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.”
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.
Harvard Fires Professor Who Co-wrote Great Barrington Declaration
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | March 12, 2024
Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., an epidemiologist and professor of Medicine at Harvard University, on Monday confirmed the university fired him.
Kulldorff has been a critic of lockdown policies, school closures and vaccine mandates since early in the COVID-19 pandemic. In October 2020, he published the Great Barrington Declaration, along with co-authors Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, Ph.D., and Stanford epidemiologist and health economist Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D.
In an essay published Monday in City Journal, Kulldorff wrote that his anti-mandate position got him fired from the Mass General Brigham hospital system, where he also worked, and consequently from his Harvard faculty position.
Kulldorff detailed how his commitment to scientific inquiry put him at odds with a system that he alleged had “lost its way.”
“I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard,” Kulldorff wrote. “The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired.”
He noted that it was clear from early 2020 that lockdowns would be futile for controlling the pandemic.
“It was also clear that lockdowns would inflict enormous collateral damage, not only on education but also on public health, including treatment for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental health,” Kulldorff wrote.
“We will be dealing with the harm done for decades. Our children, the elderly, the middle class, the working class, and the poor around the world — all will suffer.”
That viewpoint got little debate in the mainstream media until the epidemiologist and his colleagues published the Great Barrington Declaration, signed by nearly 1 million public health professionals from across the world.
The document made clear that no scientific consensus existed for lockdown measures in a pandemic. It argued instead for a “focused protection” approach for pandemic management that would protect high-risk populations, such as elderly or medically compromised people, and otherwise allow the COVID-19 virus to circulate among the healthy population.
Although the declaration merely summed up what previously had been conventional wisdom in public health, it was subject to tremendous backlash. Emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health called for a “devastating published takedown” of the declaration and of the authors, who were subsequently slandered in mainstream and social media.
Collins and other figures, including Dr. Rochelle Walensky who would go on to head up the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the pandemic, sought to undermine their credibility, Kulldorff wrote.
His tweets contradicting CDC policy that people with natural immunity must be vaccinated were flagged by the Virality Project, a government front group, and censored by Twitter.
“At this point, it was clear that I faced a choice between science or my academic career,” Kulldorff wrote. “I chose the former. What is science if we do not humbly pursue the truth?”
Kulldorff said he was also fired from the CDC COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Technical Work Group because he disagreed with the decision to completely pause the Johnson & Johnson adenovirus COVID-19 vaccine after a safety signal was detected for blood clots in women under 50.
He spoke out in op-eds and social media to argue the Johnson & Johnson shot should remain available for older Americans alongside the Pfizer and Moderna shots — the only other shots available in the U.S. market.
While Kulldorff’s arguments advocating the Johnson & Johnson vaccines may be flawed, investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel wrote today on his Substack, Kulldorff’s story reveals a “more powerful truth.”
“He found out the hard way that there is no crossing the tracks of the institutional freight train that is the Big Pharma-Government Health system of institutional capture that persists in America today,” Schachtel wrote.
“He threatened the gravy train that produced hundreds of billions of lawsuit-protected taxpayer dollars that were making their way to Pfizer and Moderna,” Schachtel added. “And for that sin, he was swiftly removed from his role on the CDC working group.”
Harvard also denied Kulldorff’s vaccine exemption requests. He publicly opposed the Harvard mandates and pushed for the university to rehire those who were fired and to eliminate its mandate for students.
The university last week dropped its COVID-19 mandate for students.
“Veritas has not been the guiding principle of Harvard leaders,” Kulldorff concluded. “Nor have academic freedom, intellectual curiosity, independence from external forces, or concern for ordinary people guided their decisions.”
To right the wrongs that have been done, he said, the broader scientific community must restore academic freedom and end “cancel culture.”
“Science cannot survive in a society that does not value truth and strive to discover it,” he wrote. “The scientific community will gradually lose public support and slowly disintegrate in such a culture.”
Harvard Medical School did not respond to The Defender’s request for comment.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
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.
“WHAT THE NURSES SAW” NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE (WELL, A SHORT VIDEO)
For more info go to www.WhatTheNursesSaw.com
Based on the book by Ken McCarthy.
