducted among healthcare professional over the last 15 years or so, finding that masks and respirators are ineffective against transmission of respiratory viruses; and, on the other hand, the more recent studies finding otherwise. (I offered some suggestions as to how laypersons might assess such studies: by reading scientific reviews, and by noting the universities where the latter studies were conducted, to see if they have financial ties to Big Pharma and/or the Gates Foundation). I offered this as an example of how one must study propaganda—by looking into what a given propaganda drive blacks out or misreports, reviewing all the pertinent information, and deciding for oneself what’s true, or likely to be true.
The student who flipped out did not speak up in class, but, a few days later, took the Twitter, to demand that NYU fire me, over my “excessive amount of scepticism around health professionals”, and the “harm” that I was posing to the students’ health. (I’d made quite clear, in class, that I was not telling them not to wear masks—NYU has a strict rule, which I observe myself—but that this was an intellectual exercise, of the sort essential to the study of propaganda.) She also took screen shots of several posts on my website, News from Underground (markcrispinmiller.com), and presented them as all self-evidently false, asserting that they came from “conspiracy and far right websites”.
Sputnik: How has the university dealt with the complaint? What’s the current situation now in respect of your position at the university?
Professor Mark Crispin Miller: The student (by her own account) first tried to get some satisfaction from the Office of Equal Opportunity, demanding that they take some action. They told her, rightly, that they had no grounds for doing so; so she went public—whereupon the university, or at least my corner of it, quickly took her side, in three ways.
First, my department chair immediately tweeted his thanks for her complaint, and added: “We as a department have made this a priority, and are discussing next steps”. This was news to me, since I’m a long-time member of that department, but I was not included in whatever meeting led the chair to take that step.
The next day, the dean of the Steinhardt School (in which I teach), and the doctor who advises NYU on its COVID regulations, emailed my other students—without putting me on copy—to indicate that I had given them dangerous information, and to direct them to (what the dean and doctor called) “authoritative” studies finding that masks are effective barriers to SARS-COV-2, and sternly reminding them that they must wear masks on campus (as if I’d told them not to). Again, I too had urged the class to read those further studies; but I didn’t tell them what to think. (I’d also pointed out, in class, that the CDC—the source of those links to the “authoritative” studies—had, until early April, publicly repeated the consensus of the prior studies that I had encouraged the class to read).
@nyuniversity: an MCC tenured professor spent an entire class period telling students that wearing masks doesn’t prevent the spread of COVID-19, and that hydroxychloroquine trials were made to fail so more people would be given the vaccine and have their DNA changed. thread 1/
— Julia Jackson (@julia_jacks) September 21, 2020
Finally, my chair then pressured me to cancel my propaganda course for next semester, urging that it would be better for the department if, instead, I’d teach two sections of my film course, because, he said, my film courses have high enrollments. The problem with that rationale is that my film and propaganda courses are the same size, with both of them ordinarily full up, and students wait-listed for both. Because of that, and since I’ve long taught the propaganda course at least twice a year (and think that it’s especially relevant right now), I didn’t want to do that; but I was told I had no choice, which, technically, was true.
This experience prompted me to put up a petition, in defence of academic freedom and free speech, simply urging NYU to respect my academic freedom; although I posted the petition not just on my own behalf, but in the name of all professors, journalists, scientists, doctors, activists and whistle-blowers who’ve been gagged, or punished for their dissidence on topics of all kinds, for decades, and especially this year. The petition quickly garnered many signatures from people all over the world (to date, it has been signed by over 27,000 people), including many eminent figures, including Seymour Hersh, James K. Galbraith, Sharyl Attkisson, Rashid Khalidi (Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University), Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Oliver Stone, and Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng; and it also drew a public statement of support from Ralph Nader.
Then the drive against me escalated.
Calling the petition “an attack on the department”, a large group of my colleagues sent a letter to the dean, demanding “an expedited review” of my “conduct”, on the grounds not only of my heresy on masks (claiming that I had discouraged their use, and “intimidated” students who wore them), but, primarily, because of my history of abusiveness and lunacy in the classroom (and beyond). They charged me with “explicit hate speech”, “attacks on students and others in our community”, “advocating for an unsafe learning environment”, “aggressions and microaggressions”, and other crimes. Although the letter is completely false on every point it makes, the dean—prompted by NYU’s lawyers—went right ahead and ordered that “review”, which is, as of today, ongoing (although it was supposed to end with last semester).
