Ambassador Mike Huckabee Secretly Meets Top Israeli Spy Jonathan Pollard
Let’s remove both Huckabee and Israel from American foreign policy
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • November 25, 2025
Given the high visibility of the Israeli genocide being carried out in Gaza, for the first time many among the American general public are beginning to ask why a rich country like Israel should be getting billions of dollars from the United States taxpayer to pay for waging its war when many Americans are struggling. Inevitably, of course, the press coverage of the questions being asked about the cash flow and what is playing out in Gaza have failed to discuss the real magnitude of the “aid,” which goes far beyond the $3.8 billion a year that President Barack Obama committed to America’s “best friend and closest ally.” In fact, over the past two years, Washington has given Israel more than $21 billion in weapons and cash and just last week the 1,000th US transport plane filled with weapons landed in Israel. On top of all that, there are trade concessions, co-production “defense partnership” projects and dicey charitable contributions from Zionist billionaires that our federal and many state governments shower on the Jewish state, easily exceeding $10 billion in a “normal” year without Israel claiming having “greater need” as it goes about violating ceasefires and killing Gazans, Lebanese and Iranians.
The fact that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have enabled Israel’s slaughter without so much as the slightest hesitation should in itself be damnable, but the average American is fed a steady diet of propaganda favoring Israel through the devastatingly effective Jewish media control that prevails nationwide. Interestingly, however, as the American public is beginning to tire of the Israeli lies, the Israel Lobby in the US is following the orders of Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu, who has declared that his country will be fighting eight wars – seven against all of its neighbors and one to control the United States’ increasingly negative opinion of what Israel represents. As a result, laws like the Antisemitism Awareness Act are being passed to silence “freedom of speech” critics of the Jewish state and criminalize what they are saying.
During his 2016 campaign Donald Trump swore that he would be the best friend that Israel has ever had in the White House, a pledge that some viewed skeptically as Trump was also committed to bringing the troops home from “useless wars” in Asia, most of whom were in the Middle East supporting Israeli interests. More recently Trump admitted that America was in the Middle East to “protect Israel” and he has indeed proven to be the great benefactor he promised to be in responding fully to Netanyahu’s wish list. In his first term in office, Trump increased tension dramatically with Iran, moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights, and basically gave Israel the green light to do whatever it wants on the Palestinian West Bank, including getting rid of the Palestinians.
And currently as all that has already played out the Israelis have attacked and killed thousands of civilians in Gaza, Syria and the West Bank with impunity, protected by the US veto in the UN Security Council against any consequences for their actions while a subservient Congress gives Netanyahu fifty-six standing ovations and bleats that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Trump has made the United States completely complicit in Israeli war crimes and has added a few unique touches of its own to include the widely condemned assassination of the senior Iranian official Qassem Soleimani while on a peace mission in Baghdad in January 2020.
Israel more-or-less openly admits that it controls the actions of the United States in its region, Netanyahu having boasted how the US federal government is “easily moved” when it comes up against the Israeli Lobby. Nor is there any real secret to how the Lobby uses money to buy access and then exploits that access to obtain real power, which is then used to employ all the resources of the US government in support of the Jewish state. The top donor to the Democratic Party, Israeli-American Haim Saban has stated that he is a one issue guy and that issue is Israel. This single-minded focus to promote Israel’s interests at the expense of those of the United States makes the Israel Lobby the most formidable foreign policy lobby in Washington.
One of the tools used by Trump to facilitate the virtual slavery under the Israeli yoke is the appointment of passionately Zionist US Ambassadors to Israel, where they often behave as if they are there to represent Jewish interests rather that those of the United States. Trump’s first term appointment David Friedman was a personal lawyer with no diplomatic or international experience, so he inevitably endorsed with some enthusiasm every extreme proposal coming from Netanyahu, which he then went on to sell to Trump. Friedman, now retired, has a home in Jerusalem and has reportedly opted to spend much of his time in Israel.
Friedman was, however, somewhat of a gem compared to the current ambassador Mike Huckabee, an Israel-Firster Baptist preacher from Arkansas, who repeatedly expresses his love for the Jewish state and white-washes whatever it does. For what it’s worth, on October 13th, 2025, Friedman and Huckabee performed a rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s hit song Sweet Home Alabama in Jerusalem but with altered lyrics that promoted Zionism and the city of Jerusalem itself. Friedman played guitar while Huckabee played bass. Trump, of course, is similar in his overweening embrace of Israel, whether it be because he is being blackmailed, or honestly believes in what he is saying, or even because he has converted to Judaism in 2017, as some believe. In any event, the theatrical duet performance by the two Israel-loving ambassadors failed to provide any benefit to the United States of America.
The complete contempt that the Israelis and Israeli supporters in the US – to include the Ambassador Huckabee – have for other Americans and their interests has been on full display recently and it involves the most significant espionage operation that Israel has ever “run” inside the United States. Jonathan Pollard, the most damaging spy in American history, stole for Israel the keys to accessing US communications and information gathering systems, which gave the Jewish state access to all US intelligence as it was being collected. He was Jewish and a US citizen, his father a professor at Notre Dame University. As a student at Stanford, where he completed a degree in 1976, Pollard’s penchant for dissimulation was already noted by other students. He is remembered for having boasted that he was a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, claiming to have worked for Mossad, to having attained the rank of Colonel in the Israel Defense Forces (even sending himself a telegram addressed to “Colonel Pollard”), and to having killed an Arab while on guard duty at a kibbutz. All the claims were lies.
Physically Pollard was also unappealing, overweight and balding, seemingly an unlikely candidate to become a US Navy intelligence analyst which he accomplished after having failed a polygraph test when trying to join CIA. One review board determined that he had been hired in the first place under pressure from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). According to an intelligence agency after-the fact-damage assessment “Pollard’s operation has few parallels among known US espionage cases… his first and possibly largest delivery occurred on 23 January [1984] and consisted of five suitcases-full of classified material.”
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger wrote a forty-six page review of the Pollard case that remains largely classified and redacted to this day, detailing what incredible damage Pollard had done. Part of the document states: “In this case, the defendant has admitted passing to his Israeli contacts an incredibly large quantity of classified information. At the outset I must state that the defendant’s disclosures far exceed the limits of any official exchange of intelligence information with Israel. That being the case, the damage to national security was complete the moment the classified information was given over. Ideally, I would detail… all the information passed by the defendant to his Israeli contacts: unfortunately, the volume of data we know to have been passed is too great to permit that. Moreover, the defendant admits to having passed to his Israeli handlers a quantity of documents great enough to occupy a space six feet by ten feet… The defendant has substantially harmed the United States, and in my view, his crimes demand severe punishment… My foregoing comments will, I hope, dispel any presumption that disclosures to an ally are insignificant; to the contrary, substantial and irrevocable damage has been done to this nation. Punishment, of course, must be appropriate to the crime, and in my opinion, no crime is more deserving of severe punishment than conducting espionage activities against one’s own country.”
Pollard was detected and arrested in 1985, convicted in 1987, and imprisoned. The case sent shockwaves through both Washington and Tel Aviv at the time of the conviction. Pollard pled guilty, confessing to selling the thousands of pages of secret documents to the Israelis for cash, vacations to Europe, and promised future payments to be wired to a Swiss bank account. A federal judge correctly dismissed pleas for clemency.
