Vast majority of Brits blame immigration for unrest – poll
RT | August 18, 2024
Two-thirds of Brits believe the country’s immigration policy is responsible for the recent wave of right-wing riots, according to a poll published on Sunday. The riots triggered a nationwide crackdown on disorder and online dissent.
Dozens of British towns and cities were rocked by right-wing protests and riots earlier this month after a British teenager of Rwandan descent stabbed three children to death and injured ten others in the town of Southport, near Liverpool. Initially sparked by a false rumor that the knifeman was a Muslim immigrant, the demonstrations spiraled into a wider backlash against Islam and mass immigration, culminating in an arson attack on a hotel housing asylum seekers in the town of Rotherham.
According to a survey of 2,237 people carried out by polling firm Savanta and published by The Telegraph, 82% of Britons believe that the rioters themselves were responsible for the unrest, followed by 75% who pin the blame on far-right groups and influencers.
However, 64% believe that Britain’s immigration policy is ultimately to blame, while 59% say the Southport stabbings triggered the crisis.
British authorities responded to the riots in draconian fashion, with more than 1,000 people arrested, 480 charged, and 99 sentenced for their role in the disorder, according to figures published by the BBC on Friday. Around 30 people have been charged for online offenses, with a 34-year-old man sentenced to three months in jail for sharing what the BBC called a “derogatory meme about migrants,” and a 55-year-old woman arrested for sharing “inaccurate” information about the identity of the Southport killer.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is reportedly considering toughening up hate speech legislation, while London’s Metropolitan Police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, warned last week that foreign “keyboard warriors,” including X owner Elon Musk, could be investigated and charged for allegedly encouraging the riots.
Participants in the Savanta poll were split on this heavy-handed response, with 49% saying the government handled the situation well, and 43% saying that it was handled badly. Meanwhile, 44% blamed the riots on Starmer. In a public address at the height of the unrest, Starmer refused to mention the stabbings, instead accusing all those rioting of being motivated by “far-right hatred.”
Immigration to the UK soared during the premiership of Tony Blair. An adviser to the former prime minister, Andrew Neather, admitted in 2009 that Blair wanted to “open up the UK to mass migration” and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity.” With legal and illegal immigration combined, some 1.2 million people moved to the UK last year, 85% of them from outside the EU.
The Cradle’s Instagram page ‘permanently banned’ over pro-Palestine content

The message that The Cradle team received from Instagram
Press TV – August 18, 2024
In yet another instance of censorship targeting alternative media outlets, Instagram has blocked the page of The Cradle, a journalist-driven news website covering West Asia.
Owned by Meta Platforms Inc., formerly Facebook Inc., Instagram claimed the page was “disabled” for not “following our community guidelines,” without specifying which guidelines were violated.
The Cradle’s social media team was informed that they “cannot request another review of the decision,” effectively making the suspension indefinite.
“No one can see or find your account and you can’t use it. All your information will be permanently deleted,” the message added.
A senior member of The Cradle team took to social media to condemn the censorship.
“This, my friends, is what happens when you amplify the voice of the resistance,” wrote the journalist, referring to the “permanent Meta ban.”
“We are proud of our work and its overwhelming reach, and none of it was in vain. Returning to Meta seems impossible at the moment, but please stay with us on X, Telegram, and YouTube.”
The Cradle has extensively covered Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023, highlighting both the regime’s war crimes and the complicity of Western states.
Its social media presence and following have also grown over the past year amid the war on Gaza.
According to rights groups, social media giants, particularly Meta-owned platforms, have engaged in systemic, global censorship of pro-Palestinian content since the genocidal war began last year.
At least three of Meta’s most senior leaders are believed to have close ties to Israel, including Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Guy Rosen, who also served in the Israeli military’s Unit 8200.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta founder and CEO, and Sheryl Sandberg, a Meta board member, have also been involved in pushing Israeli propaganda, including the discredited “Hamas October 7 mass rape” hoax, Paul Biggar, a New York-based software engineer and founder of Tech for Palestine, told the Press TV website in a May interview.
In October last year, days after the genocidal war on Gaza was launched, Meta removed the largest Palestinian news page, Quds News Network, on Facebook.
In February, Meta removed the English-language accounts belonging to the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei on Instagram.
It came on the day when the Leader said the genocide in Gaza was a tragedy for the entire humanity.
Press TV has also faced multiple bans on various social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and X, for its pro-resistance coverage, both before and after Operation Al-Aqsa Storm.