I sent my colleagues a point-by-point rebuttal, asking for a retraction and apology. They ignored that request, and my follow-up email; so I decided that I had no choice but to sue them for libel, as their letter makes quite clear that their intention is to nullify my academic freedom, presumably so as to get me fired (just as that student had demanded). There’s a GoFundMe page soliciting donations, to help me pay for this legal effort.
Sputnik: Have your other students been at all supportive of you?
Professor Mark Crispin Miller: Yes. In response to my colleagues’ letter, and the dean’s review, many students, current and former, as well as visitors to my classes over the years, have sent strong statements of support to the dean’s office, pointedly rebutting my colleagues’ preposterous charges. Over 50 such statements have so far come in, attesting to my tolerance, open-mindedness and—above all—effectiveness as a professor, and the importance of my propaganda classes in particular. That outpouring is the only upside to this dismal situation.
Sputnik: To what extent is your situation unique and to what extent does it represent a broader culture of censorship or intimidation within academic institutions?
Professor Mark Crispin Miller: As the petition makes clear, my plight is only one of countless others throughout academia—and not just there. Academic freedom and free speech have actually been under slow assault for decades, as many urgent subjects have long since been declared taboo as mere “conspiracy theory”, so that any professors or journalists (or, for that matter, entertainers) who dare look into them risk their careers. Since that mode of censorship began in 1967, another, more explicit kind emerged with the ferocious appropriation of “social justice” as a means of “cancelling” dissident expression on a range of other urgent subjects, so that anyone who questions certain pieties is charged with “hate speech”. And this year has seen a third line of attack, as the COVID crisis has entailed much of the sort of outright “war-is-peace”/”2+2=5” propaganda that Orwell satirised in Nineteen Eighty-Four, with bald lies on every aspect of the crisis pumped out by “authoritative” health officials, and the media, always in the name of “science”.
And so the truth on many subjects, and those trying to express it, or even study it, are under fierce assault on one or more of those three grounds; and I see myself as under fire on all three bases. My colleagues charge that I make “non-evidence-based” assertions in my classes (a striking accusation, in a letter whose every claim is based, demonstrably, on no evidence whatsoever); assert that I engage in “explicit hate speech” (which I’ve never done, in class or anywhere else); and cast me as a risk to public health, for urging students to look into the scientific basis for the mask mandates, then make up their own minds.
This assault, I think, makes my case an important flashpoint in the larger struggle—now a global struggle—for academic freedom and free speech, at a time when both are under existential threat. I therefore hope that people will continue to support me, as well as others in my situation, in any way they can.
How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler
In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.
By Glenn Greenwald | January 12, 2021
Critics of Silicon Valley censorship for years heard the same refrain: tech platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter are private corporations and can host or ban whoever they want. If you don’t like what they are doing, the solution is not to complain or to regulate them. Instead, go create your own social media platform that operates the way you think it should.
The founders of Parler heard that suggestion and tried. In August, 2018, they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. They also promised far greater free speech rights, rejecting the increasingly repressive content policing of Silicon Valley giants.
Over the last year, Parler encountered immense success. Millions of people who objected to increasing repression of speech on the largest platforms or who had themselves been banned signed up for the new social media company.
As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months — banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family, denouncing and deleting multiple posts from the U.S. President and then terminating his access altogether, mass-removal of right-wing accounts — so many people migrated to Parler that it was catapulted to the number one spot on the list of most-downloaded apps on the Apple Play Store, the sole and exclusive means which iPhone users have to download apps. “Overall, the app was the 10th most downloaded social media app in 2020 with 8.1 million new installs,” reported TechCrunch.
It looked as if Parler had proven critics of Silicon Valley monopolistic power wrong. Their success showed that it was possible after all to create a new social media platform to compete with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And they did so by doing exactly what Silicon Valley defenders long insisted should be done: if you don’t like the rules imposed by tech giants, go create your own platform with different rules.