In 2015 Pollard was released from prison under parole which required him to remain in the United States. But in January 2021 Pollard was released from the parole conditions and was allowed to fly “home,” meeting Netanyahu as he disembarked from a private plane that had departed from Newark New Jersey before being given a hero’s welcome. The Pollard trip to his “home” occurred because Donald Trump had obligingly lifted the travel restrictions on him the week before, one more favor to Israel. At the airport, Pollard and his wife knelt to kiss the Israeli soil before Netanyahu handed him an Israeli citizen ID and welcomed him. The 737 luxury-fitted executive jet Pollard and his wife flew on belonged to Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, then the chief donor to the Republicans and to Donald Trump. Adelson was married to an Israeli, Miriam Adelson, who now survives him and continues the donations to the Republicans. Sheldon famously once said that he regretted having worn a US Army uniform when he was drafted in World War 2, much preferring instead that he might have done military service in the Israel Defense Forces.
But the Pollard story does not end there. In July Jonathan Pollard was a guest at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, where he met with Ambassador Mike Huckabee. The meeting was his first with US officials since his release and immigration to Israel. It was a break with precedent and the move by Huckabee, even all these years after the crime, still alarmed American intelligence officials even though, as it was Israel, media coverage in the US was minimal. John Kiriakou, a former CIA counter-terrorism officer, has argued that Pollard should have been detained by the Marine guards at the American Embassy in Jerusalem and should not have been allowed to meet with the ambassador. “[Pollard] has called for Jewish Americans who have security clearances… to begin spying for Israel, just like he did… So for him to be welcomed into the American Embassy is a bridge too far. If anything, he should have been snatched when he entered the American embassy.”
The Trump administration was apparently not consulted regarding the planned get-together. “The White House was not aware of that meeting,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt claimed. It was reportedly left off the public schedule of the ambassador, suggesting at a minimum that it was a terrible decision by Huckabee acting on his own which he made some attempt to conceal. And yet, when the story broke the Trump administration still condoned the actions of the ambassador, who reportedly had a friendly chat with the spy who had done the most grave damage ever to the United States. “The president stands by our ambassador, Mike Huckabee,” Leavitt added, “and all that he’s doing for the United States and Israel.” She did not elaborate on what he has been doing for the United States.
After the story broke, Pollard accused “anti-Israel and isolationist elements within the US government of leaking that he met off-the-books with US Ambassador Huckabee in a bid to discredit and oust the pro-Israel envoy.” He claimed that “the New York Times story was part, or is part, of an effort to discredit the ambassador and have him removed. I think the people behind this are anti-Israel elements within the Trump administration, the neo-isolationists… and others, perhaps pro-Saudi, pro-Qatari elements within the administration that would like to see a person like Ambassador Huckabee sent home.” Pollard later gave an interview in which he named Steven Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner as likely culprits “representing Saudi and Qatari rather than US interests” in brokering the Gaza ceasefire, and he added that he “despises them” for daring to “carry on with terrorists.” Pollard added his view that the 20-point ceasefire plan, leaving the door open to the possibility for Palestinian statehood, threatens Israel’s security and “undermines our independence,” and the October 9th truce-hostage deal that is based on that plan would have been worthwhile only had Israel “unleashed… hell on Hamas” following the October 13th release of the last 20 living hostages from Gaza.
Pollard described his meeting with Huckabee as “personal” and “friendly” and confirmed that it was his first meeting with a US government official after his release by Trump from travel restrictions. He concluded that “A lot of people seem to think that I harbor an anger toward the United States, which I don’t. There were specific people that lied about me, that lied about Israel, that tried to use me as a weapon to undermine the US-Israel special relationship, and those are the people I have problems with but certainly people like Ambassador Huckabee, and others, I have absolutely no problem talking to. If I could guess, I would say it’s that community, particularly the CIA station in the embassy, that probably was the one that initiated this whole effort to discredit the ambassador.”
Pollard clearly is promoting a false narrative that makes himself look like some kind of honorable and valiant defender of Israel when in reality he did what he did for the most base of reasons, i.e. for money. Money is indeed how the Israeli boosters in the United States have been able to flat out corrupt America’s political process to attain the dominance that has enabled them to promote the Israeli agenda. They have bought or intimidated every politician that matters to include presidents, congressmen and even those in state and local governments. Anyone who criticizes Israel or Jewish collective behavior in support of the Israeli state is subject to character assassination and blacklisting a la Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tom Massie. Those who persist are denounced as anti-Semites, a label that is used liberally by Zionist groups. Now Pollard is portraying himself as some kind of Israeli hero. The end result is that when Israel kills civilians in violation of a ceasefire in Gaza and is allowing rampaging armed settlers to destroy Palestinian livelihoods the United States government chooses to look the other way and instead showers the rogue state with money so it can continue to do its dirty work. Providing that political cover for Israel is in part the real dark side of Huckabee’s job as he sees it, not to engage over real American interests.
And then there are the hot buttons a-la the lies about Israel being advanced by Pollard and his ilk which, if the US actually had a functional government that is responsive to the people, should have been pushed long ago. “Best friend” Israel is ranked by the FBI as the number one “friendly” country in terms of its spying against the United States. Pollard is an exception who was actually punished since his crime was so dramatic and damaging, but Israeli spies are routinely slapped on the wrist when caught and never face prosecution for that crime, as one might note in the current “investigation” of Jeffrey Epstein, which was undoubtedly a major MOSSAD intelligence operation.
And there are also the MOSSAD agents who were the “Dancing Shlomos,” celebrating while the twin towers went down on 9/11, who were allowed to go home and various assassinations including JFK and even Charlie Kirk that have an Israeli back story. And Israel has never truly paid any price for the horrific bombing and torpedoing of the USS Liberty fifty-eight years ago, which killed 34 Americans and injured over one hundred and seventy more. The completely unprovoked attack took place in international waters and was later covered-up by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Congress. May they burn in hell. The few remaining surviving crew members are still waiting for justice.
Good riddance to scum like Jonathan Pollard and the Israel-Firsters who enable him. It is reported in Israel that Pollard is now preparing to run for the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, which explains his demeanor and phony narrative. It also all means that it is past time to get rid of folks like Ambassador Mike Huckabee who prefer to advance Israeli interests rather than those of his own country because, he believes, God is telling him to do so. More generally speaking, it is well past time to get rid of the special relationship with Israel, sanctified in the halls of Congress and by a Jewish dominated media, which does nothing good for the United States and for the American people. Israel’s constant interference in the US political system and economy comes at a huge cost, both in dollars and in terms of actual American interests.
So, let’s all resolve for 2026 to do whatever we can to pull the plug on Israel. Let Israel, which is now seeking a 20 year commitment of even more cash annually from the US taxpayer, pay its own bills and take care of its own defense. American citizens who prefer the Jewish ethno-religious state to our constitutional republic should feel free to emigrate. In fact, they should be encouraged to leave. Lacking Washington’s backing, Israel will also be free to commit atrocities and war crimes against all of its neighbors but without the US United Nations veto it will have to begin facing the consequences for its actions. But most of all, as Americans, we will no longer have to continue to carry the burden of a country that manipulates and uses us and also has a certain contempt for us while doing so, witness how Trump’s kid-glove handling of Jonathan Pollard has played out. And maybe just maybe freeing the United States from Israel could lead to an end to all the wars in the Middle East that Washington has been waging in spite of the fact that we Americans are threatened by no one in the region and have no real interest whatsoever in prolonging the agony of staying engaged there.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
The GRANITE ACT: Wyoming Bill Targets Foreign Censors With $10M Penalties
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | November 24, 2025
The first cannon shot in a new kind of free speech war came not from Washington or Silicon Valley, but from Cheyenne. Wyoming Representative Daniel Singh last week filed the Wyoming GRANITE Act.