US universities impose ‘police state’ rules to prevent campus protests over Gaza war
Press TV – August 18, 2024
US universities have imposed “police state” rules to avoid a repeat of campus protests against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, with students and faculties warning of the chilling effect they would have on free speech.
Reports indicate that as summer break ends, university administrations across the United States are imposing tougher measures to avoid a new wave of campus protests, which led to nationwide police crackdowns on campuses last semester.
Large protest encampments set up last semester eventually ended after a nationwide police crackdown on campuses in different US universities led to more than 3,100 arrests.
Scores of students faced criminal charges and disciplinary measures, and several schools scaled back graduation ceremonies for protesting against the Israeli war which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians so far.
Columbia University students, who were at the vanguard of the movement, may encounter the most changes.
The university president, Minouche Shafik, resigned this week in the wake of criticism for her handling of the protests, but not before overseeing the installation of fencing around the lawns of the school’s quad – the heart of campus life and the site of large protest encampments.
According to the Wall Street Journal, university administrators are also considering bringing in “peace officers” with the authority to arrest students – something Columbia’s current 290 security personnel cannot do.
In an email sent to students last month, the administration also announced a “color-coded campus status” system, with varying levels of access restrictions “based upon the potential disruption to our academic mission and/or campus operations.”
To further confront protesting students, some universities have banned the use of “event tents, tables, walls, outdoor displays, inflatables, freestanding signs, huts, sculptures, booths, facilities, flashing or rotating lights, illuminated signs, or similar objects and structures.”
Students say despite new draconian rules the pro-Palestine rallies will continue as long as Israeli atrocities go on in occupied Palestinian lands.
“The war is still there … nothing has changed in Palestine,” said Jonathan Ben-Menachem, a sociology PhD student who participated in the Columbia University students’ campus protests.
He said universities’ efforts to quash the protests when students return from summer vacation will fail.
“It’s going to be more of a police state than it was, but I don’t think that means no one’s going to do anything,” the graduate student pointed out.
Human rights advocates and student activists as well as university faculty members have sounded the alarm about the new policies, warning that the restrictions in addition to endangering free speech, run counter to educational institutions’ mission to foster debate, risk deepening tensions on campuses, and – in the case of public universities – may run foul of schools’ constitutional obligations.
Last week, the American Association of University Professors issued a statement condemning the harsh anti-protesting rules at universities.
The tougher new rules “impose severe limits on speech and assembly that discourage or shut down freedom of expression”, wrote the group, which represents more than 44,000 faculty members nationwide.
“Those who care about higher education and democracy should be alarmed.”
The American Board of Internal Medicine Revoked All 3 Of My Board Certifications
Although I can still practice medicine, the ABIM’s actions against me and Paul Marik threaten the sanctity and autonomy of the physician-patient relationship.
Pierre Kory’s Medical Musings | August 17, 2024
I will just start by saying that I believe that the ABIM’s decision was 100% predetermined even before we first received their accusation in June 2022. There was no way they were going to declare us innocent of misinformation, even though a good portion of this country knows how effective and accurate our deeply evidence-based Covid treatment guidance was (and still is).
One of the reasons why they were never gonna let us off is that, if they declared us “innocent,” (i.e. accurate) that action would have immediately imperiled the decisions by medical boards across the country who persecuted hundreds of doctors for using ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine or for recommending against Covid-19 mRNA gene therapy products. More importantly, it could potentially launch hundreds of thousands of lawsuits by the families of patients who died due to lack of early treatments offerred by clinics and hospitals or filled by pharmacies.
The above examples which led to the deaths of so many shows the sheer power of mega-corporations that put their financial interests ahead of our health and our lives. Through their overwhelming influence over nearly every institution of society and Science (media, journals, health agencies, politicians, medical schools, physicians etc), they literally succeeded in depriving a whole country (and world) of the most effective, inexpensive, safe, and widely available treatments for Covid. My biggest worry is that this crime against humanity may never enter the history books and thus will be eventually erased from memory. Which is looking probable.
The massive financial opportunities that Covid immediately presented to Big Pharma were threatened by the “inconvenient truths” Paul and I put out there. This ABIM action is one way in which Big Pharma punishes those who are foolish enough to do so. Foolish is not quite the right word in our case as I would argue we were simply naive to the consequences of advocating publicly for the use of off-patent medicines for an immensely profitable disease. It wasn’t heroism as some think, but rather extreme naivete.