But today, if you want to download, sign up for, or use Parler, you will be unable to do so. That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country.
If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.
The united Silicon Valley attack began on January 8, when Apple emailed Parler and gave them 24 hours to prove they had changed their moderation practices or else face removal from their App Store. The letter claimed: “We have received numerous complaints regarding objectionable content in your Parler service, accusations that the Parler app was used to plan, coordinate, and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 that led (among other things) to loss of life, numerous injuries, and the destruction of property.” It ended with this warning:
To ensure there is no interruption of the availability of your app on the App Store, please submit an update and the requested moderation improvement plan within 24 hours of the date of this message. If we do not receive an update compliant with the App Store Review Guidelines and the requested moderation improvement plan in writing within 24 hours, your app will be removed from the App Store.
The 24-hour letter was an obvious pretext and purely performative. Removal was a fait accompli no matter what Parler did. To begin with, the letter was immediately leaked to Buzzfeed, which published it in full. A Parler executive detailed the company’s unsuccessful attempts to communicate with Apple. “They basically ghosted us,” he told me. The next day, Apple notified Parler of its removal from App Store. “We won’t distribute apps that present dangerous and harmful content,” said the world’s richest company, and thus: “We have now rejected your app for the App Store.”
It is hard to overstate the harm to a platform from being removed from the App Store. Users of iPhones are barred from downloading apps onto their devices from the internet. If an app is not on the App Store, it cannot be used on the iPhone. Even iPhone users who have already downloaded Parler will lose the ability to receive updates, which will shortly render the platform both unmanageable and unsafe.
In October, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law issued a 425-page report concluding that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all possess monopoly power and are using that power anti-competitively. For Apple, they emphasized the company’s control over iPhones through its control of access to the App Store. As Ars Technica put it when highlighting the report’s key findings:
Apple controls about 45 percent of the US smartphone market and 20 percent of the global smartphone market, the committee found, and is projected to sell its 2 billionth iPhone in 2021. It is correct that, in the smartphone handset market, Apple is not a monopoly. Instead, iOS and Android hold an effective duopoly in mobile operating systems.
However, the report concludes, Apple does have a monopolistic hold over what you can do with an iPhone. You can only put apps on your phone through the Apple App Store, and Apple has total gatekeeper control over that App Store—that’s what Epic is suing the company over. . . .
The committee found internal documents showing that company leadership, including former CEO Steve Jobs, “acknowledged that IAP requirement would stifle competition and limit the apps available to Apple’s customers.” The report concludes that Apple has also unfairly used its control over APIs, search rankings, and default apps to limit competitors’ access to iPhone users.
Shortly thereafter, Parler learned that Google, without warning, had also “suspended” it from its Play Store, severely limiting the ability of users to download Parler onto Android phones. Google’s actions also meant that those using Parler on their Android phones would no longer receive necessary functionality and security updates.
It was precisely Google’s abuse of its power to control its app device that was at issue “when the European Commission deemed Google LLC as the dominant undertaking in the app stores for the Android mobile operating system (i.e. Google Play Store) and hit the online search and advertisement giant with €4.34 billion for its anti-competitive practices to strengthen its position in various of other markets through its dominance in the app store market.”
The day after a united Apple and Google acted against Parler, Amazon delivered the fatal blow. The company founded and run by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, used virtually identical language as Apple to inform Parler that its web hosting service (AWS) was terminating Parler’s ability to have AWS host its site: “Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST.” Because Amazon is such a dominant force in web hosting, Parler has thus far not found a hosting service for its platform, which is why it has disappeared not only from app stores and phones but also from the internet.
On Thursday, Parler was the most popular app in the United States. By Monday, three of the four Silicon Valley monopolies united to destroy it.
With virtual unanimity, leading U.S. liberals celebrated this use of Silicon Valley monopoly power to shut down Parler, just as they overwhelmingly cheered the prior two extraordinary assertions of tech power to control U.S. political discourse: censorship of The New York Post’s reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the banning of the U.S. President from major platforms. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find a single national liberal-left politician even expressing concerns about any of this, let alone opposing it.
