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Biden’s DHS Is Accused Of Being Weaponized Against Online Speech

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | May 26, 2023

The Biden administration has been accused of using a grant program initially created to combat terrorism to crackdown on the speech of conservatives, the Republican Party, and Christians, according to documents obtained by MRC Free Speech America through freedom of information requests.

Under the Biden administration, the Targeted Violence & Terrorism Prevention Grant Program (TVTP) has awarded public and private institutions almost $40 million to fight “all forms of terrorism and targeted violence.” However, the program has not been targeting actual terrorism. Instead, it has focused on targeting right-leaning organizations through “media literacy and online critical thinking initiatives” and other similar seminars.

Source: MRC

The program was created under the Obama administration in 2011. Its plan was titled “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States. The Trump administration paused it for about three years, before the DHS revamped it and renamed it the “Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention.”

During his campaign, Biden promised to disband the program. However, the DHS, led by Alejandro Mayorkas, has repurposed it to target specific organizations.

The DHS itself has refused to provide documents revealing details about the program. However, the organizations that received the grants did provide documents.

One of the recipients of the grants was the University of Dayton, which received $352,109 to create the PREVENTS-OH program to combat “domestic violence extremism and hate movements.

A chart used by the grantee and the DHS in a training program puts conservative organizations like the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Republican National Committee, the Heritage Foundation, Turning Point USA, and the National Rifle Association in the same category as organizations like The Base and websites like The Daily Stormer.

In the same seminar, President Trump was compared to Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, who was responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million people.

It was also suggested that Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis wanted to start a second Holocaust because in 2021 he proposed a civilian military force to assist the National Guard during emergencies.

In another seminar, Michael Loadentahl, a self-proclaimed member of the organization Antifa, the report alleges, explained how to create fake accounts on social media platforms like Gab, Rumble, and Telegram to infiltrate and destabilize conservative political movements.

In total, the TVTP program has awarded 80 grants, totaling $39,611,999.

May 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

An Open Letter to Ella Irwin, Head of Twitter’s Trust and Safety (and Censorship) Department

By CJ Hopkins | Consent Factory, Inc. | May 7, 2023

The following is an open letter to Ella G. Irwin, Head of Twitter Trust and Safety, and Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter, and anyone else at Twitter, Inc. who is responsible for censoring political speech and defaming people with fake “advisory” labels, among other such “visibility-filtering” tactics.

I am publishing it as an open letter, not to bore everyone to death with my personal problems, but because the censorship and defamation I have suffered at the hands of Twitter for at least two years is an example of how the decentralized network of global corporations, Intelligence agencies, governments, non-governmental governing entities, “anti-disinformation” outfits, and other parties that together comprise what Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi have dubbed the “Censorship Industrial Complex” are evolving into an Orwellian Ministry-of-Truth-type apparatus “with the power to control the information environment in ways that determine what people believe to be true and what is false.”

Twitter, Inc. has been censoring my political commentary and maliciously defaming me (i.e., damaging my reputation and income as an author) for approximately two years. Twitter has been doing this by concealing the Tweets of my “Consent Factory” account with fake “age-restricted adult content” labels, deceiving Twitter users into believing I have been tweeting content depicting “adult nudity and sexual behavior,” or “excessively gory content, sexual violence and/or assault, bestiality or necrophilia.” Twitter’s actions have damaged both my book sales and my reputation, globally. Defamation is a tort. I could sue the corporation for damages in several jurisdictions.

I have no interest in doing that, currently. What I do want, however, is a real explanation of why and exactly how Twitter, Inc. censored and defamed me for approximately two years. I want this explanation — a real explanation with documentation, not self-serving corporate-speak — not for personal reasons, primarily, but because I believe people need to be able to understand how powerful corporations like Twitter (and Facebook, and Google, and all the other entities and parties I mentioned above) are “visibility filtering” our collective reality.

The fact that these powerful corporations (and other entities) are doing this, not just on the macro level, but also on the micro level, to writers like me, who, let’s face it, are not exactly world-famous “influencers,” and to “non-public persons” who are basically just using social media to talk to their friends, does not bode well for the future of our societies. This kind of micro-perception-manipulation, this “visibility filtering” of our collective reality, goes way beyond traditional censorship. It is a hallmark of all totalitarian systems, which attempt to control, not only what people say, but what they think, how they think, how they perceive events, and facts, and each other.

