What do Justin Trudeau and Kristi Noem have in common? Both want to put you in jail for having unpopular opinions
Chuck Baldwin Live | March 21, 2024
The left and right sides of an ellipse are descriptive of Left and Right politics. At the top of the ellipse is Liberty. At the bottom of the ellipse is Tyranny. Republicans and Democrats spend most of their time arguing over things that fall in the middle of the ellipse.
I define Tyranny as anything that promotes the power of the state to control people’s lives and liberties beyond the Natural Laws of our Creator. I define Liberty as anything that constrains the power of the state to control people’s lives and liberties beyond the Natural Laws of our Creator.
The problem with so many people from both the political Left and the political Right is that, regardless of their differences over middle elliptical issues, they meet in unison at the bottom of the ellipse. Both Trump and Biden, Republicans and Democrats, want to use the power of government to coerce, intimidate or force the American citizenry to do what THEY want us to do. Whether we agree or not with either side is irrelevant. The fact that we would allow them to exercise governmental power to enforce THEIR personal opinions upon us should be anathema to any true freedomist.
And there are no God-ordained liberties more precious to free men and women than the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion (conscience).
And there is currently a perfect depiction of what I said above being played out before our very eyes with the Leftist Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and South Dakota’s conservative governor, Kristi Noem.
The Liberal Justin Trudeau
The Canadian government is rapidly advancing plans to usher in full-blown tyranny and will soon begin sentencing citizens to life in prison if they are found guilty of committing the “crime” of so-called “hate.”
Many are likening the new laws to George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” as Canada will soon start handing out severe penalties for wrongthink.
The push for life sentences is part of “liberal” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “anti-hate” legislation.
The shocking new law, buried in bill C-6, states:
Everyone who commits an offense under this act or any other act of Parliament, if the commission of the offense is motivated by hatred based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, color, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation or gender identity or expression, is guilty of an indictable offense and liable to imprisonment for life.
The new law from Canada comes as Trudeau’s World Economic Forum-controlled administration seeks to rapidly advance the nation’s descent into globalist tyranny.
The government has been pushing several new laws that seek to strip the public of their freedoms.
As Slay News reported, among the draconian new laws are powers that allow authorities to begin jailing citizens who “might” commit a crime.
Trudeau’s government is pushing for the new “pre-crime” authority which officials claim will help to tackle so-called “hate crimes.” (Source)
Naturally, conservatives on the right side of the ellipse are aghast and angry at such a tyrannical proposal—and justifiably so. There is no question that Fidel Castro’s Canadian son wants to turn our northern neighbor into a cold-climate communist state like the balmy prison island of Cuba.
But now let’s visit the other side of the ellipse, the right side, the conservative side.
The Conservative Kristi Noem
In signing a draconian, tyrannical “hate” law of her own in South Dakota, USA, Governor Kristi Noem (on the short list to be Trump’s running mate) said the following (reported by Chris Menahan at InfoWars):
When I was growing up, my dad would always gather our family together and we would pray for Israel. It was instilled in me from a very young age that the Jews were Gods [sic] chosen people, that Israel was the Holy Land, and that we should always pray for them.
I brought those fundamental ideals with me when I was in the State Legislature, when I served in Congress, and now as Governor of South Dakota. Supporting the State of Israel and our Jewish community has always been extremely important to me. It’s important to support Israel for spiritual, historical, and national security reasons. I am continuing to stand with the Jewish people by signing historic legislation to protect them from antisemitism.
I was very proud to sign HB 1076, a very important bill to combat antisemitism. This bill defines antisemitism and makes it easier to prove when discriminatory conduct is motivated by antisemitism. It is an impactful piece of legislation that will ensure the safety of Jewish people and strengthen South Dakota’s anti-discrimination laws.
We held a beautiful, moving signing ceremony for this bill in the Rotunda of our State Capitol in Pierre. Many prominent Jewish leaders attended, including Elan Carr, the CEO of the Israeli-American Council for Action, nationally renowned Jewish leader and founder of the Jacobson Society Dan Rosen, Rabbi and Director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center Dr. Mark Goldfeder, Rabbi Mendel Alperowitz of the Chabad Jewish Center of South Dakota, Renie Schreiber on behalf of Yinam Cohen, Consul General of Israel to the Midwest, and Jordan Cope from Stand With Us. A few of our special guests said some words about the impact this legislation will have for the Jewish people.
This bill puts the gold standard International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [IHRA] definition of antisemitism into state law.
I hope that more states across our great nation will follow this example that we are setting here in South Dakota. It is more important now than ever for our nation’s leaders to stand up and fight against antisemitism. We must always work to ensure the security of God’s chosen people.
Menahan writes:
The IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism is completely antithetical to the First Amendment.
The IHRA defines anti-Semitism as:
– Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
– Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
– Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).
– Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
– Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
– Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
– Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
– Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
No other ethnic or religious group in America is afforded any such privileges.
Notice that virtually everything in this list defining “antisemitism” focuses on speech, attitudes or thoughts. “Allegations.” “Accusing.” “Denying.” “Accusing.” “Accusing.” “Denying.” “Applying.” “Using.” All of this refers to speech, attitudes or thoughts.
Kristi Noem is abusing the power of government in an attempt to deny people their First Amendment freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
If Noem wants to believe that the Ashkenazi Jews in the Middle East are “God’s Chosen People,” it is her religious right to believe that. And if she wants to publicly say she believes that, the freedom of speech gives her the right to do so.
BUT . . .
1. That doesn’t mean she is right; in fact, she is NOT right. The Ashkenazi Jews in Palestine today are no more God’s Chosen People and the blood descendants of Abraham than you or me or the man in the moon.
2. That doesn’t give her the right or authority to force people to believe as she does, to share her religious persuasion or to use the power of government to punish them for taking a contrary position.
For your information, Kristi,
I DO believe that the popular scope ascribed to the German Holocaust IS “exaggerated.”
I DO believe that Jewish Zionism IS a radical racist ideology—and so do many Israelis, by the way.
I DO believe that Zionist Jews DO have an extraordinary influence over our media, Federal Reserve, government and societal institutions—and it appears that by signing this bill, Kristi, you are proving my assertion.
And, yes, I also believe that the Jews who coerced and manipulated Pontius Pilate to crucify Jesus ARE blood libel for His death. As a matter of fact, Kristi, the Pharisees and Jews that murdered Jesus admitted their liability for Christ’s death when they shouted, “His blood be on us, and on our children.” (Matthew 27:25)
If I lived in South Dakota, I suppose I would be guilty of a “hate” crime and open to government reprisal.
So, how are Noem and Trudeau any different? Both of them want to use the power and force of government to punish people for exercising their God-ordained freedom of religion and freedom of speech in a manner that doesn’t comport with theirs.
Noem’s tyrannical “hate” bill is not motivated by greed and ambition, using this bill as a means of holding her hand out to the Israeli lobbyists for more campaign cash, is it?
Ditto Trudeau’s tyrannical “hate” bill?
Naw!
Left. Right. Liberal. Conservative. Secularist. Religious. It all spells tyranny if they are meeting at the bottom of the ellipse, as Justin Trudeau and Kristi Noem are doing right now.
© Chuck Baldwin
‘Kind of Terrifying’: Critics Slam Claim That First Amendment Shouldn’t Constrain Government’s Ability to Censor
By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | March 21, 2024
Journalist Matt Taibbi denounced statements made by liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during a U.S. Supreme Court hearing suggesting the First Amendment should not constrain the government’s ability to combat misinformation during a crisis.
“That was kind of terrifying because the entire purpose of the First Amendment is to restrain the government — it’s not to restrain the public from getting in the way of government action,” Taibbi said Tuesday during an interview on The Hill’s “Rising.”
Taibbi, who has reported extensively on the government’s censorship efforts, also said the plaintiffs in the case — including Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff and Aaron Kheriaty — had their speech suppressed because they contradicted a false government opinion.
“The entire purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from creating a hegemonic opinion that cannot be challenged,” Taibbi said.