The “Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny & Extortion Act,” passed, would make Wyoming the first state to let American citizens sue foreign governments that try to police what they say online.
The bill traces back to a blog post by attorney Preston Byrne, the same lawyer representing 4chan and Kiwi Farms in their battles against censorship-driven British regulators.
Byrne’s idea was simple: if the UK’s Ofcom or Brazil’s Alexandre de Moraes wanted to fine or threaten Americans over online speech, the US should hit back hard.
Exactly one month after that idea appeared on his blog, it’s now inked into Wyoming legislative paperwork.
Byrne said:
“This bill has a long way to go until it becomes a law, it’s got to make it through legislative services, then to Committee, and then get introduced on the floor for a vote, but the important thing is, the journey of this concept, the idea of a foreign censorship shield law which also creates a civil cause of action against foreign censors, into law has begun.”
That “journey” may be the kind of slow procedural trudge that usually kills most ideas in committee, but the intent here is anything but mild, and, with the growing threat of censorship demands from the UK, Brazil, Europe, and Australia, there is a lot of momentum here to fight back.
“For the first time, state legislators are moving to implement rules that will allow U.S. citizens to strike back, hard, against foreign countries that want to interfere with Americans’ civil rights online,” Byrne continued.
The Act would let American citizens and companies sue foreign governments or their agents for trying to censor them, and, crucially, it strips away the usual escape hatch of sovereign immunity.
In its legal filing responding to the 4chan and KiwiFarms lawsuit, Ofcom insisted it has “sovereign immunity” and told the court there were “substantial grounds” for throwing out the case on that basis.
The regulator’s lawyers framed Ofcom as a protected arm of the British state, immune from civil claims even when its decisions target a platform based entirely inside the United States.
Ofcom treats the idea of “sovereign immunity” as something substantial but the First Amendment as something that does not exist at all.
The GRANITE Act is a defensive maneuver against a growing global trend. “Foreign governments and their agents increasingly seek to restrict, penalize or compel disclosure concerning speech occurring wholly within the United States,” the bill warns.
Such efforts, it argues, “conflict with the constitutions of the United States and of Wyoming and chill speech by Wyoming residents and entities.”
The act’s definition section is where its true reach becomes clear. It covers “any law, regulation, judgment, order, subpoena, administrative action or demand of a foreign state that would restrict, penalize or compel disclosure concerning expression or association” that would otherwise be protected under US law.
The text is well-researched and knows all the buzzwords of tyranny, naming the categories most likely to cause friction: “foreign online safety, hate speech, misinformation, disinformation, defamation, privacy, or ‘harmful content’ laws.” It’s a catalog of the modern speech-control toolkit, all of which Wyoming now places firmly outside its borders.
Wyoming’s approach also bars its own agencies from playing along. “No state agency, officer, political subdivision, or employee thereof shall provide assistance or cooperation in collecting, enforcing or giving effect to any measure” that qualifies as foreign censorship. The phrasing borrows from the constitutional doctrine of anti-commandeering, warning that local officials won’t be drafted into enforcing foreign censorship orders.
In Byrne’s view, that legal protection has let overseas bureaucrats act like international hall monitors, wagging fingers at Americans through threats of fines or content bans.
Byrne didn’t mince words about what he thinks this law could mean:
“If we get corresponding federal action, this law, and laws like it, could represent the single greatest victory for global free speech in thirty years.”
The teeth of the bill lie in its damages. The minimum penalty: ten million dollars. It matches the scale of fines already threatened by the UK and others, which have been dangling penalties of $25 million or 10 percent of global revenue for non-compliance.
The math, as he puts it, is simple. A country can censor an American, but that choice now comes with a very real price tag.
“Foreign countries can bully the shit out of American citizens and companies because they know that US law potentially protects them from consequences for doing so. We should take that immunity away from them.”
Byrne’s theory is that once the threat of US civil suits hangs over foreign regulators, the entire global “censorship-industrial apparatus” starts to wobble.
Byrne notes that the GRANITE Act would also relieve the White House from having to deal with diplomatic flare-ups over censorship complaints.
Trial lawyers would take over that job, freeing the president to “move on to other, more important matters.”
If the Act becomes law, the power to fight foreign censorship wouldn’t rest with federal agencies but with American citizens, state courts, and civil litigators. It would empower them to fight back against foreign censors.
In the global tug-of-war over speech, Wyoming could suddenly become a frontline jurisdiction.
The Money Behind the Muzzle: Germany’s Fivefold Surge in Speech Control
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | November 24, 2025
Government spending on digital speech regulation in Germany has surged over the past decade, increasing more than five times since 2020 and totaling around €105.6 million by 2025.
The findings come from The Censorship Network: Regulation and Repression in Germany Today, a detailed investigation by Liber-net, a digital civil liberties group that monitors speech restrictions and information control initiatives across Europe.
The report describes a sprawling alliance of ministries, publicly funded “fact-checkers,” academic consortia, and non-profit groups that now work together to regulate online communication.
It started as a handful of “anti-hate” programs and has evolved into a broad state-financed system of “content controls,” supported by both domestic and foreign grants.
Liber-net’s accompanying databases and map document more than 330 organizations and over 420 separate grants, rating each on a one-to-five scale according to its level of direct censorship involvement.
Between 2020 and 2021, public funding for these initiatives tripled, and by 2023 it had doubled again.
Source: The Censorship Network: Regulation and Repression in Germany Today
The Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) has been the leading funder, responsible for more than €56 million in allocations since 2017.
Much of this money has gone to the RUBIN consortium, a research group developing artificial intelligence tools designed to identify and filter “disinformation.”
Liber-net notes that these systems, while presented as safeguards against falsehoods, also concentrate control over what qualifies as legitimate speech.
Foreign contributions have further reinforced this system. The European Union has provided roughly €30 million since 2018, including €4 million for Deutsche Welle’s Media Fit program, which counters online narratives related to the Russia-Ukraine war.
The United States government has contributed about $400,000 to fourteen German organizations during the same period. These combined investments reveal a coordinated transatlantic interest in shaping the online information landscape.
The financial expansion has been matched by a more aggressive enforcement effort within Germany.
In June 2025, police executed around 170 raids targeting individuals accused of online “hate speech.” Earlier raids reported by CBS in February focused on similar allegations.
One of the most publicized cases involved David Bendels, editor-in-chief of Deutschland Kurier, a publication affiliated with the AfD. Bendels received a seven-month suspended sentence for posting a meme on X that showed Interior Minister Nancy Faeser holding a sign reading “I hate freedom of expression.”
The legal foundation for these operations is the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which requires social media platforms to remove illegal or offensive content within strict deadlines.
Originally framed as a tool to combat extremism, the law has drawn opposition from parties across the spectrum, including the Left Party, the Free Democrats, the Greens, and the AfD.
They argue that it undermines open debate and gives private corporations excessive authority over what can be published online.
Liber-net’s research positions Germany as a key actor in Europe’s expanding structure of information control.
Liber-net concludes that Germany’s speech regulation framework has moved beyond addressing harmful content and now functions as a managed system for policing public discourse.
With significant funding, cross-border backing, and little transparency, the country’s “content control” network demonstrates how easily censorship can be institutionalized under the language of safety and social responsibility.
Settler attacks intensify as Palestinians face systematic displacement
Al Mayadeen | November 24, 2025
Abdullah Awad, speaking to the Financial Times, describes a reality Palestinians across the occupied West Bank know too well: armed Israeli settlers storming their land with the aim of driving them out. The attack on his family farm near Turmus Ayya, carried out by about 15 masked settlers, left his children screaming as the group smashed their home and equipment.