Totalitarian systems do not spring into being fully formed. They develop slowly, gradually, unrecognized at first, and then ignored, usually until it is too late. We do not recognize the formation of new totalitarian systems because we are forever looking backwards instead of forwards, preparing for the storm that has passed, expecting history to repeat, rather than rhyme. Blinded by hindsight, we do not recognize the monster that is taking shape right in front of us. We glimpse a claw here, a tooth there, the flash of a pitiless blue eye, but fail to assemble the bits into an image of the beast entire, until it is inexorably upon us.

Anyway, here’s my open letter … one more bit, for the record.

To: Ella G. Irwin, Head of Trust and Safety, Twitter, Inc.
cc: Elon Musk

Dear Ms. Irwin,

This open letter is further to our brief correspondence on May 3, 2023 (on Twitter) regarding Twitter’s censorship and defamation of my @consent_factory Twitter account with fake “age-restricted adult content” labels for approximately two years.

First, thank you for taking action to cease and desist from further censorship and defamation. From what I can tell, it appears that Twitter is removing or has removed the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels from the @consent_factory Twitter account’s Tweets (or at least going back to late 2021). I trust that these fake “age-restricted adult content” labels will be removed from all of the account’s Tweets in due course, and I appreciate your prompt attention to this matter. Please accept my apology for claiming that you had lied about taking action on this. I admit, after two years of being censored and defamed, and having my complaints ignored by Twitter, I have become rather skeptical regarding your company’s behavior and statements. That said, it is clear now that you were not lying, and that you have taken action to have the fake, defamatory labels in question removed, and I apologize for publicly claiming otherwise.

Assuming the process is eventually completed and all of the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels that Twitter has been censoring the @consent_factory Twitter account with are in fact removed, I would appreciate substantive answers to the following questions:

(1) Why and exactly how did Twitter start censoring and defaming my Consent Factory account with these fake, defamatory “adult content” labels? When I asked you to explain that in our correspondence, you replied:

Clearly, the account did not “post multiple tweets containing sensitive content (nazi imagery) that resulted in the sensitive content label being applied,” because Twitter has now removed the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels from those Tweets, which contain the same “Nazi imagery” they originally contained. As I am sure you have noted, the so-called “Nazi imagery” contained in those Tweets was simply historical photos of the Nazi Germany era, which were used to illustrate critical points I was making in opposition to totalitarianism, and not at all any type of celebration or approval of totalitarianism or fascism. Any rational adult, seeing those Tweets, could not possibly mistake the anti-fascist/totalitarian intent behind them. Also, the fact that the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels are being removed gradually, in stages, rather than all at once, suggests that the application of the fake labels (or “interstitials”) in question was not the result of a blanket algorithm applied to the account. Additionally, not every Tweet (or every Tweet containing an image) by this account was censored with a fake “interstitial,” which suggests that something other than a blanket algorithm was at work.

In any event, having been censored and defamed for two years by Twitter, Inc., I think I am entitled to an actual explanation of how this started, including documentation of any intra-company discussions or “log” notes in connection with the decision to begin censoring and defaming the account. Your substantive response to this request will demonstrate that the “new” Twitter is, in fact, committed to transparency, and free speech, and not just another element of the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” as Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi dubbed it, before Mr. Musk cut off access to the “Twitter Files.”

(2) What, if any, other restrictions/visibility filtering tactics have been applied to my @consent_factory Twitter account from 2020 to the present? Again, I would appreciate documentation of any such “visibility filtering” or other “restrictions” and/or the removal thereof. Having been censored and maliciously defamed by Twitter for years, I believe I am entitled to know how my “visibility” is being and/or has been “filtered.”

(3) What steps is Twitter, Inc. now taking to cease and desist from the type of malicious defamation the company has been engaging in to suppress political speech and damage the reputation and income of writers, like me, and independent media outlets, like, for example, OffGuardian? Twitter blocks links to all OffGuardian articles with a different fake, defamatory “interstitial” warning.

There is nothing “unsafe” about OffGuardian, or any content published on the website that could possibly “lead to real-world harm.” It is a small, independent news and commentary outlet. Twitter, Inc. is using the fake “interstitial” warning above to discourage users from visiting the site, and thus damaging OffGuardian’s reputation and income. This is just one further example (i.e., in addition to my case). Twitter’s continued use of fake, defamatory, “interstitial” labels to suppress political views is relatively widespread, as far as I can tell. Moreover, recent updates to Twitter’s Platform Use Guidelines make it clear that Twitter intends to continue using these “interstitials,” which is worrying, given the fact that the company has been using them to deceive people, and to suppress political speech, and to damage the reputations and incomes of small businesses and sole proprietors.