I really never thought I would have to lose/leave three jobs and now three Board certifications for speaking truths. Recall that I was very well known in my specialty prior to Covid and was about to become Full Professor when I resigned as Chief of the Critical Care Service at the University of Wisconsin (where I was also the Medical Director of the Trauma and Life Support Center). Reading the Washington Post article “Doctors Accused of Spreading Misinformation Lose Certification” was a pretty sobering reminder of how far I have supposedly “fallen” (Not so fun fact: they completely overstated my salary as the money I received in 2022 included retroactive pay for 2021).
But I am still standing folks. I am happily practicing medicine at my Leading Edge Clinic with my amazing partner Scott Marsland. As many know, we specialize in treating vaccine injury syndromes and Long Covid, and I believe we are soon closing in on having treated our 1,400th patient.
Thank God I managed to build a private, fee-based practice two and half years ago. At the time I suspected this was coming while also already aware that I was “unemployable” by the system. I got fired by my last hospital for a 100% made up complaint, despite the fact they desperately needed me. I was an independent contractor at the time and my ICU partners and all the nurses really liked me. But my partners were telling me that they were under increasing pressure by the Chief Medical Officer to “get rid of Kory.” Although they initially resisted, my stance on vaccines started to cause even more problems for them. When the ICU Director, who was both a friend and a colleague, called to fire me, his last words were, “Pierre, I know there is a war going on and unfortunately you are a casualty.” Truer words were never spoken.
Just know that Board certification is not a license to practice medicine (that comes from state medical licensing Boards of which I have more than a few still). But this ABIM action now puts a definitive end to any hope of me returning to an academic or “system” position (not that I have that hope anymore). Why is that? Well, because Board Certification was originally just a badge of distinction that doctors could use to impress each other and their patients. But they have since weaponized and monetized Board Certification in that currently you cannot obtain a faculty appointment at an academic medical center without one. Nor can you work for most hospitals without one. Even worse, insurance plans will not put you on their provider panels without it. So, although I have been fully excommunicated from “the system,” I cannot be happier about it.
Understand that what happened to me this week was a devastating censorship action, plain and simple. It was done for two reasons; the first was to destroy my reputation and credibility so that my voice will no longer carry (essentially silencing me) and the other was to send a message to doctors that if they stray from consensus, no matter how scientifically absurd (e.g. mRNA vaccines for a coronavirus), dangerous (e.g. remdesivir, mRNA jabs), or ineffective (Paxlovid), they will be punished.
The damage that will result to patients again, is incalculable. No longer will “system” doctors be able to practice medicine with the autonomy they require to arrive at the best decision for each individual patient. Nearly everything they do will be protocolized with society guideline recommended treatments (i.e. consensus manufactured by Pharma). No longer will they be able to “think out of the box” or use treatments which although known effective, do not have the blessing of those in control of that system. I am as terrified as ever of needing a hospital.
Not to overstate the importance of their actions, but Medicine as I knew it, or thought I knew it, is even more dead if that is possible. If you can’t have a differing scientific opinion without losing your career over it, then how is that Medicine or Science? In fact, in our repeated written defenses, we challenged the ABIM, asking them where “the line” is between legitimate scientific debate driven by a differing emphasis on or interpretation of data and outright misinformation.
Misnformation, as I understand it, is defined as “incorrect or misleading” information. For us to be misinformationists, in my mind, would mean that all the data from trials and studies that exist for therapeutics in Covid;
- the overwhelming preponderance of data for the efficacy and safety of ivermectin in Covid shows it to be ineffective and dangerous
- the overwhelming preponderance of data for the vaccines show they are safe and effective
Basically, it comes down to how you interpret the body of evidence which currently exists. Paul and I adhered rigidly to a “totality of the evidence” approach, drawing from in-vitro, in-vivo, clinical and epidemiologic data. All of it lined up in a truly magnificent, inspiring, and unprecedented way. Well, except for the “Big 7 RCT’s” which manipulated the design, conduct and analyses to conclude ivermectin was ineffective. I spent literally hundreds of hours (along with others like Alexandros Marinos), publishing critiques which exposed the most absurd scientific misconduct I had ever witnessed. If interested, here are just some of those critiques, e.g. Oxfords’ PRINCIPLE trial, the TOGETHER trial (three parts, here, here, and here, and the NIH ACTIV-6 trial )
We also evolved with the data, unlike the agencies who had quickly determined in December of 2020 that the vaccines were safe and effective and never, ever veered from that stance up until this day. In contrast, the founding members of the FLCCC, for quite a long time, differed in respect to the efficacy, safety, and need for the mRNA vaccines. I was the first and most vocal against the mRNA vaccines (starting in April 2021) which actually almost led to the breakup of the FLCCC or at least the membership of the original 5.