The Supreme Court heard arguments on Monday pertaining to an injunction, granted in September 2023 by a federal appeals court, in Murthy v. Missouri. The case centers on whether the federal government violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to censor content that ran counter to official government narratives on such topics as COVID-19 origins, vaccines, elections and other controversial topics.
Responding to Solicitor General of Louisiana J. Benjamin Aguiñaga during oral arguments, Justice Jackson said:
“So my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods. I mean, what would you have the government do? I’ve heard you say a couple of times that the government can post its own speech, but in my hypothetical, you know, ‘Kids, this is not safe, don’t do it,’ is not going to get it done.
“And so I guess some might say that the government has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country. And you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information.”
Government set up ‘private highway’ to social media execs
“Rising” host Briahna Joy Gray asked Taibbi which was the primary issue: the government’s actions or the companies’ choices to succumb to pressure?
Taibbi compared the situation to the government hypothetically threatening to pull a mainstream media outlet’s Federal Communications Commission license unless it held a story, which he argued would be highly inappropriate.
“They didn’t just do that in this case,” Taibbi explained. “They went straight to the heads of the company” using an “industrial-scale operation … a sort of private highway to all of these companies where they were funneling mass requests.”
Taibbi noted that Renée DiResta, research director of the Election Integrity Partnership that was sponsored by both the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “talked about using Section 230 to bring these companies to heel.”
“This was an overt threat,” Taibbi said.
Taibbi suggested it would be appropriate for the government to use its bully pulpit to say, “I don’t like what’s on Facebook. They made a mistake here, here and here. Here’s what I think the truth is, and we see these posts that say something else.”
“The president has an enormous megaphone to counter” what it considers misinformation, Tabbi said. “What’s not appropriate is doing it in private and coupling it with a threat.”
Justices missed the point on First Amendment
On his Racket News Substack Tuesday, Taibbi provided further context on the government’s pressure on social media companies.
During oral arguments, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher — referring to instances where government officials publicly criticized social media platforms and called for changes to Section 230 protections — said, “I think it’s really troubling, the idea that those sorts of classic bully pulpit exhortations, public statements urging actors to behave in different ways, might be deemed to violate the First Amendment.”
Taibbi lamented the lack of a strong response from the other eight justices.
“That a line about ‘the First Amendment hamstringing the government’ was uttered by one Supreme Court Justice is astonishing enough,” he wrote. “[But] listening as none of the other eight pointed out that the entire purpose of the First Amendment is to ‘hamstring’ government from interfering in speech was like watching someone drive a tank back and forth over Old Yeller.”
As evidence of the justices’ confusion over First Amendment rights, Taibbi pointed to Justice Elena Kagan’s statement that the government intervening in news organizations’ activities “happened all the time” decades ago, especially when issues of national security were at stake.
As to her question, “Was that coercion?” Taibbi wrote:
“The situations aren’t remotely analogous. What’s happening now is a wide-scale partnership agreement between intelligence/enforcement agencies and media distributors, not media outlets themselves.”
Rep. Jordan: ‘That is scary where we’re headed’
Some Congress members were quick to criticize Justice Jackson’s statements from the Murthy v. Missouri hearing.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), in an interview with Fox News Monday, said, “The big takeaway today was Katanji Brown Jackson, when she said to the Solicitor General from Louisiana, ‘You’ve got the First Amendment hamstringing the government’ — well, that’s what it’s supposed to do, for goodness sake!”
“That is frightening because she really believes that,” Jordan added. “That is scary where we’re headed.”
Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) suggested that if the Supreme Court does not intervene, it could allow the FBI to “embed itself with social media companies” and “take down” issues like “the Hunter Biden laptop in election after election after election.”
Bishop argued that the government should not be able to suppress legal, protected speech on public platforms. “I just don’t think the government ever has a valid interest in doing that,” he said.
“[The government] can … come out publicly and say, ‘We don’t agree that there could have been a lab leak, that we think that’s a ridiculous theory,’” said Bishop. But he argued it was a “bad idea” to allow the government to pressure social media because “We see from what has happened afterward … they were wrong.”
Jordan also alleged that the Biden administration abused its power by censoring political opponents, citing its pressure to remove a tweet by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Children’s Health Defense chairman on leave, despite the tweet containing true statements about Hank Aaron’s vaccination and passing.
“Oh, by the way, who was that individual [requesting the censorship]?” Jordan asked, before answering, “The guy running against him in the [Democratic] primary [at the time]. That is as scary as it gets, but that’s what this White House was doing.”
Will ‘traceability’ derail free speech case?
One of the central questions before the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri is whether the government’s actions, including vague threats and pressure on social media companies, constitute illegal coercion.
Taibbi pointed out in the “Rising” interview that the “Twitter Files” showed “both overt and less obvious evidence” of correspondence among Twitter’s executives describing how they understood proposed regulatory changes as a threat they must answer to get the government off their back.
“That’s not missing from the case — that’s a feature of the case,” Taibbi said, adding that he thought the government publicly airing those threats “was sending a very strong message so that not only the companies would hear it, but the public would hear it.”
Taibbi acknowledged the difficulty of establishing “traceability” — a direct causal relationship between government pressure and the censorship of individual plaintiffs’ posts — saying their evidence “didn’t show a soup-to-nuts progression.”
However, he noted that shortly after the government told social media companies, ‘We don’t want anybody who is creating content that would promote vaccine hesitancy,’” people like Dr. Bhattacharya and Dr. Kulldorff were “deamplified or removed from platforms.”
Taibbi highlighted the lower court rulings that established or upheld injunctions against the government’s use of coercive tactics with social media companies.
“Two judges compared it to a mob movie,” he said. Characterizing the government in this metaphor, the judges said, ‘Hey, it’s a nice tech company you’ve got there. Be a shame if something happened to it,” Taibbi said.
“Rising” host Robby Soave asked Taibbi whether a legislative remedy could prevent government censorship. Taibbi said that while he felt there was ample evidence that what the government engaged in was already against the law, he thought it would be “difficult” to get a new law passed “absent a judicial ruling that this kind of behavior is illegal.”
But even if such a law were passed, “The problem is the enforcement mechanism is absent here,” he said.
In his Racket News article, Taibbi said the Supreme Court hearing “felt like a gut punch.” He expressed concern that if the court rules against the plaintiffs based on “traceability” issues, it could be interpreted as an endorsement of the government’s “plainly abusive” surveillance and censorship programs.
He wrote:
“Murthy [v. Missouri] already represents a major public relations victory for the Executive Branch.
“After roughly two years in which momentum for shutting down government censorship programs seemed to be gaining, and episodes like Bhattacharya’s punctured the myth that such bureaucracies only targeted ‘misinformation,’ yesterday’s hearing will help restore the basic narrative that the activities revealed earlier in this suit and in the Twitter Files was little more than good-faith efforts by a concerned government trying to stop ‘harm’ in a unique historical emergency.
“As Brown Jackson put it, ‘What would you have the government do?’”
John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Leave TikTok Alone
By Sheldon Richman | The Libertarian Institute | March 22, 2024
This is America, last I checked. Surely, the government would not force the sale of a social-media company or ban its app from the Google and Apple stores. Would it?
Well, yes, it would, could (perhaps), and might. A bill in Congress, backed by the government’s nominal chief executive, could become law. The House of Representatives passed it last week by an overwhelming bipartisan majority — despite valiant efforts by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-KY, plus a few others — and it is now before the Senate.
That bill would establish fuzzy criteria defining a “foreign adversary’s” alleged influence through a social media platform. It is aimed, for now, at requiring TikTok, used by 170 million mostly younger Americans, to be sold to a government-approved American buyer within a specified period. If not sold, Americans would be forbidden to get the app. I guess the app would have to be disabled for those who have it already.
In other words, TikTok would be banned from America — you know, just as China’s communist government bans or interferes with social media over there. Knowing how the government works, we must presume that the bill’s criteria will be applied to other cases later. It certainly would exist as a standing threat to the uncooperative.