That’s it for my questions, for now.

Again, thank you for finally putting an end to the defamation that Twitter, Inc. has been subjecting me to, for the last two years. I must say, it is a bit disappointing that it took a happenstance encounter on Twitter to connect with someone with the power to do that. Frankly, given Mr. Musk’s initial and ongoing publicity campaign to portray himself as a champion of free speech, and a stalwart opponent of censorship, and Twitter under his leadership as the antipode of “old, bad, censorship-happy Twitter,” I had expected that immediate steps would be taken to … you know, stop deceiving people, and maliciously defaming people, and manipulating the “visibility” of political views according to some unarticulated ideological schema, but I guess these things take time.

I look forward to your substantive response to the above questions.

Very truly yours,
C. J. Hopkins

P.S. Should you happen to run into Mr. Musk there at Twitter HQ, you might also want to suggest that he resume providing access to the “Twitter Files” to reporters like Matt and Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Gutentag (if I can put a word in for her). Doing so would demonstrate that the “Twitter Files” thing was not just a limited hangout, and a PR stunt designed to whitewash the company and kill public interest in the nefarious activities of Twitter, Inc., and other powerful global corporations, and their partners at the FBI, DHS, whatever that CIS or CISA acronym stands for, and … well, you know, “other agencies.”

May 7, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Government agencies are subpoenaed for documents on social media censorship collusion

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | April 29, 2023

Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan, has sent subpoenas to the heads of three federal agencies for records on communications with social media companies to censor online content.

Jordan sent the subpoenas to head of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) head Jen Easterly, State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) coordinator James Rubin, and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Dr. Rochelle Walensky.

We obtained an example of one of the letters for you here.

The subpoenas are part of the efforts to reveal the collusion between the federal government and social media to censor certain viewpoints.

“Numerous documents made publicly available reflect the weaponization of the federal government’s power to censor speech online directly and by proxy,” Jordan wrote in his letter to Dr. Walensky. (Documents obtained in the lawsuit filed by Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general against the Biden administration and the Twitter Files published by Matt Taibbi and other independent journalists have shown that officials at several federal agencies, including the FBI and DHS, constantly contacted social media companies to have certain people and content censored.)

“It is necessary for Congress to gauge the extent to which the CDC coerced, pressured, worked with, or relied upon social media and other tech companies in order to censor speech.”

Jordan sent all three agencies letters to produce the records, but they failed to adequately provide the records requested. The subpoenas are an attempt to force them to produce all the records required.

All three agencies have until May 22 to provide the records.

April 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Facebook Should Keep Removing COVID ‘Misinformation,’ Oversight Board Says

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 21, 2023

The oversight board for Facebook’s parent company, Meta, on Thursday recommended the social media giant “maintain its current policy” of removing COVID-19 “misinformation” from its platform until the World Health Organization declares an end to the global pandemic.

The board made the recommendation despite widespread outcry about social media censorship after the Twitter Files and several ongoing lawsuits revealed collusion between state actors and social media companies to censor dissenting opinions and factual information that contradict official narratives, including those related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The recommendation came in response to a request by Meta in July that the oversight board — an independent panel of tech and legal experts selected by Meta to weigh in on content policy issues — assess whether “a less restrictive approach” to censoring misinformation might “better align with its values and human rights responsibilities.”

Meta’s current misinformation policy sets different categories of harm content might cause, making that content subject to removal. Content is censored if the platform deems that it contributes to the “risk of imminent physical harm,” could cause “interference” with the functioning of political processes or contains “certain highly deceptive manipulated media.”

But the board didn’t find inconsistency between Meta’s “misinformation policy” and its “values and human rights responsibilities.” Instead, it said Meta’s current “exceptional measures” of eliminating disinformation are “justified.”

The board also urged Meta to “begin a process” to reassess which “misleading claims” it removes, to be more transparent about government requests for information, to consider making its “misinformation” policies more localized and to investigate how the architecture of the platform facilitates the spread of misinformation.

Meta said Thursday it will publicly respond to the board’s non-binding recommendations within 60 days.

Suzanne Nossel, a board member and CEO of PEN America, told The Washington Post that the board’s recommendations are not just relevant to COVID-19, but could shape Meta’s approach to anticipated future global health emergencies.