Artwork by Anne Gibbons.
Video editing by Paul Morrison and Ken McCarthy.
BRASSCHECK
So what about “What the Nurses Saw”?
Over 7,000 copies sold so far. Not only that, the book is now being circulated among staff in TWO different U.S. Senators office: Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.
What the Nurses Saw
You can order the book here
Did Covid-19 Threaten the Life of a Nation?
A Better Way with Dr Tess Lawrie | March 5, 2024
Was Covid-19 a Trojan Horse for an attempted New World Order?
Many consider Covid-19 to have been a worldwide ‘Trojan Horse’ event that enabled human rights and freedoms to be trampled, dangerous medical interventions to be normalised, and an unprecedented transfer of wealth to take place from ordinary people to the super-rich. There is deep concern too that this was just a trial run, and that the immanent promulgation of the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) ‘Pandemic Treaty’ and amended International Health Regulations will take these tyrannical measures to an entirely different level.
In response to these concerns, the World Council for Health (WCH) has published a Legal Brief on Preventing the Abuse of Public Health Emergencies. This document explains how governments used the declaration of an unjustifiable state of emergency as a legal instrument to deny people their basic human rights and freedoms, and to grant themselves extraordinary powers.
Did Covid-19 meet the pre-requisites to declare a legitimate state of emergency?
The critical question that should have been addressed at the time was whether the threat posed by Covid-19 represented a public health emergency that threatened the life of the nation. The Legal Brief presents four criteria to be used to determine if a state of emergency should be declared. These criteria state that the threat should:
- be actual or imminent;
- involve the whole nation;
- place the continuation of the organised life of society at risk of extinction; and
- be so extraordinary that ordinary measures for protecting public health and order are clearly inadequate.
The arguments presented in this thoroughly referenced document show that the Covid-19 event never actually met any of these criteria. Thus, as it did not meet the legal conditions of an emergency ‘threatening the life of a nation’, all derogation measures such as lockdowns, mask mandates, school and small business closures, travel restrictions, and harmful vaccine mandates, were illegal breaches of International Human Rights Law (IHRL).
All States have a legal obligation to enact public policy that protects, respects, and ensures fundamental human rights. Furthermore, certain norms and fundamental human rights exist that can never be violated, not even during a declared state of emergency. Instead, during Covid-19, governments around the world chose to follow the recommendations of WHO, ignore the rights of citizens, and enact oppressive public health actions. It is also of huge concern that human rights organisations failed to hold governments to account for their abuse of emergency measures.
The Legal Brief maintains that, had people across the board been properly informed about the requirements of IHRL and the prerequisites necessary to declare a legitimate state of emergency, these gross violations of fundamental human rights would not have been possible.
Recommendations
To prevent future public health emergencies resulting in similar human rights abuses, the Legal Brief therefore recommends the following actions:
- To educate the public regarding the criteria to declare a legitimate state of emergency;
- To establish panels to monitor adherence to IHRL and communicate violations; and
- To establish activist groups to take necessary proactive legal action.
As the Legal Brief concludes:
… the widespread misuse of emergency measures during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed the view that, de facto, there “are no ultimate institutional safeguards available for ensuring that emergency powers be used for the purpose of preserving the Constitution.” The only thing that can guarantee this is the people’s own knowledge of the law, proactive legal action, and their determination to ensure that their governments do not abuse their discretionary power by imposing self-serving, biased, or arbitrary limitations on fundamental human rights.
We trust that this Legal Brief will be useful to lawyers and lay people alike in furthering legal and lawful recourse in the pursuit of Truth and Justice. You can download the full brief here.
What the Nurses Saw — It was Murder
An investigation into systemic medical murders that took place in hospitals during the COVID panic and the nurses who fought back to save their patients
By Ken McCarthy | December 6, 2023
No human activity can ever be free from error, but to be clear, this book is not about the kind of error all human beings are prone to.
As you will learn from the eye-witness accounts and technical information presented in this book, calling the failed COVID protocols “errors” is not accurate.