The complaint against TikTok is that it’s a subsidiary of ByteDance, a widely owned company subject to Chinese government influence or control, although this is disputed by TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean businessman with substantial roots in — the United States. But let’s assume the worst and see where that leads. After all, the Chinese government is no respecter of individual rights. If the U.S. government is eager to interfere with social media, why not the Chinese government?
TikTok worriers say that China could harvest data on Americans while feeding them self-serving democracy-subverting messages. It has reportedly been caught suppressing unflattering information. Not good, but of course, the U.S. government has done the same thing; a lawsuit about this, Murthy v. Missouri, is now before the Supreme Court. As many critics of the bill have pointed out, the Chinese don’t need TikTok to acquire information that users readily give up to other platforms. It’s already on the market. Moreover, nobody should expect the news from any one online source to be complete; as one grows, one should learn to consult a variety of sources for a fuller picture.
Matthew Petti of Reason is right: “Competition is the strongest force keeping the internet free. Whenever users find a topic banned on TikTok, they can escape to Twitter or Instagram to discuss the censored content. And when Twitter or Instagram enforce politically motivated censorship on a different topic, users can continue that discussion on TikTok.”
Changing ownership or banishing TikTok would create a false sense of security. The problem of myopia would remain.
Moreover, as Matt Taibbi alerts us, the bill would give the executive branch “sweeping powers.” He writes: “As written, any ‘website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application’ that is ‘determined by the President to present a significant threat to the National Security of the United States’ is covered.’”
Taibbi continues: “A ‘foreign adversary controlled application,’ in other words, can be any company founded or run by someone living at the wrong foreign address, or containing a small minority ownership stake. Or it can be any company run by someone ‘subject to the direction’ of either of those entities. Or, it’s anything the president says it is. Vague enough?”
By this time, shouldn’t we expect the worst from letting legislators write the rules?
But those are not the only reasons for concern. According to Glenn Greenwald, the bill had been floating around for a few years but had not garnered enough support to get through Congress. That changed recently, according to Greenwald, citing articles in the Wall Street Journal, Economist, and Bari Weiss’s Free Press. Why? As Greenwald documents, anxiety about TikTok took a quantum leap beginning on Oct. 7, 2023, the day Hamas killed and kidnapped hundreds of Israeli civilians and Israel began retaliating against the people of the Gaza Strip.
What has this got to do with TikTok? you ask. Good question. Israel’s defenders in the United States, such as Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, are upset that TikTok’s young users are being exposed to what he calls anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic disinformation. “It’s Al Jazeera on steroids,” Greenblatt said on MSNBC. During a leaked phone call, he complained, “We have a TikTok problem,” by which he means a generational problem. Younger people — including younger Jewish people — are appalled at what Israel’s military is doing in Gaza. (To complicate things, it looks like TikTok and Instagram have suppressed pro-Palestinian information.)
Would an American-owned TikTok be easier to control? Experience says yes. Have a look at the Twitter Files, which document how American officials, Chinese-style, pressured social media to censor or suppress dissenting views on important matters such as the COVID-19 response and the 2020 election. A federal judge likened the government’s efforts to the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Do we want to become more like China?
A final word. Defenders of free speech should not argue that ill-intentioned disinformation and well-intentioned misinformation from any source can cause no harm, broadly defined. Of course, it can. The proper answer to this legitimate concern is that government-produced “safetyism,” placing safety above every other value including freedom, will do more harm than good.
I was banned from Elon’s ‘free speech’ X app for offending power
BY KIT KLARENBERG · THE GRAYZONE · MARCH 19, 2024
Following years of pressure from Israel lobbyists and British spooks, I was finally banned by Twitter/X. What does my removal say about Elon Musk, who flaunts his opposition to censorship, while promising to build an “everything app” where you could lose access to banking and messaging for violating dubious speech codes?
On February 17, I was suspended from Twitter/X without warning. The cause was mass-reporting by Zionist activists I’d offended. My removal was justified on the basis that I violated X’s “rules against violent speech.” Having endlessly condemned violence on the platform – in particular, the Gaza genocide – I’m flummoxed. Not least because a post from one of my Zionist detractors, which openly calls for me to be “battered on a weekly basis” over my political views, remains extant today.
Despite repeated requests for clarity from X, I have no idea whether I will ever be reinstated. In February, I received from “support” stating the suspension will only be reversed after three months. But just a few sentences later, the email contradicted itself, stating in closing that the ban would last just a month. Meanwhile, whenever I log into X, my profile appears to have zero followers or follows, I cannot view or search anyone’s tweets (including my own), and my DMs are inaccessible. Have they been erased? A landing page message reads:
“Your account is permanently in read-only mode, which means you can’t post, repost, or like content. You won’t be able to create new accounts.”
In January 2024, X purged a number of prominent, predominantly left-wing users without warning or explanation. Their suspensions were lifted only after a deluge of complaints poured in to the personal account of Elon Musk, the libertarian tech maven and self-proclaimed free speech warrior who purchased Twitter with his personal fortune.
I am grateful that scores of X users have done the same following my own suspension. However, Musk has kept mum about my case. While I may not have as many followers as those abruptly defenestrated in January, my work has been widely shared on X, with some posts gaining millions of impressions. Most-viewed was my December 2023 revelation that an unadvertised and unnoticed Russian government plane was parked in Washington DC’s Dulles airport, a visit which likely represented the beginning of the Ukraine proxy war’s end.
This [number of impressions] is quite a remarkable turnaround, given the concerted effort to suppress my Twitter output for as long as I have used the platform. One of the most illuminating disclosures in the Twitter Files exposed how the hyper-censorious regime that controlled the social media platform before Musk’s takeover required explicit authorization from managers to throttle accounts with more than 100,000 followers. Until then, engineers had free rein to covertly censor, suppress and shadowban anyone they wished, however they wished, without any oversight whatsoever.
This secret protocol offered a compelling explanation for curious developments regarding my own Twitter account in Summer 2022. For 18 months following my 2021 registration for Twitter, my follower count remained stubbornly low. This was until The Grayzone unmasked celebrity “journalist” Paul Mason as a British intelligence asset who directly coordinated attacks on anti-war figures and movements with a “friend” in the Foreign Office. I was the lead investigator on this series of reports.
The exposés generated significant attention the world over. My followers duly began multiplying by hundreds daily. Curiously, however, whenever I was a few dozen shy of 10,000, the total would crash back down. Evidently, Twitter staffers – and powerful forces breathing down their necks – were absolutely determined no one saw what I had to say.
Besides the exposes of Mason I worked on, there was my October 2019 report revealing Gordon Macmillan, a senior Twitter executive, as a member of 77th Brigade, the British Army’s shadowy psychological warfare unit which specializes in the weaponization of social media.
Had Macmillan and his fellow national security cadres exacted revenge on me when I was finally banned from Twitter/X? And what does my permanent removal say about X’s new boss, Elon, who advertises X as a platform that “champions free speech,” while promising to build an “everything app” where you could presumably lose access to your bank and messaging history for violating dubious speech codes?
Frozen out of ‘everything’ by Elon
Gordon MacMillan was one of many high-ranking staffers rightly sacked from the company upon Musk’s acquisition. From my perspective, while the owner’s politics couldn’t be further removed from my own, I have largely defended and embraced the changes he has implemented.
During an October 26, 2023 all-hands meeting at Twitter/X headquarters, Musk opened his remarks by announcing that he was “transforming the company from what it was, Twitter 1.0, to the everything app.”
He vowed to establish “a single application that encompasses everything. You can do payments, messages, video, calling, whatever you’d like, from one single, convenient place.”
“We just don’t have that,” Musk lamented. “It doesn’t exist outside of China.”
I might not have been using X for “everything”, but it was an extremely useful tool in my personal and professional life. My banning offered me a stark illustration of the dangers of relying so heavily on a privately-owned social media app, especially one that provides features that are almost essential in a digital world.