Prior to April 2021 I was simply neutral/skeptical. That skepticisim was due to what I thought might be folly in trying to vaccinate against a coronavirus (I knew that historically coronavirus vaccines had failed because the vaccinated animals developed antibody dependent enhancement and also that coronaviruses mutate rapidly). Then I did my first deep dive on VAERS and the epidemiologic data showing massive spikes in mortality and hospitalizations timed with the rollout of the jabs across dozens of countries. Voila, I was now “anti-vaxx.”
I continued to track and analyze the ever-emerging data and the horrors they revealed. This work ultimately led the FLCCC to reach an internal “consensus” that the vaccines should be avoided at all costs (literally at all costs as none of the costs incurred by taking the jab were worth someones life). Anyway, I just wanted to show that we evolved with the data, always questioning and reviewing as new data emerged.
I will end by reminding all of how dangerous the ABIM’s actions will be to all of our lives because it will further erode and/or literally destroy the patient-physician relationship. As I wrote in a previous Op-ED in the Daily Caller on January 31, 2023, “A War Is Still Being Waged Against Doctors Who Question Covid Orthodoxy:”
By virtue of their professional training, doctors must advise patients on available treatments and known risks of any treatment or procedure. By threatening doctors who might provide information different than their preferred worldview, ABIM is disrupting the doctor-patient relationship.
When allowed to practice their craft freely, physicians can prevent societal disaster by focusing on individual patients, informed by clinical experience.
Groups like the ABIM, and public medical officials like Fauci, should support and encourage evidence-based debate and patient-centered care.
Instead, they have suppressed both that debate and treatment approach by persecuting its proponents. This campaign must be stopped, its origins and evolution must be thoroughly documented, and it must never be allowed to recur. Physician autonomy must be restored lest all patients suffer.
Want More Freedom of Speech? Try Less Government.
By Jonathan Turley | August 15, 2024
Below is my column in The Hill on my call for a bill that would bar federal funding of any program and grant to censor, blacklist, or target individuals or sites based on their content. It is time to get the U.S. government out of the censorship business. The column discusses the proposal in my new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” to block any further funding for the current system of corporate, academic, and government programs targeting opposing or dissenting views.
Here is the column:
It is time to get the United States out of the censorship business for good.
In the last three years, the House of Representatives has disclosed a massive censorship system run in part with federal funding and with coordination with federal officials. A federal court described this system as truly “Orwellian.”
The Biden Administration has made speech regulation a priority in targeting disinformation, misinformation or malinformation. President Joe Biden even said that companies refusing to censor citizens were “killing people.”
His administration has now created an anti-free speech record that is only rivaled by the Adams Administration, which used the Alien and Sedition Acts to arrest political opponents.
Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is an example of how speech controls and censorship have become mainstream. Her agency was created to work on our critical infrastructure, but Easterly declared that the mandate would now include policing “our cognitive infrastructure.” That includes combating “malinformation,” or information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
I have testified for years about the censorship system. For much of that time, Democrats insisted that there was no proof of any coordination or funding from the government. Such evidence did indeed exist, but Democrats worked to block any investigation to confirm what we already knew about government officials targeting individuals and groups for throttling, bans, and blacklisting.
Then Elon Musk bought Twitter. The release of the Twitter Files destroyed any plausible deniability of the government’s role in this censorship system. Various agencies had employees working with social media companies to target those with opposing or disfavored views. At the same time, we learned of grants from the federal government supporting blacklisting and targeting operations.
That includes efforts to quietly choke off the revenue of disfavored sites by pressuring advertisers and donors.
While companies like Facebook have continued to fight to conceal their coordination with the government, the Twitter Files pulled back the curtain to expose the system. Indeed, Democrats largely abandoned their denials and turned to full-throated defenses of censorship, even calling free speech advocates “Putin-lovers” and “insurrectionist sympathizers.”
In 1800, Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams in the only election where free speech was a primary issue for voters. It should be again. Vice President Kamala Harris is known as a supporter for these censorship and blacklisting operations. She can now defend that record and convince Americans that they need to have less free speech.
This debate should ideally focus on one simple legislative proposal. In my new book, I suggest various measures that can regain the ground that we have lost on free speech. One such measure is a federal law that would ban any federal funding of any offices or programs (government, academic, or corporate) that rate, target, censor, throttle, or seek to take adverse action against individuals or groups based on their viewpoints in public forums or social media.