Not only did leading left-wing politicians not object but some of them were the ones who pleaded with Silicon Valley to use their power this way. After the internet-policing site Sleeping Giants flagged several Parler posts that called for violence, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked: “What are @Apple and @GooglePlay doing about this?” Once Apple responded by removing Parler from its App Store — a move that House Democrats just three months earlier warned was dangerous anti-trust behavior — she praised Apple and then demanded to know: “Good to see this development from @Apple. @GooglePlay what are you going to do about apps being used to organize violence on your platform?”
The liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg pronounced herself “disturbed by just how awesome [tech giants’] power is” and added that “it’s dangerous to have a handful of callow young tech titans in charge of who has a megaphone and who does not.” She nonetheless praised these “young tech titans” for using their “dangerous” power to ban Trump and destroy Parler. In other words, liberals like Goldberg are concerned only that Silicon Valley censorship powers might one day be used against people like them, but are perfectly happy as long as it is their adversaries being deplatformed and silenced (Facebook and other platforms have for years banned marginalized people like Palestinians at Israel’s behest, but that is of no concern to U.S. liberals).
That is because the dominant strain of American liberalism is not economic socialism but political authoritarianism. Liberals now want to use the force of corporate power to silence those with different ideologies. They are eager for tech monopolies not just to ban accounts they dislike but to remove entire platforms from the internet. They want to imprison people they believe helped their party lose elections, such as Julian Assange, even if it means creating precedents to criminalize journalism.
World leaders have vocally condemned the power Silicon Valley has amassed to police political discourse, and were particularly indignant over the banning of the U.S. President. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, various French ministers, and especially Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador all denounced the banning of Trump and other acts of censorship by tech monopolies on the ground that they were anointing themselves “a world media power.” The warnings from López Obrador were particularly eloquent:
Even the ACLU — which has rapidly transformed from a civil liberties organization into a liberal activist group since Trump’s election — found the assertion of Silicon Valley’s power to destroy Parler deeply alarming. One of that organization’s most stalwart defenders of civil liberties, lawyer Ben Wizner, told The New York Times that the destruction of Parler was more “troubling” than the deletion of posts or whole accounts: “I think we should recognize the importance of neutrality when we’re talking about the infrastructure of the internet.”
Yet American liberals swoon for this authoritarianism. And they are now calling for the use of the most repressive War on Terror measures against their domestic opponents. On Tuesday, House Homeland Security Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) urged that GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley “be put on the no-fly list,” while The Wall Street Journal reported that “Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.”
So much of this liberal support for the attempted destruction of Parler is based in utter ignorance about that platform, and about basic principles of free speech. I’d be very surprised if more than a tiny fraction of liberals cheering Parler’s removal from the internet have ever used the platform or know anything about it other than the snippets they have been shown by those seeking to justify its destruction and to depict it as some neo-Nazi stronghold.
Parler was not founded, nor is it run, by pro-Trump, MAGA supporters. The platform was created based in libertarian values of privacy, anti-surveillance, anti-data collection, and free speech. Most of the key executives are more associated with the politics of Ron Paul and the CATO Institute than Steve Bannon or the Trump family. One is a Never Trump Republican, while another is the former campaign manager of Ron Paul and Rand Paul. Among the few MAGA-affiliated figures is Dan Bongino, an investor. One of the key original investors was Rebekah Mercer.
The platform’s design is intended to foster privacy and free speech, not a particular ideology. They minimize the amount of data they collect on users to prevent advertiser monetization or algorithmic targeting. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, they do not assess a user’s preferences in order to decide what they should see. And they were principally borne out of a reaction to increasingly restrictive rules on the major Silicon Valley platforms regarding what could and could not be said.
Of course large numbers of Trump supporters ended up on Parler. That’s not because Parler is a pro-Trump outlet, but because those are among the people who were censored by the tech monopolies or who were angered enough by that censorship to seek refuge elsewhere.
It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate violence or are otherwise grotesque. But that is even more true of Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter. And contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley platform.