Many are anxious about the rise of digital payments and currencies, for this would inevitably grant financial institutions, and governments, monopoly power over how citizens can spend their cash, and even more gravely, whether they can. Fall foul of such powerful forces, even accidentally, and you might find yourself frozen out of your life savings, perhaps forever. If X is to truly become an “everything” app, the implications of a ban will be greatly multiplied, with suspensions effectively locking a user out of every sphere of their public and private life.
We haven’t reached that point yet. But the consequences of X’s arbitrary suspension process are very real. There are now scores of people — comrades, collaborators, critics, and journalistic sources — from whom I’m now cut off, perhaps forever. Meanwhile, the contents of our conversations seem to have been rendered permanently inaccessible – except, perhaps, by Musk himself.
The vaguely-explained, arbitrary suspension means I’m not only being deprived the ability to express my opinions in a public forum, hold the powerful to account, expose hypocrisy, criminality and even genocide, and directly engage with my supporters and detractors. It also means I’ve lost a platform through which to conduct sensitive conversations with sources across the globe.
The start of something worse?
In a June 2019 op-ed, United Nations special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer wrote that once WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been “dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide.” A key component of the WikiLeaks founder’s “isolation” was the Ecuadorian Embassy cutting off his internet access in March 2018.
As I previously revealed, that act was just one aspect of a wide-ranging black propaganda campaign executed by a British intelligence cutout called the Integrity Initiative. By falsely framing Assange as a Russian agent, London successfully pressured Quito into banning his personal visits as well as any and all communication with the outside world. Immediately thereafter, British police launched ‘Operation Pelican,’ a scheme designed to extract Assange from the embassy and ultimately transfer him into US custody.
Operation Pelican succeeded one year later, and Assange has festered in Belmarsh Prison, Britain’s Gitmo, ever since. As he awaits extradition to Washington, where he could face 175 years in a supermax prison, Assange has been blocked from communicating with the outside world. Press photographers were even prohibited from capturing his wedding day inside the jail on the grounds of national security. Is my Twitter/X suspension part of a similar effort to isolate me, so when the British state deprives me of my most fundamental rights, it won’t provoke public outrage?
Alternatively, recall the role Twitter/X played in the case of independent journalist Steve Sweeney, who was arbitrarily detained in Mexico while on his way to cover Nicaragua’s November 2021 election, which the US State Department had condemned. Sweeney might have languished in prison for an interminable period had word not immediately spread across Twitter, resulting in his release after three nightmarish days in custody without food or clean water. Activists in Mexico were at the forefront of the push to free Sweeney.
Since May 2023, when British counter-terror officials detained, interrogated, and digitally strip searched me for six hours without granting my right to silence or privacy, I have found travel unnerving — particularly the act of arriving at, walking through, and exiting airports.
I don’t know what information global databases display about me, which claims regarding my character have been shared with foreign governments, or whether I’ve been erroneously flagged as an international security threat.
Influential security state-tied figures like Paul Mason have openly clamored for me to be jailed as punishment for my journalistic activities. Heidi Bachram, the British pro-Israel activist who led the campaign to mass-report me on X over my solidarity with Palestine, has expressed hope that I “will never again be allowed to visit” my homeland. Her supporters have echoed the sentiment.
There are clear indications that a number of shadowy, intelligence-linked elements are monitoring my activity online. In November 2023, an Irish defense consultant who claims to have “advised government, military and civil society actors in Ukraine and other European countries regarding defence policy,” bizarrely alleged: “Klarenberg… showed his FSB signature training as [sic] early 2014.”
I have no idea what they were alluding to, and certainly have never received any training by Russian intelligence. But it’s not unreasonable to think I’d be in the military alliance’s crosshairs. That same month, the NATO Stratcom Center of Excellence described me as one of the “agents and sympathizers” of a “hostile regime” in a report which effusively advocated for the cyberbullying, harassment, stalking, and doxxing of anti-imperialists.
British censorship org targets The Grayzone?
Apparently not content with simply targeting me personally, these same forces have relentlessly attacked The Grayzone as well. In August 2022, longtime British intelligence operative Ross Burley publicly smeared The Grayzone as a “Russian propaganda outfit” and asserted it was “incredibly irresponsible for YouTube and other social media companies” to platform our journalists. The cause of his ire may have been our 2021 report on leaked files that exposed details of Britain’s wide-ranging, clandestine intelligence operations targeting Russia.
In response, Twitter took the unprecedented step of applying a “warning” label to each and every tweet linked to this report, cautioning users it contained “materials obtained through hacking.” The policy backfired, however, after countless users mocked the label and turned it into a meme. Others, meanwhile, suggested Twitter’s label simply amounted to a seal of authenticity that confirmed the leaked material’s veracity. As to the question of why the social network chose to slap this label on The Grayzone exclusively, and overlook Western-funded “OSINT” collectives such as Bellingcat which routinely publish stolen material, recent developments may provide some clue.
In February, Politico revealed that Britain’s Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee had been unsuccessfully attempting to woo major social media platforms to join its board. The Committee is a Ministry of Defence-run censorship mechanism tasked with dictating which security-related stories mainstream media is authorized to report. When the Committee asks British journalists and editors to withhold information from the public, they almost always comply.
Politico quoted Geoffrey Dodds, a DSMA secretary and former military official, as saying Google and Meta were among the social media giants on the Committee’s wishlist. He proposed that tech firms monitor their platforms for content relating to Britain’s “national security,” then seek the Committee’s advice on whether to censor. Yet his effort has so far been unsuccessful, as the companies reportedly “felt that they couldn’t sit on [the board] because it was too linked to government.”
Still, Dodds remained optimistic that the British government would “come up with a grand bargain with the tech giants… then hopefully, we’ll be able to get the tech giants back on board.” Politico said the Committee was “steadfast” in its determination to get social media firms aboard. Dodds remarked that moving forward, “there’s probably going to be less print, just as much broadcasting, and a continued increase in social media and online [news]… So we need to get into this game.”
Publicly-available minutes of the DSMA Committee’s June 2023 meeting show that the body’s Deputy Secretary, retired Navy Captain Jon Perkins, disclosed that between October 2022 and April 2023, material of “extreme sensitivity (in national security terms)” had been “protected from inadvertent disclosure” thanks to the Committee’s interventions with journalists. This material was “of the most sensitive nature he had seen” since joining.
While the “nature” of that “material” was unstated, Perkins may well have been referring to a series of investigations The Grayzone published throughout that precise period detailing London’s secret and pivotal role in escalating the Ukraine proxy war. Given this outlet’s reputation as a leading source of insight on the cloak-and-dagger machinations of the US and British-led Western national security state, the DSMA Committee would welcome its suppression on Twitter/X and other platforms at least as much as it did my indefinite suspension.
After years of pressure from Western security state operatives, I was finally banished from Twitter/X under the watch of the billionaire owner who has flaunted his ideological opposition to censorship. On his coming “everything app,” it seems that everything you say can and will be used against you.
“It’s Not About Trump”: American CJ Hopkins, Charged Again in Germany, Describes Global Censorship Effort
Acquitted on German hate speech charges in January, American playwright CJ Hopkins is being charged again for the same offense.
By Matt Taibbi | Racket News | March 20, 2024
The German people are famous for putting everything in print, even things they shouldn’t, and in this instance at least, American playwright and author CJ Hopkins is glad. “The irony,” he says, laughing. “The Germans, always documenting everything.”
In a letter from the Berlin Prosecutor’s file on Hopkins, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA, analogous to our FBI) acknowledges receipt of a document from a government office describing an effort to have tweets deleted. “The Hessen Gegen Hetze reporting office,” the highlighted portion reads, “has already initiated measures to delete the relevant post on the social network”:
Hopkins reached out to me after listening in disgust to the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court hearing Monday. Standing was a big issue: our government said plaintiffs like Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Aaron Kheriaty lacked definite proof that the government was responsible for suppressing their speech. No such issue exists in CJ’s case, as you can see.