“The settlers had axelike sticks with nails attached. So, they intended to injure us badly or kill us. Thank God we were awake when they came, so we could move away a bit,” he said. The assault followed years of harassment, but Awad says the violence has intensified since the war on Gaza began: “There were many assaults. This was not the first, and won’t be the last . . . but since the start of the war [in Gaza], they have become more violent. The situation has changed.”
Escalating campaign of settler aggression
Across the West Bank, Palestinians are facing an orchestrated campaign to terrorize communities and seize land. Settlers have attacked farmers, burned property, and raided villages from the northern hills to the southern plains. Videos of settlers beating Palestinians, including one incident in which a masked settler clubbed a woman unconscious, reflect a growing sense of impunity.
Political analyst Ibrahim Dalalsha told FT the pattern is unmistakable, “The settlers are totally emboldened, and the attacks are spreading, in the north, centre and south [of the West Bank]… This time they are really going deep inside.”
Targeting the olive harvest, the backbone of Palestinian rural life
The olive harvest, which sustains thousands of Palestinian families, has become an annual target for settler groups seeking to disrupt livelihoods and claim new territory. This season, attacks have soared. Settlers have torched a mosque in Deir Istiya, burned cars and homes near Beit Lahm, and even stormed an industrial area close to Beit Lid.
According to UN OCHA figures, more than 260 settler assaults resulting in injuries or property destruction were recorded in October, the highest monthly total since monitoring began nearly two decades ago.
Israeli condemnations ring hollow as impunity deepens
Israeli leaders have issued belated statements condemning settler actions, but on the ground, Palestinians say nothing has changed. The army dismantled a single illegal outpost, an exception so rare it drew international attention, while settlers continue attacking communities without consequence.
The settlers who burned the Deir Istiya mosque left graffiti stating: “We’re not afraid of Avi Bluth.”
Their message was aimed at the Israeli general responsible for West Bank operations, a taunt conveying how little fear violent settlers have of the regime’s security forces.
Rights group Yesh Din reports that 94% of settler violence cases were closed without charges in the 18 years before the war on Gaza. Palestinian officials say the situation has only worsened, with the military frequently standing aside, or acting in coordination with settlers during attacks.
Dalalsha said, “In the past, when there were attacks, there were investigations. Palestinians viewed these as a sham. But at least there was a process. These days, we do not hear of anything.”
Forced displacement as policy
Settlement expansion, illegal under international law, has accelerated at a pace Palestinian rights groups describe as intentional and strategic. Reports indicate that since the start of the war on Gaza in 2023, 44 Palestinian communities have been forcibly pushed from their lands through settler assaults combined with military restrictions.
Yair Dvir of B’Tselem put it bluntly, “When you look at what is happening, there is an order to [the attacks] . . . It’s not just individuals and settlers. They are backed by the Israeli system. There is a very clear goal, which is to forcibly displace the Palestinians and force them into the big cities.”
Daily terror in towns under siege
In Sinjil, a town outside Ramallah, a newly built settler outpost has triggered relentless harassment for Palestinians. Mayor Moataz Tawafsha told the FT: “There is no day without an attack. They steal tractors, burn stuff that belongs to the farmers, prevent farmers from reaching their land. Every day. They never stop.”
Near Turmus Ayya, settlers have placed a metal cabin and tent on a Palestinian building left half-finished and raised an Israeli flag above it, a symbolic claim over land that locals have farmed for generations. The new presence has cut Palestinians off from hundreds of hectares of farmland, including thousands of olive trees.
The mayor, Lafi Adeeb Shalabi, says the aim is clear, “They are trying to destroy the history of Palestine . . . This land belonged to our families, to our great great-grandfathers,” he said. “And when we try to defend it, they say we are terrorists.”
A systematic drive to empty Palestinian land
Testimonies from across the West Bank point to a coordinated effort to dispossess Palestinian communities: settlers advancing deeper into Palestinian areas, soldiers restricting movement, homes and farms burned, and entire communities uprooted.
What was once seasonal harassment has evolved into a sustained campaign of displacement.
Truth about Donbass pushed out of public view – EU historian
RT | November 21, 2025
An Italian historian has spoken out after a proposed public lecture on Russophobia was censored by a local political party, due to his views on the situation in Russia’s Donbass.
The renowned anti-fascist intellectual at the University of Turin told told RT (video report) on Thursday that it is essential to look beyond a “binary” narrative that blames only Russia while casting Ukraine and the West as innocent.
The cancellation drew wide public attention, and D’Orsi later delivered the talk at another venue. Hundreds attended in person, with more listening outside on speakers. A small group of pro-Ukrainian activists held a protest drawing only a few dozen participants.
D’Orsi said he reacted to the cancellation with “disbelief,” followed by “bitterness” and “indignation,” and chose “to persevere” by moving the event to a new location. “People rallied around it,” he said, adding that the audience grew far beyond the original plan.
“Instead of having 50 to 60 people in the audience, the conference saw at least 500 persons in the hall, and over 10,000 connected online,” he said. “So, this way I turned a defeat into a resounding victory.”
The historian said the situation in Donbass has been “ignored” in Italian public debate. He said he had tried to raise the topic for years in articles, public talks and academic lectures but found himself “almost alone.” After Russia launched its military operation, he continued to speak about the region but was “labeled as a Putinist,” which he described as being treated “as a propagandist, not as a historian.”
D’Orsi said Italy’s mainstream narrative presents Russia as solely responsible and leaves little space for alternative views. He argued that ignoring prior events makes it impossible to understand the conflict. He was referring to the Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014, after which the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the neighboring Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) broke away from Ukraine. Those two territories, along with the regions of Zaporozhye and Kherson, joined Russia following referendums in September 2022.
Jeffrey Epstein used Rothschild banking empire to finance Israeli cyberweapons industry
Press TV – November 19, 2025
Convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein used his close relationship with the Rothschild banking empire to channel private investments into the Israeli regime’s cyberweapons industry.
Documents released by the US House Oversight Committee in November, alongside hacked emails from former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, reveal that Epstein acted as a key intermediary, connecting the Rothschild banking dynasty with Israel’s cyberweapons sector.
The records show Epstein coordinating private investments in Israeli startups developing offensive cyber capabilities, surveillance tools, and spyware technologies.
Following Barak’s retirement from office in 2013, he recruited Pavel Gurvich, a former operative of Israel’s secretive Unit 81, to identify promising cyber ventures.
Barak relied on Gurvich for guidance on investments in offensive cyber tools, including Tor network surveillance, NSO-style cellphone hacking software, and router exploitation technologies.
Gurvich supplied detailed maps of undersea transatlantic cables and network access points, illustrating the global reach of potential operations.
Epstein then facilitated connections between Barak, Gurvich, and the Rothschild dynasty, offering logistical support, guidance on tax and investment structures, and strategic advice.
Epstein’s involvement included a $25 million contract in October 2015 between his Southern Trust Company and Barak’s spyware-linked startup Reporty Homeland Security (now Carbyne).
The agreement covered “risk analysis and the application and use of certain algorithms.”
He also organized private meetings and dinners to foster collaboration, including a January 2014 gathering in Paris with Barak, the Rothschilds, and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Emails suggest Epstein coached Barak on managing the Rothschild relationship, advising him to provide “time, attention, stable, recurring, predictable” engagement to earn trust.