There can be easy exceptions to this ban for individuals or groups engaging in criminal conduct or unlawful foreign interference with elections. Threatening individuals or trafficking in child pornography constitute conduct, not speech. They are criminal acts under the federal code.
Nothing in this law would prevent the government from speaking in its own voice. If Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas wants to challenge claims made about him or his agency, he can do so on the agency website or make his case to the media. That is the essence of free speech. What he cannot do is create a Disinformation Governance Board to regulate the speech of citizens or groups.
In my prior testimony to Congress, I warned about the use of what I called “censorship by surrogate” through which agencies did indirectly what they are barred from doing directly under the First Amendment.
This new law will not put an end to the burgeoning anti-free speech movement. It will not end the new market for groups making millions in seeking to silence or strangle sites with opposing views. However, it will create a wall of separation of the government from censorship systems.
It would also offer a simple and clear line for the 2024 election. Candidates will have to take sides on free speech. If candidates like Harris want to continue to support the government in blacklisting or censoring citizens, they should own it. We spent years of politicians engaging in cynical denials of the government’s role in censorship. If these politicians are “all in” with censorship, then they should be honest about it and let voters make the same choice that was made in 1800.
With billions to play with and enabling allies in Congress to conceal federal operations, speech regulation is an irresistible temptation for the government. We have seen how this temptation quickly becomes an insatiable appetite for government officials seeking to silence rather than answer critics.
Let’s get our government out of the business of rating, throttling blacklisting, and censoring citizens. It is time to pass a free speech protection act.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster).
This op-ed is part of The Hill’s “How to Fix America” series exploring solutions to some of the country’s most pressing problems.
US moving towards total censorship – Moscow

RT | August 17, 2024
Freedom of speech in the US is only permitted for those who express pro-American views, while dissenters are subjected to a “political inquisition,” Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, has claimed.
The diplomat was commenting on an FBI search at the home of Russian-born US political analyst and author Dimitri Simes in Virginia, on Tuesday. Simes, a critic of President Joe Biden’s administration, has been co-hosting a geopolitical talk show on Russia’s Channel 1 since 2018.
The targeting of Simes is another example of the “witch hunt” taking place in the US in the run up to the presidential election on November 5, Antonov wrote in a post on Telegram on Saturday.
“Hundreds of people are declared undesirable just because they dare to contradict the policies of the administration. They are forbidden from having their own point of view” and government agents are “breaking into homes, performing searches and seizing documents,” he stated.
According to the ambassador, the situation in the country resembles the “dark times of McCarthyism,” a campaign against suspected communists led by Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.
“The local ruling circles have decisively embarked on the path of total censorship. Freedom of speech in modern America is sacred only if this speech is pro-American. All dissidents are subject to political inquisition, especially when it comes to those who fight against one-sided and biased views on Russia,” he said.
Antonov accused Washington of double standards when it comes to democracy and freedom of speech. While “easily” neglecting the rights provided by the First Amendment at home, US officials, “at the same time continue to lecture the whole world on democratic values and human rights,” he wrote.
Simes is a naturalized US citizen, who immigrated from the Soviet Union in 1973. He served as an aide to President Richard Nixon and as the publisher and CEO of National Interest magazine, which advocates a realist approach to international relations and geopolitics.
At the height of Russiagate, Simes was among those investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a suspected contact between Donald Trump and the Russian government. The report by Muller in 2019, which failed to find any evidence of collusion between Moscow and Trump’s 2016 campaign, also vindicated Simes.
FBI agents arrived at his property in Virginia a week after a search took place at the home of former US Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter in New York state. Ritter, who is now a journalist and commentator, said the US authorities appeared to be “primarily concerned” with his “relationship” with Russian media outlets – RT and Sputnik news agency.
Scott Ritter: Biden Administration Declaring War on Journalism
Sputnik – August 16, 2024
Recent FBI raids on properties belonging to Russian-American political scientist Dimitri K. Simes and Scott Ritter, who both challenge the mainstream US political propaganda, are meant to squash dissent on Ukraine, former UN weapons inspector Ritter told Sputnik.
The conflict in Ukraine – in which the US has become deeply involved by providing the Kiev regime with billions of dollars – reportedly has people questioning Washington’s hawkish policy that the government seeks to suppress.
“What is our crime? Our crime is to have an opinion that is opposite of that of the United States government when it comes to Ukraine,” Ritter emphasized.