“The decision is less perhaps about the COVID pandemic per se or exclusively than about … how Meta should handle its responsibilities in the context of a fast-moving public health emergency,” she said.

How Facebook and Instagram censor COVID ‘misinformation’

The recommendation specifically assessed Meta’s “misinformation about health during public emergencies” policy, under which it removes 80 distinct “COVID-19 misinformation claims” posted on its platforms, such as claiming masking or social distancing lack efficacy or that the vaccines can have serious side effects.

Between March 2020 and July 2022, Facebook and Instagram, also owned by Meta, removed 27 million instances of COVID-19 “misinformation,” 1.3 million of which were restored on appeal.

The social media giant also designates a second type of COVID-19 “misinformation,” which does not reach the standard of removal, but is still subject to manipulation by the platform.

For example, information in that category is “fact-checked” where it is labeled as “false” or “missing context,” and then linked to a fact-checking article. That content is then also demoted so that it appears less frequently and prominently in users’ feeds.

Meta also treated other information with what it calls “neutral labels,” where it labeled posts with statements such as “some unapproved COVID-19 treatments may cause serious harm” and then directed people to Meta’s COVID-19 information center, which provides approved information from public health authorities.

Last July, the company said it had connected more than 2 billion people across 189 countries to “trustworthy information” through the portal. But it decided to stop using the neutral labels in December 2022, to ensure they would remain effective in other health emergencies, according to the oversight board’s report.

The basis for determining what is misinformation is whether the information conforms to what public health authorities deem to be true, according to the board’s recommendation and the Facebook policy page.

But throughout the pandemic, public health authorities have had to concede they were wrong about things — and that they lied about things — they had previously pronounced to be science-backed facts.

These “facts” include, for example, flip-flopping on masks, the lab-leak hypothesis, the effectiveness of natural immunity and numerous claims about vaccine efficacy, including that it stops transmission.

That means the platforms eliminated and demoted facts and information that were true. Even CNN conceded that “the company applied the labels to a wide range of claims both true and untrue about vaccines, treatments and other topics related to the virus.”

‘This kind of abuse of power should terrify all of us’

The board recommendations don’t mention the events that led Meta to consider changing its policies — controversy over recent revelations about how government officials coerced social media companies into toeing the government line.

In 2021, President Biden directly criticized Facebook and other platforms, saying they allowed “vaccine misinformation” to spread and they contributed to deaths from COVID-19.

He said they were “killing people” and that the pandemic was only “among the unvaccinated.”

Biden’s accusation was accompanied by threats of regulatory action from from high-ranking members of the administration — including White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — if the social media companies did not comply.

Psaki said government officials were in regular touch with social media platforms, telling them what — and in some cases whom — to censor, Jenin Younes reported.

DHS even created a video in 2021, since removed from youtube, encouraging children to report their own family members to Facebook for ‘disinformation’ if they challenge U.S. government narratives on COVID-19.

Writing in Tablet Magazine this month, civil liberties attorney Jenin Younes recounted the story of a Facebook support group for people who experienced adverse events related to the COVID-19 vaccines being shut down for spreading harmful “misinformation.”

Last month, in the Twitter Files release about Stanford University’s Virality project, Matt Taiibbi revealed that Stanford, with the backing of several government agencies, had created a cross-platform digital ticketing system that was processing censorship requests for all of the social media platforms, including Meta’s.

The Virality Project claimed its objective “is to detect, analyze, and respond to incidents of false and misleading narratives related to COVID-19 vaccines across online ecosystems.”

Taibbi said the Virality Project was “defining true things as disinformation or misinformation or malformation,” which he said signifies “a new evolution of the disinformation process away from trying to figure out what’s true and what’s not and just going directly to political narrative.”

That reflects Meta’s policy to censor statements that don’t conform to official public health authority doctrine as “misinformation.”

Meta’s policies do not mention the tips and directions it receives from government agencies about misinformation.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Tuesday published an op-ed in The Hill calling for an end to censorship practices, pointing out that statements about COVID-19 made on platforms like Facebook that are now supported by evidence were flagged as disinformation.

”Statements including my own, that our government once labeled as ‘disinformation,’ such as the efficacy of masks, naturally acquired immunity, and the origins of COVID-19, are now supported by evidence,” he said.

“In reality, the most significant source of disinformation during the pandemic, with the most influence and greatest impact on people’s lives, was the U.S. government,” he added.