Indeed, a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler. The Capitol breach was planned far more on Facebook and YouTube. As Recode reported, while some protesters participated in both Parler and Gab, many of the calls to attend the Capitol were from YouTube videos, while many of the key planners “have continued to use mainstream platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.” The article quoted Fadi Quran, campaign director at the human rights group Avaaz, as saying: “In DC, we saw QAnon conspiracists and other militias that would never have grown to this size without being turbo-charged by Facebook and Twitter.”
And that’s to say nothing of the endless number of hypocrisies with Silicon Valley giants feigning opposition to violent rhetoric or political extremism. Amazon, for instance, is one of the CIA’s most profitable partners, with a $600 million contract to provide services to the agency, and it is constantly bidding for more. On Facebook and Twitter, one finds official accounts from the most repressive and violent regimes on earth, including Saudi Arabia, and pages devoted to propaganda on behalf of the Egyptian regime. Does anyone think these tech giants have a genuine concern about violence and extremism?
So why did Democratic politicians and journalists focus on Parler rather than Facebook and YouTube? Why did Amazon, Google and Apple make a flamboyant showing of removing Parler from the internet while leaving much larger platforms with far more extremism and advocacy of violence flowing on a daily basis?
In part it is because these Silicon Valley giants — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple — donate enormous sums of money to the Democratic Party and their leaders, so of course Democrats will cheer them rather than call for punishment or their removal from the internet. Part of it is because Parler is an upstart, a much easier target to try to destroy than Facebook or Google. And in part it is because the Democrats are about to control the Executive Branch and both houses of Congress, leaving Silicon Valley giants eager to please them by silencing their adversaries. This corrupt motive was made expressly clear by long-time Clinton operative Jennifer Palmieri:
The nature of monopolistic power is that anti-competitive entities engage in anti-trust illegalities to destroy rising competitors. Parler is associated with the wrong political ideology. It is a small and new enough platform such that it can be made an example of. Its head can be placed on a pike to make clear that no attempt to compete with existing Silicon Valley monopolies is possible. And its destruction preserves the unchallengeable power of a tiny handful of tech oligarchs over the political discourse not just of the United States but democracies worldwide (which is why Germany, France and Mexico are raising their voices in protest).
No authoritarians believe they are authoritarians. No matter how repressive are the measures they support — censorship, monopoly power, no-fly lists for American citizens without due process — they tell themselves that those they are silencing and attacking are so evil, are terrorists, that anything done against them is noble and benevolent, not despotic and repressive. That is how American liberals currently think, as they fortify the control of Silicon Valley monopolies over our political lives, exemplified by the overnight destruction of a new and popular competitor.
Former US representative Ron Paul locked out of Facebook for undisclosed reasons
RT | January 11, 2021
Former US representative Ron Paul has been mysteriously locked out of his Facebook page and accused of “repeatedly going against our Community Standards.” The platform didn’t explain which content on Paul’s page flipped the switch.
Paul tweeted a screenshot of his official Facebook page on Monday sporting a “You Have Limited Page Functionality” warning screen notifying him that he was “temporarily blocked” from “creating new Pages and managing our existing Pages.”
While the warning implied the former Texas senator had “repeatedly [gone] against our Community Standards,” Paul insisted he had never before been given even a notice of violating community standards, let alone a strike or other official reprimand.
The post that supposedly triggered Facebook’s discipline was not displayed, nor was Paul given any further hints as to what he supposedly did to provoke the wrath of the social media behemoth. Instead, he was only given a link to “review our Community Standards to see what’s a violation.” Facebook’s Community Standards has exploded in size over the past few years as the platform scrambles to root out political wrongthink.
Many on social media saw the move as an ominous hint of censorship to come. While Paul’s page was not deleted, it is one of thousands that have been purged or locked since November’s election, a mass disappearance Twitter has eagerly engaged in as well.
Paul’s podcast, the Ron Paul Liberty Report, was censored on YouTube in September, given a “warning” that the video violated “community guidelines” on “spam, deceptive practices, and scams.” Upon further investigation, Paul’s cohost Daniel McAdams discovered the episode had committed the (Youtube-defined) cardinal sin of disagreeing with the World Health Organization’s guidelines on Covid-19. While the WHO itself has changed guidance on the pandemic several times, ordinary users are not permitted to “dispute the efficacy of the WHO or local health authorities’ recommended guidance on social distancing and self isolation.”