It is not just about the government deceiving the American people, it is about the mainstream media working in close coordination with the US government to deceive the American people about a war, Ritter noted.
“That’s where independent journalists come in. That’s where a genuinely free press [comes in], a press that isn’t subordinated to the US government, that doesn’t serve as a stenographer of US government policy, a free press that questions the official narrative,” he pointed out.
Ritter concluded that the US government does not trust common people, irrespective of their political leanings, and is actively trying to deceive and manipulate the public.
Earlier, Simes, a Channel One presenter in Russia and the founder and ex-president of the Center for the National Interest (USA), told Sputnik that he had not been to the United States since 2022, and had not been notified ahead of time that FBI agents would be conducting a search of his property in Rappahannock County, Virginia, this week.
Court Denies Jordan Peterson’s Appeal as Free Speech Fight Heats Up in Canada
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 15, 2024
Psychologist and author Jordan Peterson has announced that Canada’s Supreme Court refused his appeal against undergoing social media re-education (“remedial”) training.
The case stems from the demand of the Ontario College of Psychologists (which licenses practicing clinical psychologists) for Peterson to be subjected to media training. The ruling now means he is to pay court costs to the organization seeking to impose this measure on him.
According to Peterson, the demand was spurred by his negative stance regarding what’s known as “gender-affirming care,” the doomsday climate change narrative (that he spoke about on Joe Rogan’s podcast), and criticism of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
In a video posted on YouTube, Peterson said the court’s “terrible decision” not to consider his appeal was yet another “blow to free speech” in his country – and could well result in the revoking of his license to practice, while the ultimate goal of the social media re-education would be to get “something approximating a public apology” for his opinions and for expressing them.
Peterson previously mentioned his criticism of social service workers and police “threatening to apprehend the children of the Trucker Convoy protestors” as another reason for the Ontario College of Psychologists wanting to get him “reeducated” – though he did not speak about this in the YouTube video.
In a post on X, Peterson said that the Supreme Court ruling amounted to admitting that “mid-level bureaucrats who rule the professional colleges and regulatory boards” have more power than the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In another post, he criticized Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government which he said was “overseeing the commissars” standing in the way of conservatives’ free expression, including “perhaps” Ford himself.
Peterson is also critical of the way Canada’s CBC covers the case (including his remarks on the Rogan podcast), referring to the broadcaster as “paid lackeys.”
But Peterson has received support from other corners, including Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International, who said they were willing to work with him “to see if he wants to take the case international” – which he seems to be open to.
And Canadian Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre lambasted the decision as an attempt to impose forced political reeducation, noting that this came after “another government bureaucracy threatened to ban a Canadian from practicing his profession because he expressed political opinions the state doesn’t like.”
The FBI ‘Visits’ Scott Ritter

By Andrew P. Napolitano | Ron Paul Institute | August 15, 2024
Among the lesser-known holes in the Constitution cut by the Patriot Act of 2001 was the destruction of the “wall” between federal law enforcement and federal spies. The wall was erected in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which statutorily limited all federal domestic spying to that which was authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The wall was intended to prevent law enforcement from accessing and using data gathered by America’s domestic spying agencies.
Government spying is rampant in the US, and the feds regularly engage in it as part of law enforcement’s well-known antipathy to the Fourth Amendment. Last week, the FBI admitted as much when it raided the home of former Chief UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter. Scott is a courageous and gifted former Marine. He is also a fierce and articulate antiwar warrior.
Here is the backstory.
After President Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Congress investigated his use of the FBI and CIA as domestic spying agencies. Some of the spying was on political dissenters and some on political opponents. None of it was lawful.
What is lawful spying? The modern Supreme Court has made it clear that domestic spying is a “search” and the acquisition of data from a search is a “seizure” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. That amendment requires a warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of crime presented under oath to the judge for a search or seizure to be lawful. The amendment also requires that all search warrants specifically describe the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.
The language in the Fourth Amendment is the most precise in the Constitution because of the colonial disgust with British general warrants. A general warrant was issued to British agents by a secret court in London. General warrants did not require probable cause, only “governmental needs.” That, of course, was no standard whatsoever, as whatever the government wants it will claim that it needs.
General warrants authorized government agents to search wherever they wished and to seize whatever they found — stated differently, to engage in fishing expeditions.
FISA required that all domestic spying be authorized by the new and secret FISA Court. Congress then unconstitutionally lowered the probable cause of crime standard for the FISA Court to probable cause of speaking to a foreign agent, and it permitted the FISA Court to issue general warrants.