Hopkins also wanted Americans who might be up in arms about the specter of legalized censorship in their own country to see that the phenomenon has also spread to virtually every Western democracy, often in more extreme forms than we’ve seen so far in the United States.
CJ’s unique insight involves his ludicrous German case, which as you’ll read in the Q&A below has taken bizarre turns since we last checked and will now go to trial yet again. As an expat following the American situation from afar, he’s seen how the authoritarian tide is rising in similar or worse ways all around the globe.
Hopkins is facing the business end of the German version, among the worst. As detailed last June, he was charged with “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.” The crime? Using a barely detectible Swastika in the cover image of his book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. Far from “furthering the aims” of Nazism, he was criticizing them by comparing Nazi methods and laws to those of modern health authorities. The offending image:
Hopkins went to trial in January and delivered an impassioned plea to the court. “Every journalist that has covered my case, everyone in this courtroom, understands what this prosecution is actually about,” he said. “It has nothing to do with punishing people who actually disseminate pro-Nazi propaganda. It is about punishing dissent, and making an example of dissidents in order to intimidate others into silence.”
Though the judge was clearly not a fan of Hopkins — a courtroom account by Aya Velázquez, which I recommend reading, described how the judge said CJ’s statements were “ideological drivel,” just “not punishable by law” — he won on the law.
After acquittal, he was made aware that technically the case wasn’t over, because thanks to a quirk of German jurisprudence, the prosecutor had a week to file an appeal. Hopkins was unconcerned. “I doubt he will [re-file]. He made a total fool of himself in front of a large audience yesterday,” he wrote. “I can’t imagine that he will want to do that again.”
Bzzt! Wrong. The prosecutor re-filed charges. The prosecutorial theory in the Hopkins case was based on a bizarre interpretation of hate crime, essentially asserting that if you have to think about an image to realize it’s satire, it can’t be allowed. If that idea spreads, it would make comedy or even sharp commentary impossible. This is why his indictment, and the similar investigation of Roger Waters, are really serious moments. Not to be heavy-handed, but eliminating the loophole for satire or mockery is exactly what Waters meant by “Another Brick in the Wall.” Before you know it, it’ll be too high to see over:
MT: You got charged again?
CJ Hopkins: No… I got acquitted. I went to trial on the 23rd of January, and I wrote this up and I’ll send it to you so you can just look at the whole account. But at the trial I made a big aggressive statement that people republished all over the place. The judge acquitted me, and then called me all kinds of names and then put on her covid mask and stalked out of the courtroom. She called me a Schwurbler, which in German is kind of an idiot, I guess a babbler or someone.
Anyway, I read that statement, which pissed them all off, but she said, “Okay, you’re an idiot, but that’s not against the law, so you’re acquitted.” So I thought, “Great. This is over. I’m acquitted.” The prosecutor had no case whatsoever, and it was really embarrassing, and I figured it was all done, but my attorney reminded me: oh no, the prosecutor can appeal. Which he did. So now I’m facing another trial in appeals court. It’s not new charges, it’s the same charge, but the prosecutor’s appeal of my acquittal.
MT: The double jeopardy thing isn’t big in Germany, I take it?
CJ Hopkins: No.
MT: Are they going to make a different argument?
CJ Hopkins: I have no idea what they’re going to do. They have no argument… I mean, they put my tweets up on an overhead projector, like we were back in high school, and interrogated me about whether the Swastika was on top of the mask or behind the mask, that sort of thing. The prosecutor’s argument was basically, “We don’t believe that Mr. Hopkins is a Nazi, or pro-Nazi, we don’t believe he was trying to spread Nazi propaganda, but he nonetheless spread Nazi propaganda. because his tweet” – and this is a great part of their argument – “because if people saw his tweets, they would have to stop and think for a minute to figure out what they meant.”
MT: Essentially you can’t have satire, because that requires a person to have at least one thought.
CJ Hopkins: You can’t make people think. You’ve got to have beat-you-over-the-head messaging. I think the whole point of this… I’m sure it’s like the plea-bargain thing in the States. They figure if they hit you with a 3,600 Euro fine, you’re going to pay three times that much to fight it in court, so you’re just going to pay the fine and go away. I don’t think they ever expected to end up in court, and I have no idea what the prosecutor is doing with this appeal. The judge a few weeks later submitted a written verdict, which is strongly in my favor. She pretty much reiterated my attorney’s arguments and made it absolutely clear that what I did falls under the exceptions to the statute, and there’s nothing here to prosecute. Nonetheless, the prosecution’s going ahead.
MT: Did you have much Western news coverage?
CJ Hopkins: Right before the trial I had you, then Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which is the big paper of record in Switzerland, and James Kirchick at The Atlantic, who was a big help. I think it put a lot of pressure on the judge. My lawyer made her aware that Germany was being portrayed as a laughingstock in the international press. Aside from The Atlantic, it was all independent alternative media.
MT: In the Murthy Supreme Court case in the States Monday, there was an issue with what they call “traceability.” I see you don’t have a traceability issue, with this document from your case file?
CJ Hopkins: Exactly. That’s why I sent it to you. Unquestionably, this is a government office, directly involved with removing the tweets. The other thing that I was going to say, is that I’m looking at things like the Supreme Court case from a non-U.S. perspective. I’m outside of it. I’m watching the legislation that’s getting rolled out in Ireland and the UK and what’s happening to me here and what’s going on in the States, and it’s so obviously much broader than just a red-blue political story in the US. This is happening throughout the Western democratic countries.
I’m just desperate to get that across to people. I think it’s so easy for people to get locked into what’s going on in their own country and not see the bigger picture.
MT: What’s an example?
CJ Hopkins: There was just a piece in The Herald, in Scotland. The police were being trained there on how to crack down on abusive hate speech. According to this new legislation that’s rolling out and in the training manual, they were saying this could take place in comic performances or stage plays. People are being arrested in the UK for protest signs.
If I can just put one little bug in your head, Matt, to whatever degree you can tweak people and let them know: “Hey, it’s not just Trump and the Democrats and the liberals and the woke people and all that.” This is happening all over the West, in all these different countries. I think that’s one thing that my case does, it provides folks with an opportunity to remind them that this is happening all over. The old rules don’t apply.
MT: Good luck with your case.
CJ Hopkins: Take care.
Scottish Police Training Targets Blogs, Podcasts, and Social Media Under Authoritarian New Censorship Law
The new law will be introduced on April 1st
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | March 20, 2024
Police training in some countries these days goes well beyond what one would normally expect, to include targeting content – including artistic – deemed to be “threatening” or “abusive.”
It’s not about China – at least this time. It’s about Scotland. There, officers are learning how to put blogs, podcasts, social media posts, and even simply reposts into their proverbial crosshairs.
According to reports, actors and comedians are not exempt from this type of scrutiny if somebody feels offended, and reports them.
A story in the Scottish press, based on leaked material, details this practice, which is said to be happening thanks to the newly enacted “hate crime law” (Hate Crime and Public Order, Scotland) – even if, formally, such interpretations appear to run afoul of the actual legislation.
The implications of the law, however, are not flying under the radar, as local media says Conservatives in Scotland are questioning the lawfulness of assessing content created “through public performance of a play” for its potential as “threatening and abusive.”
And only about a year since he was appointed to oversee the law, Assistant Chief Constable David Duncan has now retired.
Police in Scotland previously said that every report identifying content as hateful toward “protected characteristics” (such as age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgenderism) will be investigated.
That sounds like officers there might end up with little time to do anything else, as a scheme positioned so broadly can easily be repeatedly abused. As for the response – once they go through “every hate crime complaint” – the promise is that law enforcement will exhibit “proportionate response.”
“An example of why it is so important to preserve freedom of speech,” X owner Elon Musk commented, linking to a post about these developments.