These protocols were explicitly ordered by those who took dictatorial control of the medical system early in the Panic (spring of 2020). Further, when they were shown to be demonstrably failing and harming many thousands of people, experienced healthcare professionals who raised informed concerns were silenced through demotion, firing, and organized campaigns of harassment promoted by the news media and enabled by companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, in some cases in collaboration with the White House and the Department of Justice’s FBI.
If this sounds very bad, it’s because it is.
What the Nurses Saw is documentation of what happens in the real world when bureaucrats, in this case bureaucrats in Washington DC, take literal dictatorial control over the practice of medicine.
On a pure dollar and cents level, one of every five dollars spent in the U.S. is spent on the products of the medical services industry, as is one of every three tax dollars. The U.S., more than any country in the world, and by a large measure, has been colonized by this industry. As part of this process, the industry and its operatives have corrupted and perverted science, academia, and the news media. Now it’s hard at work to weaken and degrade the last pillar that keeps the system even remotely functioning — the integrity of the nursing profession.
If we fail to support our good nurses, help them hold the line, and start aggressively turning things around, there is no practical limit to how far this totalitarian medical dictatorship which we in fact live under will go in its future abuse and exploitation of human beings.
Featuring in-depth interviews with:
Erin Marie Olszewski,
Kevin Corbett Ph.D.,
Kimberly Overton,
Ashley Grogg,
Kristen Nagle,
Sarah Choujounian,
AJ DePriest,
Mark Bishofsky,
and Katie Spence
Please share the link: WhatTheNursesSaw.com
Ex-UK Army Chief Nick Carter, Once In Charge of “Misinformation” Surveillance Army Unit, Joins Tony Blair Institute
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | February 28, 2024
A new noteworthy instance of what can be described as the UK-style revolving door policy, where those working for the government and private entities switch employers in both directions, has happened in that country.
A former chief of the British Army, under whose watch the 77th Brigade was spying on citizens during the pandemic, has now joined Tony Blair’s organization.
General Nick Carter is therefore a new recruit at the Institute for Global Change (globalist not in name only, either) – which the former British prime minister set up to supposedly create “open, inclusive and prosperous countries for all.”
Carter previously “distinguished” himself at the peak of the pandemic for allowing a unit under his command to hunt down “bad” speech on the internet – that of citizens skeptical of Covid measures and related contentious issues, whatever was treated as “Covid misinformation.”
Carter’s fellow new recruit at the Institute is former Government Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance. Another new hire is Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin. They will act as members of a team of “expert strategic counselors” in what critics might call Blair’s elitist globalist group – his own version of WEF, even.
Before becoming Blair’s private adviser, Carter, a decorated officer, served as the principal military advisor to the prime minister (reports don’t say which ones), as head of the Armed Forces, and finally the chief of the Defense Staff for the United Kingdom.
Back in the spring of 2020, reports cited Carter, then at the helm of the Defense Staff, saying that the 77th Brigade was “countering coronavirus misinformation online.”
Not a traditional deployment of a country’s military potential, even if it is one set up to carry out physiological warfare, like 77th Brigade had been.
And it didn’t make things better that the target of this warfare was free speech on the UK’s citizens – on Twitter, Facebook and the like.
No less than 2,000 military personnel were involved in this, with a dubious to say the least goal of what looks like a straight-forward attempt to sway opinion among the population.
This was at the time phrased as delivering “means of shaping behavior through the use of dynamic narratives.”
Related:
Tony Blair Institute Calls For a Digital ID For All British Citizens, Calls It The “Great Enabler”
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From the Archives
Major rabbi says non-Jews are donkeys, created to serve Jews
By Khalid Amayreh, in occupied East Jerusalem | The People’s Voice | October 18, 2010
A major Jewish religious figure in Israel has likened non-Jews to donkeys and beasts of burden, saying the main reason for their very existence is to serve Jews.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of the religious fundamentalist party, Shas, which represents Middle Eastern Jews, reportedly said during a Sabbath homily earlier this week that “the sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews.”
Yosef is considered a major religious leader in Israel who enjoys the allegiance of hundreds of thousands of followers. … continue
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