Barak also proposed a donor-advised fund to channel private capital into Israeli technology, planning to allocate 4–5% of the fund to startups in telecommunications, cyberwarfare, and biotechnology.
The fund would operate through the Rothschilds’ “umbrella fund” structures, allowing tax-deductible contributions to finance early-stage military and spyware technology companies. Epstein coordinated introductions and advised Barak on securing Rothschild backing.
Furthermore, Epstein managed the logistics of Barak’s participation in the 2014 Herzliya Conference, Israel’s premier cyberwarfare summit, sponsored by the Rothschild Caesarea Foundation (RCF).
Emails show he relayed speaker lists, arranged private meetings with the Rothschilds, and guided Barak on handling inquiries from conference organizers.
Correspondence indicates Epstein remained active in the network until at least April 2017, arranging private meetings and maintaining connections between Barak, the Rothschilds, and other influential figures in Israel’s cyberwarfare industry.
Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in July 2019 and held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City.
He reportedly committed suicide by hanging in August 2019, despite prior reports that he was under suicide watch following an attempt in July of that year.
Germany Turns an X Post Into a Police Raid at Dawn
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | November 18, 2025
The story starts with a tweet that barely registered on the internet. A few hundred views, a handful of likes, and the kind of blunt libertarian framing that is common on X every hour of every day.
Yet in Germany, that tiny post triggered a 6am police raid, a forced phone handover, biometric collection, and a warning that the author was now under surveillance.
The thing to understand is that this story only makes sense once you see the sequence of events in order.
The story goes like this:
- A man in Germany, known publicly only as Damian N., posts a short comment on X, calling government-funded workers “parasites.”
- The post is tiny. At the time he was raided, it had roughly a hundred views. Even now, it has only a few hundred.
- Despite the post’s obscurity, police arrive at Damian’s home at six in the morning.
- He says they did not show him the warrant and did not leave documentation of what they seized.
- Police pressured him to unlock his phone, confiscated it, took photos, fingerprints, and other biometric data, and even requested a blood sample for DNA.
- One officer reportedly warned him to “think about what you post in the future” and said he is now “under surveillance.”
- The entire action was justified under Section 130 of the German Criminal Code, which is meant to prohibit inciting hatred against protected groups.
- Government employees are not such a group, which makes the legal theory tenuous at best.
- Damian’s lawyer says the identification procedures and possibly the raid itself were illegal.
That is the sequence. A low-visibility political insult becomes a criminal investigation involving home searches, device seizure, and biometric collection.
The thing to understand is that this is not about one man’s post. It is about a bureaucracy that treats speech as something to manage and a set of enforcement structures that expand to fill the space they are given.
Start with the enforcement context. Germany has built a sprawling ecosystem around “online hate”: specialized prosecutor units, NGO tip lines, and automated scanning for taboo keywords.
The model is compliance first and legal theory second.
Once you create an apparatus like this, it behaves the way bureaucracies behave. It looks for work. It justifies resources by producing cases. A tiny X post with inflammatory language becomes a target because it contains the right keyword, not because it has societal impact.
Police behavior fits the same pattern. Confiscating phones is strategically useful because it imposes real pain without requiring a conviction.
Even prosecutors have said that losing a smartphone is often worse than the fine.
Early-morning raids create psychological pressure. Collecting biometrics raises the stakes further. None of this is about public safety. It is about creating friction for saying the wrong thing.
The legal mismatch is the tell. Section 130 protects groups defined by national, racial, religious, or ethnic identity.
There is also the privacy angle, which becomes impossible to ignore. Device access, biometrics, DNA requests: these are investigative tools built for serious crimes.
Deploying them against minor online speech means the line between public-safety policing and opinion policing has already been crossed. Once a state normalizes surveillance as a response to expression, the hard part becomes restoring restraint.
It is a deterrence strategy, not a justice strategy. And it reinforces why free speech and strong privacy protections matter. Without them, minor speech becomes an invitation for major intrusion.
The counterintuitive part is that the smallness of the post makes a raid more likely, not less.
High-profile content generates scrutiny and political costs. Low-profile content discovered through automated or NGO-driven monitoring is frictionless to act on. Unless people are reading Reclaim The Net, most people never hear of these smaller cases.
Looking ahead, the pressure will only increase. As more speech moves to global platforms that are harder to influence, local governments will lean more heavily on domestic law enforcement as their lever of control.
That means more investigations that hinge on broad interpretations of old statutes and more friction between individual rights and bureaucratic incentives.
This is particularly true in Germany and places like the UK, where the government doesn’t seem to feel any shame about raiding its citizens over online posts.
Swiss probe links Ali Abunimah detention to Israeli political pressure
Al Mayadeen | November 17, 2025
A Swiss parliamentary investigation has revealed that the detention and expulsion of Palestinian-US journalist Ali Abunimah in January were the result of political interference and undisclosed ties between senior Swiss officials and Israeli interests. The findings have raised alarms about institutional bias and shrinking space for Palestine advocacy in Europe.
The Control Commission of the Council of States released its report last week, confirming that Nicoletta della Valle, then-head of Switzerland’s federal police agency (Fedpol), personally intervened to impose an entry ban against Abunimah. The decision, investigators found, “deviated from standard practice” and was implemented in a manner they described as “unsatisfactory” and “particularly problematic.”
Abunimah, the executive director and co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, had entered Switzerland legally and was scheduled to speak at a public event before being detained without warning by plainclothes officers. He was held incommunicado for three days and deported without due process.
Della Valle’s ties to Israeli interests raise conflict concerns
The report detailed how Zurich police initially requested a ban before Abunimah’s arrival. Fedpol rejected the request after consulting intelligence and immigration agencies. However, following a phone call from the commander of Zurich’s cantonal police, della Valle reversed that decision, without new evidence, and verbally instructed her staff to enforce the ban after Abunimah had already entered the country.
Critics have pointed to Della Valle’s post-retirement role at Champel Capital, an Israeli investment firm with ties to high-ranking Israeli officials, including Major General Giora Eiland and politician Amir Weitmann. Both men are known for advocating extreme measures against Gaza and its population. Della Valle’s name has since been quietly removed from the firm’s website.
Abunimah said the findings confirmed that “serious irregularities and abuses of power” were carried out to suppress public criticism of “Israel’s” genocide in Gaza. He noted that the entry ban violated basic democratic rights and was politically motivated.
UN experts condemn growing restrictions on Palestine advocacy
International human rights bodies have condemned Abunimah’s detention and broader crackdowns on critics of the Israeli occupation in Europe.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, warned at the time of a “toxic climate” for freedom of speech, while UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, Irene Khan, called the repression of Palestinian voices “alarming” and “unjustifiable.”
The parliamentary report reconstructs a clear pattern of intervention. Authorities confirmed that Abunimah posed no threat, but the entry ban was forced through via irregular backchannel influence. Della Valle’s personal directive to override procedural safeguards has become the centerpiece of a growing scandal.
Swiss Zionist lobbying under scrutiny following revelations
The case has intensified scrutiny of Swiss institutions and their connections to Zionist lobbying networks. Switzerland hosts a wide range of organizations affiliated with the global Zionist movement, including the Swiss Zionist Federation, KKL-JNF, Keren Hayesod, and the Jewish Agency’s Swiss branch, all of which have supported illegal settlement activity and lobbied for policies targeting Palestinian advocacy.
Parallel groups, such as the Switzerland-“Israel” Society (GIS), the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG), and CICAD, as well as newer outfits like NAIN, have pushed for bans on the Palestinian Resistance in Gaza, cuts to UNRWA funding, and efforts to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
Observers say these organizations shape political narratives and influence policymakers, enabling state repression of pro-Palestinian voices under the guise of combating hate speech.