Rand pointed to critiques of DHS’s “abusive practices” by organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and highlighted a Brennan Center for Justice report published last month that found at least 12 DHS programs for tracking what Americans are saying online.

“This kind of abuse of power should terrify all of us regardless of which side of the aisle you are on,” he said.

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.

April 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , | Leave a comment

DHS is sued for censorship records on meetings with Big Tech

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | April 6, 2023

Judicial Watch has decided to sue the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after the federal agency failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records related to meetings with Big Tech representatives where censorship was allegedly discussed.

The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, seeks to force the DHS to disclose documents detailing how its Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) worked with companies behind social media platforms in order to censor speech.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

The initial FOIA request dates back to December of last year, and the advocacy group said that it wanted to gain access to records and communications of CISA Director Jen Easterly, a former CISA director, Christopher Krebs, former CISA Senior Cybersecurity Advisor Matt Masterson, and CISA Senior Cybersecurity Advisor Brian Scully.

These documents concern meetings that CISA either hosted or facilitated with Meta and Facebook, , Wikimedia Foundation, Pinterest, and Microsoft’s LinkedIn on the topic of “election security.”

Furthermore, Judicial Watch wanted information about several other meetings, including those with DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, FBI, US Secret Service, NSA, and the Office of the Director for National Intelligence employees, related to the previously mentioned meetings, and those with Election Infrastructure Subsector Government Coordinating Council.

The Judicial Watch press release refers to the Twitter Files where journalist Matt Taibbi on several occasions mentions CISA’s involvement in censorship activities, and cites these and the dates when the contacts or communication occurred.

The group also refers to Twitter Files revelations regarding the FBI’s role in censorship decisions, notably the pressure it exerted on the site to act in this way, and Taibbi’s testimony before Congress about the collusion between the Biden administration – including the Democratic National Committee and federal, state, and local law enforcement – and Big Tech, with the goal of suppressing legitimate information.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton described all this, and more that is mentioned in the statement, as “an unholy conspiracy in the Biden administration to censor Americans in collusion with Big Tech.”

As for the lawsuit, Fitton said it “shows the censorship abuse is furthered by unlawful secrecy and cover-ups.”

April 7, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Biden fails to dismiss censorship collusion lawsuit

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | March 21, 2023

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) civil rights group has announced that a federal judge has rejected a motion to dismiss a  lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden, where the government is accused of involvement in censorship.

“The Court finds that the complaint alleges significant encouragement and coercion that converts the otherwise private conduct of censorship on social media platforms into state action, and is unpersuaded by defendants’ arguments to the contrary,” the decision reads.

We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.

The Biden White House thus failed to stop the legal challenge which alleges collusion between the government and Big Tech to suppress information they disapproved of concerning the pandemic and US elections.

The decision not to accept the motion was made in the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana by Judge Terry A. Doughty, a statement from the non-profit said.

The NCLA explained that it represented doctors Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Aaron Kheriaty, as well as Jill Hines, and that the suit lifted the lid on the censorship regime that the organization says a number of federal agencies had put in place.

The number in question is “at least” 11 agencies and sub-agencies (including the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security, DHS), the NCLA said, and backed this claim up by information that came out during the discovery process.

Government officials are accused of participating in a lawless censorship campaign that used a wide variety of tools to get social media companies to toe the line, from collusion and coordination, to coercion.

These serious claims laid out in the lawsuit, which Judge Doughty just allowed to proceed, further allege that the result was the censoring, blacklisting and shadow-banning of the clients represented by the NCLA, as well as other methods of silencing them, such as deliberately downranking their content, throttling, etc.

Explaining the decision to deny the motion to dismiss, the judge said that, based on past censorship, the threat of future censorship is “substantial” – rather than being “illusory or merely speculative.”

The NCLA welcomed the ruling, describing it as an important victory in the battle for free speech in the US, and lauded the district court for recognizing the scale and damage of government-orchestrated censorship.

“The Court has seen through the government’s unrelenting efforts to deny responsibility for using its vast power to silence thousands upon thousands of Americans online, often removing factually true information the government did not like,” commented NCLA’s senior litigation counsel, John J. Vecchione.

The case is now headed to a preliminary injunction hearing set for May 12.

March 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , | 1 Comment

DHS is sued for records on online election censorship demands

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | February 25, 2023

Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after the agency refused to provide records of communications related to election misinformation flagged by its Election Integrity Partnership (EIP).

Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit after another agency under the DHS, the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) failed to comply with an FOIA request filed last October.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

Judicial Watch had requested all communications related to EIP’s work sent via Atlassian’s Jira platform between employees and CISA employees and social media companies and other organizations that flagged election misinformation including The Center for Internet Security, the National Association of State Election Directors, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory.

Numerous organizations privately communicated through Jira, according to the lawsuit.

“The  ‘ Files’ are the tip of the iceberg, as the federal government ran a massive, secret censorship op against the American people,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “That the DHS is hiding these censorship records in violation of FOIA law shows the agency still has something to hide.”

In a separate lawsuit, Judicial Watch is suing the DHS for all communications between CISA and EIP, alleging that the agencies were actively flagging content in last year’s midterms. EIP flagged right-leaning news websites, including The Epoch Times, Breitbart, Fox News, The Washington Times, the New York Post, and Just the News.

February 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Logically Unsound

Taxpayer cash used to carry out Stasi-style Government Covert Ops

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | February 16, 2023

Two weeks ago civil liberties group Big Brother Watch released a damning report – entitled ‘Ministry of Truth’, a reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 – revealing highly questionable present day behaviour by shadowy UK Government agencies. The charge sheet includes the setting up of opaque surveillance squads to

  • monitor people who are “critical of the government”,
  • “tackle a range of harmful narratives online” and
  • outsource some of this dirty work – at taxpayer expense – to army units (the 77th brigade) and private (privateer?) companies such as Logically.ai (TheLogically Ltd), which claims to ‘intercept [misinformation and disinformation] threats before they become widespread’.

Picture credit: UK Column News

Reading this, you might be forgiven for thinking you had accidentally stumbled into the Science Fiction section of your local bookshop – despite the parallels, this is not a review of a rehashed version of Philip K Dick’s Minority Report.

No: this, unfortunately, is real. HART itself has been on the receiving end of some Logically’s shoddy – and shady – ‘threat interception’, and it is extremely disheartening to note that at the same time as carrying out its sinister actions, this entity was in receipt of more than £1 million of taxpayer cash to fund its operations.

HART’s experience with the disagreeable Logically.ai outfit came in the summer of 2021. Shortly after we had come together as a volunteer group to counter nonsensical government propaganda and policy, six months’ worth of our internal group messaging was leaked and made public. Logically.ai then gleefully dissected and publicised this ‘leak’, attempting to frame our activities as being somehow subversive by publishing out-of-context quotes from these informal chat logs. We reported this to the police, who agreed that this constituted an illegal hack. The police issued a URN number and one of the perpetrators was identified, but no prosecution ensued. We picked ourselves up, published this riposte to the mud-slingers, and carried on speaking out in the hope that balanced discourse might be resumed.

Though highly objectionable and disruptive to us – and very painful for a handful of our volunteer team who were subsequently targeted – ultimately these leaks only helped establish HART’s credentials – the worst any independent reader of the leaks could conclude is that (1) the grammar of our internal chat logs is not up the standard of our public output and (2) we were somewhat naïve in expressing our unadulterated views on some of the charlatans running the show.

Logically.ai pressed home their ‘threat interception’ mandate by smearing our work. Here are some extracts:

  • Apart from claims that the government is controlling the media, HART believes that the government is using “covert ‘nudges,” and psychological strategies to “increase compliance” with measures, as well as with vaccinations. “Several interventions of this type have been woven into the intensive communication campaign,” a member writes, alleging that fear, shame and peer-pressure are being weaponized by the government.
  • HART members are critical of policies such as lockdowns, mask-wearing, and vaccination.
  • HART members frequently recommend alternative treatments such as ivermectin and vitamin D.
  • The members [of HART] also repeatedly make claims about the media being controlled, social media censoring their views (a number of members have moved to Parler and Gab), often stating that journalists cannot be trusted.

Astute readers will notice that these statements have either been completely vindicated or can be deemed to have been a prudent assessment of the complex risk-reward profile of certain irreversible interventions. In summary, the UK Government used taxpayer money to pay a ‘threat interceptor’ to discredit HART’s correct statements and replace these with fictions of their own making.

It is therefore galling – to say the least – to note that Logically.ai, a government contractor, presented a Kafkaesque self-referenced submission to the House of Commons Joint Pre-legislative Scrutiny Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill by stating that its “investigation into the HART Group is just one example of how those pushing misinformation target legitimate public figures and media outlets to amplify and endorse their content. Without thoughtful safeguards in place, there is a clear risk we could see more of this kind of activity, particularly around elections and political campaigns”.