As for the way it affects performing arts, but also everybody else – the law in effect equates memes and just good old jokes with things like, for example, revenge porn. One of the provisions states that the subject of prosecution will be “displaying, publishing or distributing the material” in places like signs, sites, blogs, podcasts, social platforms.
And that applies to these actions done both directly, and indirectly, e.g., via a repost. This is referred to as “forwarding or repeating” content from a third party.
The TikTok Totalitarians
By Daniel McAdams | Ron Paul Institute | March 18, 2024
On Wednesday, March 13th, a bipartisan group of US Representatives voted to give the US president the power to remove any website, computer or mobile application, or even service provider that the president determines – without due process – is run by “a person subject to the direction of control of a foreign person or entity” as long as that foreign person or entity is declared an “adversary” of the US.
And who gets to decide who is an “adversary”? The US President.
Cut through the hollow propaganda about the Chinese using it to spy on and subvert Americans – another “Saddam’s got WMDs” lie – and it is the most dangerous and un-American piece of legislation since the PATRIOT Act.
In fact it may be arguably worse. While the PATRIOT Act was a fig leaf for the government to spy on Americans, this demon of a bill will actually allow the US Government to determine what Americans can read and thereby what they will think. Isn’t that just what supporters of this bill claim the Chinese government is doing?
Take all the massive evidence of US government collusion and censorship of Americans’ “wrongthink” exposed by the heroic Matt Taibbi and the rest of the “Twitter Files” investigators and multiply it by a million and you won’t even then begin to understand the damage this law will do once it’s passed in the Senate and signed by Biden.
Twitter/X and its owner Elon Musk are routinely claimed to be biased toward (or sometimes against) Russia. Obviously “foreign adversary controlled.” Shut it down.
The video hosting and streaming service Rumble minimizes restrictions on what can be uploaded. It rightly calls itself the free-speech platform. They even allow Russian media RT and Iran’s PressTV to give a perspective different than that given by the US government and mainstream media. Shut it down. “Foreign adversary controlled.”
How about the Ron Paul Liberty Report? We often take positions at odds with the policies of the US Administration and criticize, for example, sending hundreds of billions to fight a proxy war in Ukraine. Obviously “foreign adversary controlled.” Shut it down.
Every single independent conservative media outlet that is sympathetic to Donald Trump will be in the crosshairs of President Biden when this bill becomes law, as Biden and his crew consistently accuse Trump – even after all these years – of being in Putin’s back pocket. That is why right-winger Federalist CEO Sean Davis is horrified by the move, writing on Twitter/X:
“It’s not that the U.S. government wants to protect you from spying and data theft and manipulation. If only. No, the people behind the Russian collusion hoax, and the Kavanaugh hoax, and the natural origin COVID hoax, and the illegal warrantless spying, and the forced transing of your children—they want to be the ones spying on you and stealing your data and poisoning the minds of your children.”
Those on the Left should take heed: Be assured that if Donald Trump is elected president this fall, the bill will become the same political cudgel used by the Right to silence your alternative media outlets as well.
Libertarian-minded progressives like Glenn Greenwald see the danger – and the pattern – clearly, as he writes:
“The TikTok bill is how rights erosions always always always work: Pick a target to start with that everyone hates or fears, so that everyone unites in support, nobody wants to defend. Then the precedent is set, so when it expands inward, nobody can object any longer.”
See where this is going? It’s not about China. It’s about our freedom to consume whatever media we wish to consume. No one is forced to use TikTok. If an American exercising his or her First Amendment rights determines that any risk of using TikTok is one worth taking, that is his or her right.
Tucker Carlson – no friend of China – rightly deemed it, “the most far reaching act of censorship in the history of the United States.” He added, “it’s an attack on the right of American citizens to receive their information from any source they choose.”
After the ignominious House vote, Tucker had Sen. Rand Paul on his program to explain how the “we are protecting Americans from the Chinese Communists” explanation for attacking the US Constitution is nothing but a ruse. Watch that episode on Twitter/X here.
Sen. Paul himself pointed out the hypocrisy in the US government taking such an authoritarian approach to censorship, writing on Twitter/X, “Emulating Chinese communism is not the way to combat Chinese communism.”
There is a mafia element to the legislation as well. The bill demands that TikTok be sold to avoid being banned.
Remember when Michael Corleone told this then-girlfriend Kay Adams how his father, Don Vito Corleone, “encouraged” the bandleader that had Johnny Fontaine under contract to let him out of the contract when Johnny started to become a star:
- Michael Corleone: My father made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
- Kay Adams: What was that?
- Michael Corleone: Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract. That’s a true story.
This is exactly what the US government is doing with this legislation. It’s hardly surprising that now that this US government threat against TikTok has likely seriously devalued the company, deep state denizens like former US Treasury Secretary Steven “Goldman Sachs” Mnuchin is sniffing around ready to pick up TikTok for a song.
Either TikTok’s signature or its brains will be on Mnuchin’s contract.
This is gangsterism and authoritarianism on steroids, yet the uniparty running Washington DC lapped it up like mother’s milk. Perhaps that is why they lapped it up so enthusiastically.
When this bill becomes law, a big part of America will have died. That’s not an exaggeration.
Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-Producer/co-Host, Ron Paul Liberty Report. Daniel served as the foreign affairs, civil liberties, and defense/intel policy advisor to U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, MD (R-Texas) from 2001 until Dr. Paul’s retirement at the end of 2012. From 1993-1999 he worked as a journalist based in Budapest, Hungary, and traveled through the former communist bloc as a human rights monitor and election observer.
Germany: Green Party demands TikTok ban of popular AfD party
By Denes Albert | Remix News | March 19, 2024
To keep people away from Alternative for Germany (AfD) content, the Green-affiliated campaign network Campact wants to ban the AfD from TikTok. With the AfD the second most popular party in the country, part of the party’s appeal may be tied to its popularity on TikTok, where it is more popular than all the other German parties and has twice as many followers as all other parties combined.
The ruling left-liberal government is desperate to stop the AfD, including using anti-democratic means. While the government works towards banning the party entirely, a part of this all-out effort against AfD means cutting it off from the marketplace of ideas, where the other parties are outright losing.
Campact is working to collect signatures in this effort, calling for the AfD to be banned from TikTok. They will deliver this petition to representatives of the company’s headquarters in Berlin.
The reason given is: “The right-wing extremist slogans reach children and young people in particular.” The Green-backed organization claims this is “dangerous.”
The campaign network is aiming to obtain 200,000 signatures before it delivers its petition to the Berlin branch of the short-form video platform. However, Campact has overshot this mark, earning around 250,000 signatures in what it describes as a campaign against “hatred and agitation.”
AfD’s popularity is a major problem for rival parties on the platform, where AfD features over 409,000 followers, while the Social Democrats (SPD), the Left Party, Free Democrats (FDP), the Christian Democrats (CDU), and the Greens only have a combined total of 220,000 followers. AfD videos are also wildly popular in comparison, earning twice the number of views of all other parties combined.
The former campaign manager of the Green Party and an influential political advisor, Johannes Hillje, is warning about the party’s success.
“The TikTok generation is threatening to become an AfD generation,” he said to Der Spiegel. He said that AfD’s strong showing in state elections is tied to younger people voting for the party, which is due in part to the AfD’s successful TikTok strategy.
Teens and young people are also openly backing the AfD on TikTok. Notably, this week, a freedom-of-speech scandal erupted after reports that a 16-year-old, Loretta B., posted comments on TikTok supportive of the AfD party. When three officers pulled her out of her school in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, it resulted in a major scandal and warnings of a repressive police state. The scandal has made international news, with billionaire Elon Musk even defending the girl on X.
Remix News’ TikTok channel faces a shadowban on TikTok after earning millions of views. The account featured numerous warnings for news content and multiple suspensions, showcasing TikTok’s willingness to ban or shadowban news platforms and opinions. However, AfD’s channel has so far avoided such censorship.