Legal challenge underway
Abunimah is now taking legal action in Zurich and at the federal level, with his legal team preparing further filings based on the parliamentary commission’s findings. His case has become emblematic of growing concerns about freedom of expression in Europe and the ability of foreign-linked networks to suppress dissent through state institutions.
“These grave violations of democratic and human rights were carried out to prevent me from speaking at lawful public events, organized by Swiss citizens and residents, calling for an end to ‘Israel’s’ genocide in Gaza,” Abunimah said in a social media post.
The Surgeon General’s Final Diagnosis: When the Doctor Who Silenced the Sick Prescribes “Love”
By Sayer Ji | November 11, 2025
Before Dr. Vivek Murthy prescribed “community” as America’s cure, he helped engineer the policies that tore it apart.
When outgoing Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released his January 2025 essay, “My Parting Prescription for America,” it was framed as a heartfelt reflection on the nation’s loneliness and disconnection. The document reads like a sermon on “love,” “service,” and “community” — invoking Christian compassion, Hindu dharma, and African Ubuntu to offer a kind of spiritual healing for America’s fractured soul.
But beneath the soft prose lies a striking irony: the very official who now urges the nation to “choose community” presided over one of the most divisive and dehumanizing public health regimes in U.S. history. His tenure was marked by systematic censorship, defamation of independent scientists and health advocates, and the suppression of truthful reporting about vaccine injuries and deaths — all documented in federal court filings and corroborated by congressional investigation.
The Surgeon General Who Prescribed Silence
In 2021, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy partnered with the now-disgraced Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and its soon-to-be-deported founder, Imran Ahmed, to launch a campaign labeling “health misinformation” as a public threat and urging social media companies to “take more aggressive action” against those who questioned the official COVID-19 narrative.
As detailed in Finn v. Global Engagement Center (3:25-cv-00543) (Doc. 83), Murthy’s office collaborated with entities like the CCDH, the White House, and Big Tech platforms to pressure for the removal or throttling of lawful speech — including posts about natural immunity, vaccine injury, and early treatment protocols.
This coordination, which the complaint describes as a “fusion of state and private power to suppress disfavored viewpoints,” forms part of a broader transnational censorship enterprise now under legal scrutiny.
Murthy’s rhetoric about “protecting public health” masked an unprecedented effort to erase public testimony from the vaccine-injured and to delegitimize independent medical experts whose research contradicted pharmaceutical and government messaging. Many of those targeted — including myself — were falsely branded as part of the “Disinformation Dozen,” a defamatory construct disseminated to newsrooms worldwide through UK-linked NGOs and U.S. federal agencies.
Covering the Wounds He Helped Inflict
In his “Parting Prescription,” Murthy writes that “community is the formula for fulfillment” and that the modern epidemic of loneliness demands “love, courage, and generosity.”
Yet his own tenure systematically dismantled trust and belonging, dividing families, churches, and workplaces through moralized public health edicts.
Lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates — all publicly championed by Murthy — fractured communities, creating the very isolation he now laments.
The Surgeon General who now preaches about “connection” was among those who ordered Americans to sever their most human bonds: to distance from loved ones, to shun the unvaccinated, and to treat dissenters as diseased threats.
His later call to “build a new social contract” founded on service and civic programs like the “Youth Mental Health Corps”is telling. It repackages the same surveillance-based public health infrastructure — behavioral tracking, centralized intervention, social credit by another name — in the language of compassion.
Weaponizing Psychology: Pathologizing Dissent
Murthy’s tenure advanced a subtle but potent form of psychological warfare: pathologizing dissent as sickness.
When he declares that division and distrust are symptoms of a “spiritual crisis,” he erases the political and moral legitimacy of resistance. Those who refused the experimental injections, questioned corporate capture of science, or defended medical choice are reframed not as engaged citizens but as patients in need of behavioral correction.
This framing, echoed by the World Health Organization and the Surgeon General’s “advisories,” lays the groundwork for the next phase of informational control — one cloaked not in censorship, but in therapeutic paternalism.
The Great Inversion: Coercion as Care
At the heart of Murthy’s “Prescription” is a moral inversion: coercion recast as compassion.
Throughout the pandemic, his messaging repeatedly equated compliance with virtue and questioning with harm. His Office’s partnership with the CDC and White House COVID Response Team normalized the language of “protecting others” — a phrase that justified censorship, job loss, and social exclusion.
Now, Murthy’s final reflection dresses that same ideology in the soft robes of empathy. His triad of “relationships, service, and purpose”reads less like a personal wellness philosophy than a state catechism — urging citizens to find meaning through collective obedience to approved narratives.
The Spiritual Disguise of Technocratic Power
Murthy’s invocation of faith traditions — Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and Ubuntu — is striking not for its inclusivity, but for its instrumental use of sacred language to legitimize centralized authority.
In merging spirituality with governance, Murthy mirrors a broader trend in global health policy: the conversion of care into control, where moral virtue is measured by conformity to bureaucratic “truth.”
The true crisis is not loneliness, but alienation from truth — a wound deepened by those who censored, shamed, and silenced the nation under the guise of saving it.
From Surgeon General to Social Engineer
Murthy closes his “Prescription” with a challenge:
“We are kin, not enemies… Good people with hearts full of love can change the world.”
But for the thousands of Americans censored, deplatformed, and defamed under his watch, and many more who were injured or killed by the experimental jabs he declared were necessary, those words ring as hollow as a pharmaceutical apology after the damage is done.
True love cannot coexist with coercion. True community cannot be built on lies.
The enduring legacy of Murthy’s public health tenure is not one of healing but of division, distrust, and epistemic violence — the destruction of the social immune system that protects a free people: open inquiry and dissent.
A Prescription Reversed
If Murthy’s farewell message was sincere, his repentance would begin with acknowledgment — of the vaccine-injured, of the silenced physicians, of the citizens whose livelihoods and voices were destroyed in the name of “safety.”
Until then, his “parting prescription” serves not as medicine, but as mirror — reflecting the psychological alchemy of a technocratic era that calls its injuries love.
Referendes
- Murthy’s My Parting Prescription for America (your uploaded PDF) — referenced for quotes and thematic contrast.
- Ji et al. v. Center for Countering Digital Hate et al. (Doc. 83 – Second Amended Complaint) — for legal and factual references regarding Murthy’s actions, coordination, and the broader censorship regime.
- Judicial and congressional context — including Missouri v. Biden and Kennedy v. Murthy, which form the legal frame for federal involvement in viewpoint suppression.
EU’s “Democracy Shield” Centralizes Control Over Online Speech
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | November 13, 2025
European authorities have finally unveiled the “European Democracy Shield,” we’ve been warning about for some time, a major initiative that consolidates and broadens existing programs of the European Commission to monitor and restrict digital information flows.
Though branded as a safeguard against “foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI)” and “disinformation,” the initiative effectively gives EU institutions unprecedented authority over the online public sphere.
At its core, the framework fuses a variety of mechanisms into a single structure, from AI-driven content detection and regulation of social media influencers to a state-endorsed web of “fact-checkers.”
The presentation speaks of defending democracy, yet the design reveals a machinery oriented toward centralized control of speech, identity, and data.
One of the more alarming integrations links the EU’s Digital Identity program with content filtering and labelling systems.
The Commission has announced plans to “explore possible further measures with the Code’s signatories,” including “detection and labelling of AI-generated and manipulated content circulating on social media services” and “voluntary user-verification tools.”