Yet, the FISA compromise that was engineered in order to attract congressional votes was the wall. The wall prohibited whatever data was acquired from surveillance conducted pursuant to a FISA warrant to be shared with law enforcement.
So, if a janitor in the Russian embassy was really an intelligence agent who was distributing illegal drugs as lures to get Americans to spy for him, any telephonic evidence of his drug dealing could not be given to the FBI.
The purpose of the wall was not to protect foreign agents from domestic criminal prosecutions; it was to prevent American law enforcement from violating personal privacy by spying on Americans without search warrants.
Fast forward to the weeks after 9/11 when, with no serious debate, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. It removed the wall between law enforcement and spying. And by 2001, the FISA Court had on its own lowered the standard for issuing a search warrant from probable cause of speaking to a foreign agent to probable cause of speaking to a foreign person. This, too, was unlawful and unconstitutional.
The language removing the wall sounds benign, as it requires that the purpose of the spying must be national security and the discovered criminal evidence — if any — must be accidental or inadvertent. In January 2023, the FBI admitted that it intentionally uses the CIA and the NSA to spy on Americans as to whom it has neither probable cause of crime nor even articulable suspicion of criminal behavior.
Articulable suspicion is the linchpin of commencing all criminal investigations. Without requiring suspicion, we are back to fishing expeditions.
The FBI’s admission that it uses the CIA and the NSA to spy for it came in the form of a 906-page FBI rulebook written during the Trump administration, disseminated to federal agents in 2021 and made known to Congress last year.
Last week, when FBI agents searched Ritter’s home in upstate New York, in addition to trucks, guns, a SWAT team and a bomb squad, they arrived with printed copies of two years’ of Ritter’s emails and texts that they obtained without a search warrant. To do this, they either hacked into Ritter’s electronic devices — a felony — or they relied on their cousins, the CIA and the NSA, to do so, also a felony.
But the CIA charter prohibits its employees from engaging in domestic surveillance and law enforcement. Nevertheless, we know the CIA is physically or virtually present in all of the 50 US statehouses. And the NSA is required to go to the FISA Court when it wants to spy. We know that this, too, is a charade, as the NSA regularly captures every keystroke triggered on every mobile device and desktop computer in the US, 24/7, without warrants.
The search warrant for Ritter’s home specified only electronic devices, of which he had three. Yet, the 40 FBI agents there stole a truckload of materials from him, including his notes from his U.N. inspector years in the 2000s, a draft of a book he is in the midst of writing and some of his wife’s personal property.
The invasion of Scott Ritter’s home was a perversion of the Fourth Amendment, a criminal theft of his private property and an effort to chill his free speech. But it was not surprising. This is what has become of federal law enforcement today. The folks we have hired to protect the Constitution are destroying it.
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2024 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
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CAIR files lawsuit against FBI, US govt agencies over blacklisting of Palestinian-Americans
MEMO | August 13, 2024
An American Muslim advocacy group has filed a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the leaders of other United States government agencies after two Palestinian-American men were blacklisted due to their pro-Palestine activism.
On Monday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) filed the lawsuit in response to what it called a discriminatory and racist placement of two Palestinian Americans – Osama Abu Irshaid and Mustafa Zeidan – on a watch list by US federal authorities.
According to the lawsuit, Irshaid, the Executive Director of an organisation named American Muslims for Palestine, travelled to Qatar from the US in late May and returned in early June. Upon his return, federal agents forced him to undergo extra screening and questioning – reportedly focusing on his activism and organising against Israel’s offensive on Gaza – while seizing his phone, which has not yet been returned.
The California-based Zeidan, meanwhile, who often visits his ailing mother in Jordan, was not allowed to board a flight on his way to the country earlier this year, with authorities later informing him that he was placed on the no-fly list.
Filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the lawsuit stated that “CAIR is challenging the mistreatment of these Palestinian-American activists on constitutional grounds”, asserting that their blacklisting is based on discrimination and racism rather than actual criminal or national security concerns. “Neither Dr. Abu Irshaid nor Mr. Zeidan have ever been charged or convicted of a violent crime,” it said.
Aside from the FBI, other defendants named in the lawsuit are the leaders of government agencies, including the State Department and the Homeland Security Department.
Specialist UK Police Teams Target “Hate” on Social Media
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | August 13, 2024
The UK authorities and the media either willing to or feeling pressure to take their cues from the government, continue to assert that the root cause of the serious rioting that hit the country this month is to be found on – social media.