Supreme Court Appears Wary of Blocking Biden Admin-Big Tech Censorship Collusion
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | March 18, 2024
During oral arguments in a major First Amendment case on Monday, the Supreme Court expressed reservations about restricting interactions between the Biden administration and social media platforms. This concern emerged during the Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden) case, which delves into the extent of governmental influence over online content.
Brian Fletcher, Principal Deputy Solicitor General of the United States, presented oral arguments for the petitioners in the case, Biden’s Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy and several other current and former members of the Biden administration.
The respondents in the case, the States of Missouri and Louisiana, and several other individuals who were subject to social media censorship, allege that the federal government had pressured platforms to block or downgrade posts on various topics, including some related to Covid and the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Several lower courts agreed with the respondents, with a district judge describing the Biden administration’s Big Tech-censorship collusion as “Orwellian” and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals finding that the Biden admin likely violated the First Amendment when pushing for social media censorship.
During the oral arguments today though, the justices displayed skepticism towards a broad prohibition on governmental communications with social media platforms. They raised concerns that such a ruling could unduly restrain the government’s ability to address pressing issues.
Fletcher defended the Biden admin’s actions and framed them as the government exercising its right to “speak for itself by informing, persuading, or criticizing private speakers.” He argued that the government is entitled to communicate with social media companies to influence their content moderation decisions, as long as these interactions do not veer into coercion. According to Fletcher, the litmus test for legality should be the presence or absence of threats from the government, asserting that using the bully pulpit for exhortations is a right protected under the First Amendment.
Fletcher also tried to argue for the significant power and autonomy of social media companies, noting their capability to resist governmental pressures.
The solicitor general of Louisiana, Benjamin Aguiñaga, representing one of the Republican-led states behind the lawsuit, argued that the government’s actions amounted to coercion, effectively leading to censorship by social media platforms. He highlighted a significant shift in the focus of government-led content moderation. Initially aimed at tackling foreign interference and misinformation, these efforts increasingly targeted speech by American citizens, particularly around the contentious topics of the 2020 election and the pandemic.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson challenged Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga’s viewpoint. “And so I guess some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country. And you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information. So, can you help me? Because I’m really worried about that.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett also voiced concerns, questioning whether the FBI could legally request social media platforms to remove content, such as posts revealing personal information about officials.
Aguiñaga’s argument was that such actions could potentially suppress constitutionally protected speech.
The oral arguments went off into the weeds and into the nuances of what constitutes “coercion” by the government in its interactions with social media platforms, rather than directly addressing the core text of the First Amendment. This focus on “coercion” rather than the First Amendment’s explicit wording – prohibiting the “abridging” of the freedom of speech, or of the press – played into the Biden administration’s hands.
Justices Kavanaugh and Kagan drew a comparison between the case and the interactions that often occur between administration officials and news media. They proposed that efforts by officials to shape media coverage should be seen as constructive dialogue, not necessarily an attempt at censorship, and suggested such actions don’t violate the First Amendment’s provisions.
Kagan challenged the lawyer from Louisiana to demonstrate that the removal of the contentious posts was the result of government intervention rather than actions taken by the social media companies themselves.
“What distinguishes this as an act of the government rather than a decision made by the platforms?” Kagan inquired.
The discussion among the justices also ventured into the standing of the plaintiffs – Missouri and Louisiana, accompanied by five individuals – to bring the lawsuit. They questioned whether these parties had experienced a direct injury that would justify their legal challenge. Furthermore, the justices expressed doubts about the appropriateness of a wide-ranging injunction that would bar various officials from contacting social media platforms as a remedy to the alleged issue.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor specifically addressed concerns regarding the approach taken by the plaintiffs in presenting their case. Directing her comments to Aguiñaga, Justice Sotomayor criticized the framing of their argument. She pointed out that the plaintiff’s brief seemed to leave out crucial information, thereby altering the context of certain claims, a point which she found particularly troubling.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. appeared to concur with the notion that the federal government’s diverse array of agencies, which often lack a unified stance, weakens the argument of coercion. During a dialogue with the attorney from Louisiana, he observed, “It’s not monolithic.” He then posed a question that implied this multiplicity of voices in the federal government could substantially diminish the idea of coercion: “That has to dilute the concept of coercion significantly. Doesn’t it?”
While the justices mostly appeared skeptical of prohibiting the federal government from pressuring social media platforms to censor speech, there were some moments where they questioned the Biden admin’s arguments.
Justice Sotomayor pressed Fletcher to give her specifics on how the injunction that prohibits officials from coercing or significantly encouraging a platform’s content-moderation decisions would harm the government.
Fletcher responded by claiming that the injunction would prevent the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from flagging foreign “disinformation” to platforms, prevent White House officials from criticizing the platform’s practices on “misinformation,” and prevent officials complaining about or flagging various other types of legal content on social media.
Justice Samuel Alito also noted that two lower courts have found or accepted that some examples of Big Tech censorship that were highlighted in this case were “traceable to the government’s actions.”
He added: “We don’t usually reverse findings of fact that had been endorsed by two lower courts.”
Additionally, Justice Alito expressed skepticism about the White House and other federal officials constant “pestering” of Facebook and other social media platforms.
“And I thought, wow, I cannot imagine federal officials taking that approach to the print media,” Justice Alito said. “I thought, you know, the only reason why this is taking place is because the federal government has got Section 230 and antitrust in its pocket, and it’s…to mix my metaphors, and it’s got these big clubs available to it. And so it’s treating Facebook and these other platforms like their subordinates.”
After the hearing, the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), one of the legal groups representing the respondents in this case, urged the justices to recognize that the Biden admin’s censorship pressure violated the First Amendment.
“Our clients, who include top doctors and scientists, were censored for social media posts that turned out to be factually accurate, depriving the public of valuable perspectives during a public health crisis,” Jenin Younes, Litigation Counsel at the NCLA said. “We’re optimistic that the majority will look at the record and recognize that this was a sprawling government censorship enterprise without precedent in this country, and that this cannot be permitted to continue if the First Amendment is to survive.”
SpaceX’s spy satellite network deal a major step toward ‘space militarization,’ poses new threat to global security: experts
By Fan Anqi and Guo Yuandan | Global Times |March 17, 2024
SpaceX’s increasing involvement in US’ military deployment poses a new threat to world peace and stability, and may even impact the everyday lives of ordinary people around the world, experts warned after the company is reportedly building a powerful spy satellite network using hundreds of its satellites for US intelligence agencies.
In an exclusive report from Reuters on Saturday, the commercial space giant is allegedly building a network of spy satellites under a classified contract worth $1.8 billion with a US intelligence agency called the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), Reuters said, citing sources familiar with the program.
A special business unit under SpaceX, Starshield, is undertaking the project, the sources revealed, and if successful, it would significantly advance the US military’s ability to quickly spot potential targets “almost anywhere on the globe,” the reports said.
The reason the NRO chose SpaceX was mainly due to the company’s advantage in the number of small satellites it has in orbit, which allows for maximum coverage of more orbital levels, Wei Dongxu, a Beijing-based military expert and media commentator, told the Global Times on Sunday.
“The large number of satellites can enable the monitoring of a certain area without any blind spots, not only in coverage but also in time duration, thereby creating an all-encompassing spy network above the heads of all countries around the world,” Wei said.
Starshield was established in December 2022, when the company announced it was “expanding its Starlink satellite technology into military applications.” The target customers of Starshield includes the Pentagon and other national security agencies.
While the company tried hard to separate the two units to calm public worries, it is clear to all that the line is not so clear. Starshield will utilize the Starlink satellite constellation in low-Earth orbit to meet the growing needs of the US defense and intelligence agencies, media reports said, further blurring the boundary between civilian and military use.
Prior to this program, the Pentagon was already a big customer of SpaceX, using its Falcon 9 rockets to launch a dozen military payloads into space, according to media reports.
“This move is very dangerous,” Wei said, as once space becomes another arena for arms race, the company’s assets could be in jeopardy. In addition, if this spy satellite network gets involved in a US-instigated “space war” and thus poses threats to other countries, SpaceX may become a target for retaliation or counterbalance.