McAdams himself, who served as Paul’s foreign affairs advisor during his time in the US congress, was banned from Twitter in November 2019 after trading barbs with FoxNews’ Sean Hannity. The conservative pundit had recorded an hour-long segment railing against the so-called Deep State – President Trump’s term for the swamp-dwelling unelected intelligence agents and other powerful figures – while wearing a CIA pin, a glaring oversight that led McAdams to call Hannity “retarded.”
Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other social media platforms rushed to silence President Donald Trump last week after a horde of his supporters entered the Capitol, supposedly egged on by the president. The resulting chaos saw five people die, one shot by police and three due to unexplained medical emergencies. A police officer was also killed in the melee.
French Government “Shocked” at Twitter Banning of Trump
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | January 11, 2021
The French government has echoed Angela Merkel’s sentiment in saying it is “shocked” at Twitter’s banning of President Trump, asserting that Big Tech is a threat to democracy.
Junior Minister for European Union Affairs Clement Beaune said the decision to silence Trump proved the need for Big Tech platforms to be tightly regulated.
“This should be decided by citizens, not by a CEO,” he told Bloomberg TV on Monday. “There needs to be public regulation of big online platforms.”
Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire also said that “the digital oligarchy” was “one of the threats” to democracy and should be reigned in by the state.
As we highlighted earlier, the German government also warned that Big Tech’s deplatforming of Trump set a very dangerous precedent.
Communicating via a spokesman, Chancellor Angela Merkel called the move “problematic,” adding that social media giants shouldn’t have the power to decide who has the right to free speech.
“This fundamental right can be intervened in, but according to the law and within the framework defined by legislators — not according to a decision by the management of social media platforms,” said the statement.
While Republicans were completely toothless in their efforts to control Big Tech during Trump’s administration, Poland could be set to pass a law that would fine social media companies $2.2 million a pop for censoring lawful free speech.
“In the event of removal or blockage, a complaint can be sent to the platform, which will have 24 hours to consider it. Within 48 hours of the decision, the user will be able to file a petition to the court for the return of access. The court will consider complaints within seven days of receipt and the entire process is to be electronic,” reported Poland In.
Tech guru Durov warns Apple & Google pose threat to freedom, as Russian Senator says Trump Twitter ban a challenge to sovereignty
RT | January 11, 2021
The move by US Tech companies to censor US President Donald Trump has raised concern in Russia, with politicians and IT industry figures expressing concerns about it, and about its potential implications for political freedoms.
Alexey Pushkov, a prominent Senator and Chairman of the Federation Council on Information Policy and Media Relations warned on Sunday that the “diktat of internet giants” set a dangerous precedent. In a message posted to his official Telegram channel, the politician added that Moscow would “draw serious conclusions from the blocking of Trump by US social network conglomerates. Almost totally depending on foreign internet platforms is incompatible with the sovereignty of the country,” he argued.
However, the founder of the Russian-created Telegram messaging service, Pavel Durov, has now warned that “the Apple-Google duopoly poses a much bigger problem for freedoms than Twitter.” Of the two, he said, Silicon Valley stalwart Apple, worth more than $1.3 trillion, was the most worrying.
This, he suggests, is “because it can completely restrict which apps you use.” Over the weekend, the tech giant announced it would ban social media service Parler from its iOS store over apparent breaches to its guidelines. Telegram, which says it prioritizes the right to free speech more than its rivals, has become popular with Trump and his supporters since the president was indefinitely suspended from Twitter and Facebook. Telegram’s Durov added that his company was working on a web-based app as a contingency, should it become the next target of an App Store ban.
The Telegram founder, who first made his name with Russia’s top social network VK, also urged smartphone users to make the switch to the Android operating system, where users have more control over what they can install and use. This, he said, is “the least they can do to retain access to a free flow of information.”
In November, Russia’s media watchdog warned Google, and its subsidiary YouTube, over perceived censorship of content from the country’s media organizations. The row was sparked by the California-based streaming service’s decision to label an RT documentary on American right-wing militias as “extremist.” Roskomnadzor, the federal communications agency, warned that “cases of the administration of the YouTube video hosting service blocking, labelling, warning, consent and other restrictions with respect to materials of Russian media and journalists have become more frequent.”