Officials describe the EU Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet as a means for “secure identification and authentication.”
In real terms, tying verified identity to online activity risks normalizing surveillance and making anonymity in expression a thing of the past.
The Democracy Shield also includes the creation of a “European Centre for Democratic Resilience,” led by Justice Commissioner Michael McGrath.
Framed as a voluntary coordination hub, its mission is “building capacities to withstand foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) and disinformation,” involving EU institutions, Member States, and “neighboring countries and like-minded partners.”
The Centre’s “Stakeholder Platform” is to unite “trusted stakeholders such as civil society organisations, researchers and academia, fact-checkers and media providers.”
In practice, this structure ties policymaking, activism, and media oversight into one cooperative network, eroding the boundaries between government power and public discourse.
Financial incentives reinforce the system. A “European Network of Fact-Checkers” will be funded through EU channels, positioned as independent yet operating within the same institutional framework that sets the rules.
The network will coordinate “fact-checking” in every EU language, maintain a central database of verdicts, and introduce “a protection scheme for fact-checkers in the EU against threats and harassment.”
Such an arrangement destroys the line between independent verification and state-aligned narrative enforcement.
The Commission will also fund a “common research support framework,” giving select researchers privileged access to non-public platform data via the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Political Advertising Regulation.
Officially, this aims to aid academic research, but it could also allow state-linked analysts to map, classify, and suppress online viewpoints deemed undesirable.
Plans extend further into media law. The European Commission intends to revisit the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) to ensure “viewers – particularly younger ones – are adequately protected when they consume audiovisual content online.”
While framed around youth protection, such language opens the door to broad filtering and regulation of online media.
Another initiative seeks to enlist digital personalities through a “voluntary network of influencers to raise awareness about relevant EU rules, including the DSA.” Brussels will “consider the role of influencers” during its upcoming AVMSD review.
Though presented as transparent outreach, the move effectively turns social media figures into de facto promoters of official EU messaging, reshaping public conversation under the guise of awareness.
The Shield also introduces a “Digital Services Act incidents and crisis protocol” between the EU and signatories of the Code of Practice on Disinformation to “facilitate coordination among relevant authorities and ensure swift reactions to large-scale and potentially transnational information operations.”
This could enable coordinated suppression of narratives across borders. Large platforms exceeding 45 million EU users face compliance audits, with penalties reaching 6% of global revenue or even platform bans, making voluntary cooperation more symbolic than real.
A further layer comes with the forthcoming “Blueprint for countering FIMI and disinformation,” offering governments standardized guidance to “anticipate, detect and respond” to perceived information threats. Such protocols risk transforming free expression into a regulated domain managed under preemptive suspicion.
Existing structures are being fortified, too. The European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), already central to “disinformation” monitoring, will receive expanded authority for election and crisis surveillance. This effectively deepens the fusion of state oversight and online communication control.
Funding through the “Media Resilience Programme” will channel EU resources to preferred outlets, while regulators examine ways to “strengthen the prominence of media services of general interest.”
This includes “impact investments in the news media sector” and efforts to build transnational platforms promoting mainstream narratives. Though described as supporting “independent and local journalism,” the model risks reinforcing state-aligned voices while sidelining dissenting ones.
Education and culture are not exempt. The Commission plans “Guidelines for teachers and educators on tackling disinformation and promoting digital literacy through education and training,” along with new “media literacy” programs and an “independent network for media literacy.”
While such initiatives appear benign, they often operate on the assumption that government-approved information is inherently trustworthy, conditioning future generations to equate official consensus with truth.
Viewed as a whole, the European Democracy Shield represents a major institutional step toward centralized narrative management in the European Union.
Under the language of “protection,” Brussels is constructing a comprehensive apparatus for monitoring and shaping the flow of information.
For a continent that once defined itself through open debate and free thought, this growing web of bureaucratic control signals a troubling shift.
Efforts framed as defense against disinformation now risk becoming tools for suppressing dissent, a paradox that may leave European democracy less free in the name of making it “safe.”
The Heritage Foundation Goes Woke
By James Rushmore | The Libertarian Institute | November 13, 2025
It’s been two weeks since Kevin Roberts found himself in the Israel lobby’s crosshairs, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s been much longer. The controversy kicked off on October 30, when the Heritage Foundation’s president released a video defending Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes. But Roberts’ real crime was arguing that American Christians have a right to criticize Israel without being accused of anti-semitism. He said that conservatives “should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.” What’s more, he condemned the “venomous coalition” attacking Carlson and seeking to “cancel” anti-semitic voices like Fuentes.
Roberts’ initial statement represented a precise articulation of the conservative movement’s traditional attitude towards identity politics and cancel culture. But because it sought to maintain some level of consistency and apply those principles to pro-Israeli grievance politics, it provoked a frenzy. The terminally shrill Ben Shapiro, who devoted an entire episode of his podcast to denouncing Carlson’s interview with Fuentes, said that Roberts’ statement constituted a “betrayal of the Heritage Foundation’s history and principles.” Bloated neoconservative John Podhoretz issued a tweet calling Roberts a “rancid wretch of an amoeba.” Sentient Halloween decoration Laura Loomer, responding to a clip from Roberts’ subsequent apology tour, called him a “total hypocrite” and a “liability for the GOP.”
Last Wednesday, footage leaked of Roberts addressing his peers at the Foundation. He opened his remarks with the following: “I made a mistake, and I let you down, and I let down this institution, and I am sorry for that. Period. Full stop.” What followed was a full-blown struggle session. A steady stream of Heritage employees rose to humiliate their superior. Roberts responded with a series of groveling apologies and increasingly masochistic attempts to atone for his wrongthink. But it was no use.
Senior Legal Fellow Amy Swearer, claiming that Roberts had “shown a stunning lack of both courage and judgment,” called on him to resign. IDF veteran Daniel Flesch, who serves as a senior policy analyst at the Foundation, bemoaned how difficult the past week had been for him. He demanded that Roberts issue a statement calling Carlson an anti-semite, citing the latter’s view that Americans who serve in the IDF should be stripped of their citizenship. Meanwhile, Roberts advisor Evan Myers was castigated by Victoria Coates, the co-chair of Heritage’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, after expressing fears that the Foundation would use staff attendance at Shabbat dinners as an ideological litmus test. (Soon afterwards, the Task Force severed ties with Heritage.)
The following day, Roberts tweeted out a hostage video in which he expressed gratitude to his “amazing colleagues” for showing him the error of his ways. He also expressed regret for his use of the phrase “venomous coalition” and reaffirmed his commitment to combating anti-semitism, even when “[his] friend Tucker Carlson needs challenging.” Roberts stopped short of offering reparations to the Anti-Defamation League or attending a sensitivity training seminar with Rabbi Shmuley. But his desperate attempts to appease the mob call to mind the hundreds of videos in which perpetually aggrieved college students demand apologies from professors and administrators who express sentiments they deem offensive. Indeed, there are striking parallels between the mainstream right’s hysterical response to Roberts’ statement and the racial reckoning America bore witness to in 2020.