Wang Ya’nan, chief editor of Aerospace Knowledge magazine, believes that countries and regions will definitely take countermeasures once the network become operational, such as by moving facilities underground or using optical camouflage for concealment. As a result, obtaining sensitive information would still not be “a piece of cake” for US intelligence agencies, Wang told the Global Times.
Nevertheless, observers believe the spy network will pose a new threat to global peace and security. “The US’ extensive intelligence reconnaissance of countries or regions of interest will inevitably make some hot-button issues more sensitive or even escalate, and it will also make already complex international relationships more difficult to handle,” Wang said.
Wei warned that the satellite system will not only monitor military targets but civilian targets as well, potentially exposing the daily lives of ordinary people to surveillance, which will have significant negative implications for information security and personal privacy protection worldwide.
While the US incessantly hypes China’s “growing threat” in space and advocates for “demilitarization,” it has not stopped building up its military capabilities in the field, with the true aim of achieving a dominant position in space technology to support its superiority. “Due to the US’ instigations, we may eventually have to face the fact that space has become a new battleground,” Wang noted.
Scientists call for radical reform of scientific government advice
Global Warming Policy Foundation | March 18, 2024
A wide-ranging review of official science advice examines serious failings in the way scientific advice is being delivered to governments and proposes radical reforms to improve it.
The report – with contributions by former UK government adviser Professor Michael Kelly, Clive Hambler, Professor Roger Kopple, Professor Peter Ridd and Harry Wilkinson – addresses fatal flaws in the scientific advice provided on climate change and during the Covid-19 pandemic and deplores the irresponsible use of computer modelling, among other issues.
Key recommendations for the reform of scientific advice include:
• The rapid challenge of advice, through official and adequately resourced ‘red teams’, agents provocateurs and crowd review.
• The establishment of a quality control auditing process.
• The need to balance the ‘precautionary principle’ against the opportunity costs incurred by ‘playing safe’ and against the risks of unintended consequences of action.
• More robust systems for registering conflicts of interest, with a presumption that conflicted individuals should be precluded from participating.
• A requirement that institutions such as universities, scientific academies and journals should not take official or settled positions on scientific issues, since this stifles diversity of thought, freedom of speech and the reliability of advice.
• Protections for scientists who rationally disagree with mainstream views, with stronger guarantees of freedom of speech.
• The encouragement of internal debate to guard against ‘groupthink’.
Lead author, Professor Michael Kelly, said:
“Scientific advisors give advice, but Ministers decide. This maxim is often abused. In recent times ‘we are following the science’ is a phrase to let politicians off the hook of the responsibility that is intrinsically theirs by virtue of being elected to parliament. Ministers ask for implementation-ready policy answers, rather than nuanced and caveated advice on which they must decide.
In the recent pandemic there was an inadequate critical challenge to the scientific advice from an economic or societal perspective. At a time when the scientific enterprise is more than ever subject to capture by vested interests, it is time for a root and branch review of science advice.”
Big Tech Alliance Targets Covid-19 “Misinformation,” Links it to “Extremism,” Calls for Content Censorship
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | March 16, 2024
Big Tech alliance Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFTC) research “partner” Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) has published an article revisiting the pandemic, always, of course, in the context of “misinformation.”
GIFTC’s founding members are Microsoft, Facebook, X (Twitter), and YouTube (Google), while “general members” include these four and pretty much every tech company you’ve ever heard of, from Amazon and Airbnb to BitChute and Giphy.
GIFTC has previously come under criticism for censorship practices without oversight, whereas GIFTC now goes after “Covid misinformation” – including by conflating it with extremism, and is urging “interventions to address the spread of problematic content.”
The piece claims that its goal is to understand the mechanisms that allow for “problematic information” to disseminate across platforms and then spread between the world’s regions, all for the sake of being able to stop that “diffusion.”
It looks into things like the geographical location of different participants in the “diffusion,” their cultural and linguistic similarities, as well as thematic similarity of content (such as religious and political themes).
The study also clearly positions itself ideologically when it, in passing, refers to former US and Brazilian presidents Trump and Bolsonaro as having “extremist predispositions.”
With that in mind, the choice of topics – the pandemic, misinformation, as well as “methodology and findings” become easier to understand.
Regarding the first, the authors chose to look into Facebook groups and organizations and individuals like Doctors for Truth and microbiologist Didier Raoult, collectively accused of sharing “false and misleading content” about coronavirus, vaccines, masks, hydroxychloroquine, etc., in one form or other.
And, the goal is to find out what helped this information travel from “Global North” to “Global South.”
Soon enough, what’s supposed to be countered thanks to the findings from this “research” is referred to as extremism in online networks, suggesting that Covid “misinformation” qualifies.
Because the “findings” show that interplay tied to language, culture, and themes covered by content shared by various groups is not easy to untangle and go after, the recommendation is to come up with “targeted network-informed interventions” that would prevent information flowing from one part of the world to another.
“By identifying key factors influencing tie formation, policymakers, and platform moderators can implement targeted interventions to mitigate the spread of extremist content,” those behind the article said.
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From the Archives
Precedents for Pizzagate
Marc Dutroux, Belgian pedophile, sadist, and serial killer with friends in high places
By Aedon Cassiel | Counter – Currents | December 23, 2016
To reiterate a point that should be clear to the more astute reader, my goal in this series (part 1, part 2) has not been to defend “Pizzagate” as such. My goal has been to defend the people who want to investigate it against specific accusations levied against them by people who think Pizzagate has revealed no intriguing information at all—for a specific reason, which I will be honing in and focusing on much more directly in this closing entry.
Whereas the mainstream critics of Pizzagate would have you believe that the dividing line is between paranoid conspiracy theorist followers of “fake news” and level-headed people who follow trustworthy news sources and rely on cold, hard reason to determine the truth, my goal has been to show that—whatever is or is not happening with Pizzagate itself—this framing of the issue is arrogant, insulting, and the product of extremely narrow tunnel vision. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- West’s Claims of Non-Involvement in Ukraine Conflict ‘Epitome of Hypocrisy’ – Expert
- Putin aide urges retaliation to ‘Western piracy’
- The Depth Charge in the Womb
- ‘Fox guarding the henhouse’: AMA, Vaccine Integrity Project to conduct their own vaccine safety and efficacy reviews
- Macron, Merz, and von der Leyen Defend Expanded Speech Controls
- Keir Starmer-tied think tank paid PR firm to target The Grayzone
- ‘Israel’ threatens to genocide Gaza if Hamas refuses disarmament
- Apple Just Bought A Sinister ‘Pre-Speech’ Tech Company Implicated In Genocide
- Israel’s new West Bank registration process declares Palestinian land ‘state property’
- Two children killed in Palestinian Authority ambush in West Bank; Hamas slams attack as ‘black mark’
- If Americans Knew
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- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: A 4°C Warmer Beaufort Sea Had ‘No Sea Ice’ 11,700 – 8200 Years Ago
- Unfudging The Data: Dutch Meteorological Institute Reinstates Early 20th Centruy Heat Waves It Had Erased Earlier
- German Gas Crisis…Chancellor Merz Allegedly Bans Gas Debate Ahead of Elections!
- Pollen Reconstructions Show The Last Glacial’s Warming Events Were Global, 10x Greater Than Modern
- Germany’s Natural Gas Storage Level Dwindles To Just 28%… Increasingly Critical
- New Study Rebuts The Assumption That Anthropogenic CO2 Molecules Have ‘Special’ Properties
- Climate Scientist Who Predicted End Of “Heavy Frost And Snow” Now Refuses Media Inquiries
- Polar Bear Numbers Rising And Health Improving In Areas With The Most Rapid Sea Ice Decline
- One Reason Only For Germany’s Heating Gas Crisis: Its Hardcore-Dumbass Energy Policy
- 130 Years Later: The CO2 Greenhouse Effect Is Still Only An Imaginary-World Thought Experiment
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