Well quite. It is frustrating that they didn’t just quote Orwell:

“Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary”.

For a bit of Walter Mitty light relief, it is worth perusing some of Logically.ai’s so-called ‘fact-checks’. With about 98% of humanity having cottoned on by now, in January of 2023 the keyboard warriors at the UK Government’s favourite ‘threat interceptor’ were still bravely wading into battle in defence of virus-defeating shreds of damp cotton worn over one’s breathing orifices — Logically.ai’s efforts are extremely weak fodder compared to the recently updated Cochrane review of these ‘physical interventions to disrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses’.

All of this would be uproarious slapstick comedy if it wasn’t deadly serious. Logically.ai’s underhand disinformation campaigning has led to some of our voluntary senior clinician members who are full time nhs employees, facing long investigation processes, with threats to career and huge risk for their dependent families — this is nothing short of despicable, when these clinicians were doing nothing other than questioning dubious policies with no evidence base, thus aiming to protect their patients and the public and fulfil their oath to first do no harm.

Shortly after its action against HART, Logically.ai appointed Brian Murphy, a senior Department of Homeland Security and former FBI executive as ‘Vice President of Strategic Operations’. We do not need to ask why.

By suppressing legitimate discourse, the reprehensible actions of Logically.ai and its shadowy handlers will undoubtedly have contributed to supporting vested interests and corporate greed. How else did an “adult-only vaccine, for people over 50” end up getting injected into young children? Setting aside the exorbitant cost of this exercise, every single death and adverse event in anyone up to the age of 49 could have been avoided but for these people and entities that executed these ‘black ops’ against legitimate and constructive dissent. Do not take our word for it: even those that were cheerleaders for so-called “extraordinary vaccine success” have come round to our point of view:

“The entire population was vaccinated or offered the vaccine, which now looks like a terrible idea when there were deaths among young people who really had no need to be vaccinated. They were not at risk from Covid. The mantra was it limited transmission. We hear less about that now. Parliament was shut down. Government colluded with social media giants to suppress legitimate questions about the origin of the virus and all manner of other policy debates”.

Neatly summarised. If only the checks and balances had been in place to allow rational and constructive discourse – and shadowy ‘black ops’ outfits hadn’t been paid by the UK Government to deploy guerrilla tactics as part of ‘threat interception’ – many lives could have been saved. Yet Logically.ai’s work will have helped frighten politicians and journalists off engaging with HART (and other professional groups) who were providing a much-needed critical voice and therefore slowed a return to common sense thinking. Furthermore, some of our members (all of whom are unpaid volunteers) faced long investigation processes with professional regulators or employers. Trying to silence professionals — who may have dependent families — by threatening their careers is nothing short of despicable. These clinicians were doing nothing other than questioning dubious policies with no evidence base.  Their primary intention was to their oath to first do no harm, and protect their patients and the public.

For those minded to think of the UK civil service as a benign & mostly ‘good’ counterweight to a (perhaps corrupted and politicised) UK Government, Big Brother Watch’s Ministry of Truth report is a shocking read, covering appalling behaviour by various parts of the UK Government and the civil service. While it has been extensively covered in various alternative media outlets as well as Spectator and the Mail on Sunday (“Army spied on lockdown critics: Sceptics, including our own Peter Hitchens, long suspected they were under surveillance. Now we’ve obtained official records that prove they were right all along”), mainstream coverage has been relatively forgiving. Our experience tells us that much more is yet to come to light. The Ministry of Truth report quite correctly points out that “Whitehall officials are tasked to make a success of government policies – not to act as an authority on truth. These two roles clearly conflict”. These conflicts have not yet been resolved.

The key take-away for those who have hitherto believed that ‘the system’ might be acting in your best interests is a recognition that possibly – just possibly – historical precedent should encourage at least a modicum of scepticism when lapping up the Party Line from so-called ‘trusted’ sources. Statements from ‘saintly’ leaders along the lines of “We will continue to be your single source of truth… unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth” are giant red flags – why does the truth need to be controlled by government diktat? Why does Ofcom still prescribe what broadcasters can and cannot say on topics of critical importance such as these we are seeking to discuss?

For those who have been attempting to challenge the mainstream ‘official’ narrative since March 2020, the Ministry of Truth report is little more than confirmation of what is already well known – or at least suspected – and of course there is great suspicion that this is just a ‘Limited Hangout’ (a controlled minor admission before the ‘dead cat’ strategy is deployed to move the conversation on). On the plus side, it is heartening to see that this is an apolitical topic – it is noteworthy that people from the left and right of the political spectrum are voicing concerns.