For more than a decade, the American right has coalesced around its opposition to woke identity politics, particularly in relation to race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. The rise of Trumpism was, in large part, a product of the American public’s rejection of political correctness. But ever since Israel began its genocide in the Gaza Strip, the conservative movement has sought to carve out exceptions for pro-Israel, Jewish, and Zionist identity politics. Many on the mainstream right regard Israel as a bulwark against the barbarian forces that seek to destroy Western civilization. They rightfully view the woke left’s embrace of the Palestinian cause with suspicion. After all, the left’s insistence on viewing that issue through the prism of Black Lives Matter-style racial politics is solipsistic in the extreme. The same principle applies to the left’s insistence on fusing pro-Palestinian sentiment with pro-LGBT activism, a cause that few Palestinians support. But the right fails to hold proponents of Israeli identity politics to the same standard. Rather than reject both the intersectional logic that undergirds the left’s embrace of Palestine and the ethnonationalist logic that undergirds the Israeli project, they celebrate the latter and ignore the resulting cognitive dissonance.
The right-wing backlash against Roberts is instructive precisely because it illustrates how conservatives are willing to adopt woke tactics when they benefit Israel. Many on the right see through the left’s attempts to weaponize accusations of racism, sexism, and homophobia against their adversaries. But when it comes to anti-semitism, such individuals are more than happy to emulate the left. They’ll argue that Roberts and Carlson are endangering vulnerable populations by challenging the Israeli stranglehold on American discourse and “platforming” anti-semitic figures. By interviewing an anti-semite like Fuentes, Carlson is guilty of amplifying anti-semitic narratives, and Roberts’ defense of Carlson amounts to an endorsement of Fuentes’ pro-Hitler views. The only way for Roberts to atone for his sins is to beg forgiveness from the demographic he offended. But no matter how many struggle sessions Roberts takes part in, he can only hope to reduce the harm he’s caused. He can never achieve total purity.
The Heritage Foundation’s commitment to all things Israel, as well as its insistence on pandering to offended Jews and Zionists, mirrors the woke lunacy that’s become a defining feature of life on American college campuses. The heckler’s veto reigns supreme, and prostrating oneself before aggrieved victim groups is the default response to the raising of pitchforks. The existence of special committees to address the concerns of those groups isn’t even questioned. The fact that Heritage had a National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism should raise alarm bells. Conservatives rightly regard both the “anti-racism” and broader DEI industries with great scorn. So why don’t they recognize the deceit at the heart of the anti-anti-semitism racket? Indeed, the only thing such conservatives seem interested in conserving is wokethink.
Ironically, the Israeli project represents the culmination of intersectional logic. When a historically persecuted demographic is given free rein to do as it pleases, it should come as no surprise when it feels emboldened to brutalize its opponents. Nor should it strain credulity when it feels entitled to U.S. military and financial support. But much in the same way that the right seeks an Israel exception to its anti-identitarian doctrine, the left seeks to preserve the institutional architecture of wokethink, even as it seeks to deny Israel supporters the ability to capitalize on that framework. Look no further than Tel Aviv’s campaign to criminalize Hollywood boycotts of Israel, citing U.S. civil rights law as the appropriate predicate. The left may regard such efforts as a perversion of the underlying legislation, but nobody on the activist left would dare propose that the solution is to reform, let alone abolish, the prevailing civil rights bureaucracy. After all, that bureaucracy still benefits their preferred demographic cohorts.
The left refuses to question the many ways in which their preferred brand of woke activism parallels the hasbara tactics deployed by their pro-Israel counterparts. Case in point, over at The Nation, the Canadian writer Jeet Heer uses the Roberts controversy as an opportunity to tar Carlson as an anti-semite. He also takes issue with Roberts’ invocation of “globalism.” Heer feigns concern for the Palestinians, but his professed concern is outweighed by his pathological need to police other people’s language. Implicit to his piece is the assumption that the left should maintain something of a monopoly on Israel criticism. Sure, the left can tolerate certain conservative critiques of Our Greatest Ally™. But in Heer’s mind, any critiques that threaten to become unruly should invite a prolonged discourse on the dangers of “violent rhetoric.” Heer spends much of the piece arguing that genuine anti-semitism is a right-wing phenomenon, all while defending left-wing anti-Zionists from that spurious charge. Of course, he’s more than happy to deploy those same bogus charges against his opponents. It’s the fact that the left is finally getting a taste of its own medicine that bothers him. But what more do you expect from the man who earnestly defends art vandals?
The same week that Roberts embarked on his apology tour, Sydney Sweeney sat down for an interview with GQ’s Katherine Stoeffel. What followed was the conversation that launched a million memes. But putting aside the sheer entertainment value of the exchange, Sweeney’s refusal to apologize for her American Eagle ad campaign provides an object lesson in the value of standing one’s ground.
What does it say when a 51-year-old think tank president shows less courage under fire than a starlet nearly half his age? Roberts could learn a lot from Sweeney, who has spent the past few months being subjected to the dumbest attacks imaginable. One of those attacks came from Sweeney’s fellow White Lotus alum, Aimee Lou Wood, who responded to an Instagram post about the GQ interview with a vomiting emoji. Wood recently signed a petition vowing to boycott Israeli film institutions complicit in the Palestinian genocide. But her willingness to deviate from the politically correct script on that front is superseded by her compulsion to maintain the party line when it comes to “anti-racism.” Wood and her ideological bedfellows believe that the only problem with cancel culture is that it’s wielded against them. They’re more than content to weaponize it against those who make inoffensive pronouncements with which they take umbrage. In the same vein, conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation are happy to abandon their commitment to free speech and employ cancel culture against those who question America’s Israel-centric foreign policy.
Fuentes is a hateful, charismatic moron who would gladly celebrate the election of a President Gavin Newsom. He ought to be ignored. But the Heritage Foundation seems more than content to give Fuentes the attention he so clearly craves. And in doing so, it is willing to embrace the very same logic that has animated wokethink for the past decade. None of this should come as a surprise. Woke activists may claim solidarity with Palestine, but at the end of the day, the collectivist spirit that drives Israel’s genocide is indistinguishable from the mob mentality that undergirds woke ideology. Roberts initially seemed to understand this point, but he lacked the fortitude to stand his ground. And so the Heritage Foundation will no doubt become the latest America First institution to be sacrificed at the Israeli altar.
AfD Leader Slams EU Plans to Create New Intelligence Unit as Move to Concentrate Power
Sputnik – 13.11.2025
The creation of a new intelligence unit led personally by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will not improve the security of EU citizens, but only strengthen Brussels’ control over the bloc, Alice Weidel, co-chair of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, said on Thursday.
Earlier this week, the Financial Times newspaper reported that the EU Commission would establish a new intelligence unit led by von der Leyen to enhance the use of data collected by national intelligence agencies due to security concerns and a potential reduction in US security support for Europe.
“Von der Leyen plans [to create] her own EU intelligence service. This will not improve the security of citizens, but will expand surveillance and the power of the Brussels bureaucracy. Another dangerous step towards an EU superstate. Not with the AfD!” Weidel wrote on X.
The unit plans to recruit officials from across the EU’s intelligence community to consolidate and share intelligence for joint purposes, the newspaper reported. However, the plan has not yet been officially communicated to all EU member states, and no specific deadlines have been set, according to the report.
The move faces opposition from senior officials in the EU’s diplomatic service, who manage the bloc’s Intelligence and Situation Centre (Intcen), the report said. They argue that the new unit could duplicate Intcen’s functions and threaten its future.
Harald Vilimsky, EU lawmaker from the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), has said that the plan to create a separate intelligence analysis unit within the Secretariat-General of the European Commission is the next step in von der Leyen’s plan to concentrate power in Brussels’ hands. Instead of strengthening democratic control, she wants to create a shadow structure that places national intelligence agencies under Brussels’ supervision without any mandate, transparency or legitimacy, he added.
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A short history of British torture
ICC | December 2005
When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails… In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques. … continue
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