Parler goes offline as Amazon pulls the plug on the conservative social network
Donald Trump has faced a near-total removal from social media sites since facing accusations that he’d encouraged his supporters to storm Washington’s Capitol building last Wednesday. Four protesters and one police officer are said to have lost their lives in the violent scenes. While he urged the activists to “go home,” the president reiterated claims that November’s election had been rigged, and told demonstrators that “we love you. You’re very special.”
As well as his removal from Twitter and Facebook, Trump has since faced action from platforms including Instagram, Google, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Snapchat and Pinterest.
Hacker reveals massive Parler data leak: All users’ messages, location info, even driver’s licenses may have been exposed
RT | January 11, 2021
Recently shutdown social media app Parler is at the center of a yet another controversy, after allegations surfaced that the totality of its users’ personal data was leaked in the wake of the network going offline.
Parler, a social network popular with conservative audiences, was removed from the internet on Monday, after Amazon kicked the site off its hosting service, citing “a steady increase in this violent content” in the wake of Wednesday’s riot at the US Capitol. The decision to pull support came after Apple and Google blocked the social network from their online marketplaces over the weekend.
Shortly before Amazon’s move, a self-described hacker from Austria, going by ‘Donk Enby’ on Twitter, claimed to have gained access to all of the “unprocessed, raw” video files uploaded to Parler “with all associated metadata.” The hacker even included a link to the file library in order to prove that the data leak was real.
The development agitated the social network’s audience, especially since it occurred around the same time as Parler’s shutdown.
News of the apparent leak quickly spread online, leaving some to wonder how the hacker could have snagged the entirety of one of the network’s file libraries.
A Reddit user named ‘BlueMountainDace’ claimed to have the answer, and they posted it in the group ‘ParlerWatch,’ which appears to have been created to monitor some of the perceived extreme views of the platform’s users.
According to ‘BlueMountainDace’, it was not just the videos, but the entirety of Parler’s users’ data that was exposed.
In their viral post, the Redditor asserted that one of Parler’s hosting platforms, Twilio, accidentally exposed the app’s security authentications via a press release. This in turn could have allowed any person to create a blank administrator account and access all of Parler’s private content, which, besides message history and geo data, might have included users’ driver’s license photos, which were used to create a verified account.
Currently it is unclear which press release by Twilio might have led to the Parler data being exposed.
According to tech writer Matthew Sheffield, the breach was possible due to Parler’s long-criticized lax security standards. Specifically, Sheffield blames the potential leak on the app “never actually deleting anything its users posted,” while keeping the data accessible to administrator users.
However, Sheffield notes that it will likely “take a little while” for such amounts of data to be processed in order for it to end up in an accessible “WikiLeaks-style data dump.”
Parler and Twilio have yet to comment on the allegations.
EU Citizens Initiative calls for ban on biometric mass surveillance systems
By Katya Pivcevic | January 8, 2021
A European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI), ‘Civil society initiative for a ban on biometric mass surveillance practices,’ has been registered by the European Commission, calling for a permanent end to the disproportionate uses of biometric data in ways which can lead to mass surveillance or any undue interference with fundamental rights. Dozens of civil society groups have supported the movement.
The ECI was made part of the Lisbon Treaty in 2012, and introduced as an agenda-setting tool in the hands of citizens. An ECI allows for 1 million citizens from at least one quarter of EU Member States to invite the European Commission to propose legal acts in areas where the Commission has the power to act. Since 2012, 76 Citizens’ Initiatives have been registered.
This initiative for a ban on certain biometric applications urges the Commission to cease their development and deployment of arbitrarily-targeted biometric systems, even on a trial basis, recalling actions by EU agencies which have resulted in violations of EU data protection law. Under such law, the processing of biometric data is forbidden except where there is a “substantial public interest,” subject to strict necessity and proportionality requirements.
Should the ECI receive one million statements of support within one year from at least seven different Member States, the Commission will have to react within six months. The initiative hopes to gain transparency, protection from discrimination and respect through the Reclaim Your Face movement, which opposes biometric mass surveillance systems.
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