This, in turn, makes for a convenient excuse to ramp up police surveillance of online content. Special police teams are now going through social sites in order to identify those said to have “incited” the riots, and there’s a special name for them – “hate influencers.”
The said teams consist of what reports refer to as “specialized” officers, those investigating serious crimes (i.e., murder and the like) and terrorism, as well as local units whose job is normally to investigate organized crime.
“Other” national-level teams are also mentioned as taking part in scouring the internet, and what they might be doing is suggested by the goal of this exercise being gaining “a clear intelligence picture,” as one article put it, citing the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC).
A statement on the NPCC site said that the search for “online offenders” is being led by regional organized crime units (ROCUs) and that the offense is spreading hate and inciting violence on the internet.
NPCC Chief Constable Chris Haward is quoted as saying that the large number of people taking part in protests and riots “did not mobilize spontaneously.”
“It was the result of dozens of so-called influencers, exploiting the outpouring of grief from the tragic loss of three young girls in Southport,” Haward said, referring to the knife attack that resulted in the three murders.
Still talking about “hate influencers,” Haward added: “They knowingly spread misinformation, stoked the flames of hatred and division, and incited violence from the comfort of their own homes – causing chaos on other people’s doorsteps. (…) Online crimes have real-world consequences and you will be dealt with in the same way as those physically present and inflicting the violence.”
Thus far, the NPCC has said that it is investigating hundreds of leads. The content targeted by law enforcement and intelligence units is reportedly spread across a range of unnamed social sites and platforms, according to the press release.
It is also revealed that “hate influencers” as the British legacy press calls them will not be held responsible simply for using the internet to allegedly incite real-world violence – but also for something separate which the NPCC calls “violence online.”
“A senior investigator” will have the last word on whether any of this can be treated as a crime – and if so, people behind the accounts and/or content will be identified and arrested.
Tyranny in the UK – Can it Happen Here?
By Ron Paul | August 12, 2024
As the UK descends into tyranny, where just re-Tweeting something the government doesn’t like can land a person a multi-year jail sentence, Americans are wondering, “can it happen here?” After all, we have the guarantees of the First Amendment.
But while we shake our heads at UK authorities jailing people for their social media posts this past week, we should not kid ourselves. The answer is that silencing dissent can happen here and it is happening here.
Here are just three recent examples of how the “deep state” or the permanent government is conspiring to restrict political dialogue in the United States.
First is the revelation that former US Representative and former US presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has been placed under the bizarrely named “Quiet Skies” program. As reported by journalist Matt Taibbi based on revelations by TSA whistleblowers, this July Gabbard was flagged as a terror threat, and every time she travels her boarding pass is marked so that she is pulled aside for extensive screening. According to the whistleblowers, “Gabbard is unaware she has two Explosive Detection Canine Teams, one Transportation Security Specialist (explosives), one plainclothes TSA Supervisor, and three Federal Air Marshals on every flight she boards.”
As Gabbard herself revealed recently on the Laura Ingraham show, “A few weeks ago, I had the audacity to tell the truth: that Kamala Harris would essentially be a mouthpiece and puppet of the Military Industrial Complex and National Security State. The next day, July 23, they retaliated. Sadly this is what we can expect from the ‘Harris Administration.’”
Next we have the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump. It seems every day brings a new revelation that calls into question whether the massive failure to protect the Republican presidential candidate was just an “honest mistake.” We know from 1963 what can happen to presidents who cross the “deep state” and we know from Trump’s four years in office how “former” deep state officials can conspire to undermine the presidency with lies like “Russiagate.”
Finally we have the case of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Up until the Trump assassination attempt, the Biden/Harris Administration refused to provide the independent presidential candidate with Secret Service protection. RFK, Jr. has consistently and effectively criticized not only the current administration but the “deep state” itself while out on the campaign trail. Even though there were credible threats against him on the campaign trail the Biden/Harris administration refused to budge for months. Why? Did they want to silence him?
The US government learned an important – and dangerous – lesson from Covid: all you have to do to crush political dissent is to use the weight of the government to force the “private” sector to do the censoring for you. It is only a half-step away from forbidding us from expressing our thoughts on a virus to sending us to prison for expressing other thoughts the government does not like. And maybe worse.
There will be a reaction in the UK to the brutality of the Starmer regime. We can only hope for their – and our – sake that the reaction will be a newfound determination by the people that no government should have the authority to shut them up or jail them for their political views. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, “free speech, if you can keep it.”