The authorities – or actors within – have systematically neutered discourse and the freedom of speech that are so critically necessary for democracy to work properly. Subsequent non-denials and obfuscation – and lack of any sort of regret – give a clue that what Big Brother Watch has been able to publish is likely only the tip of the iceberg.

Let us hope that those controlling the mainstream narrative will find the growing cacophony of peaceful & rational protest harder and harder to ignore.

Call to action:

These investors have ethical responsibilities, and are regulated by the FCA. The industry association, the British Venture Capital Association, might also be interested.

February 16, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

The Twitter Files

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | January 2, 2023

If you’re still under the naively mistaken belief that there is no Deep State, the Twitter file dumps1 from Elon Musk detailing how Twitter, before his acquisition of the company, was coerced into doing the FBI’s bidding, with actual FBI agents on its staff to control the online narrative, ought to set the record straight.

In fact, the lawlessness of our intelligence agencies and the psychological warfare against the American public is far worse than most people ever expected.

FBI paid Twitter huge sums of money — your tax dollars, might I add — to censor certain views and stories, such as the damning Hunter Biden laptop story, which likely would have sunk Joe Biden’s bid for the presidency had it received the attention it legitimately deserved.

The FBI even ran a tabletop exercise about “hacked” information relating to Hunter Biden ONE MONTH before the real story broke. During that exercise, they practiced the narrative (i.e., lies) that weeks later became “official truth.”

There is a Deep State running the show, and they’re doing whatever they damn well please, without regard for the law or the U.S. Constitution. They’re acting completely outside the rules of our Constitutional Republic and the laws of the land, and they’ve weaponized the very agencies that are supposed to protect us and act in the public’s best interest and turned them against us.

The Twitter files saga is expanding by the day, so I won’t be able to cover every last detail here. Books will be needed to cover this scandal in depth. In the meantime, I suggest you review the references cited and keep your eyes peeled for later updates.

FBI Used Twitter to Track and Spy on Americans

In a recent video, investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald reviews how Washington has expanded the war state and the Democrat’s censorship regime. About 39 minutes in, he begins reviewing evidence showing the FBI was not only censoring social media content, but the agency was also, on a regular basis, asking Twitter to reveal the location of specific Twitter users — for what purpose, no one knows. As noted by independent journalist Matt Taibbi in a December 17, 2022, Twitter post:

“What ‘law enforcement’ objective is served by asking for Billy Baldwin’s location information? Why is the FBI/DHS [Department of Homeland Security] in the business of analyzing and flagging social media content at all? When were these programs created and who approved them?”

These are all good questions. Historically, the FBI’s job has been to monitor and address criminal activity, not “misinformation.” Somewhere along the way, and it’s unclear exactly when the mandate changed and by whom, the DHS/FBI (the FBI supports the DHS by investigating threats) and other agencies tasked themselves with illegally suppressing free speech and shaping public narratives through public-private partnerships with Big Tech.

The Biden administration’s Orwellian “Ministry of Truth,” revealed in the summer of 2022, was one of the first indicators we had that something was horribly amiss. And even though that agency was quickly disbanded after public outcry (and no small amount of mockery), the policing of mis- and disinformation was simply shifted elsewhere within the federal government.

Moreover, as reviewed by Greenwald, internal DHS memos, emails and documents show the DHS has worked on expanding its influence over tech platforms for YEARS. So, government censorship is not something that “just happened” in response to the COVID crisis.

Nor is the censorship limited to COVID or public health information in general. We now have evidence showing the FBI has actively interfered in multiple elections, for example — activity that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) accurately warns is “the biggest threat to our constitutional democracy today.”2

FBI Invented ‘Foreign Interference’ Narrative

Not surprisingly, the FBI invented the narrative that foreign nations were interfering in U.S. elections, which is precisely what they were doing. As reported by Taibbi and attorney Jeff Childers,3 the FBI asked Twitter to investigate “malicious actors” spreading election disinformation on Twitter. Twitter looked into the matter and reported there was no evidence of foreign interference.

The FBI was none too pleased with that answer and made it clear that Twitter better find some. As “evidence” that Twitter’s investigation was flawed, the FBI cited mainstream media articles and think-tank reports that claimed foreign interference was indeed taking place.4

In response, Twitter’s former censorship head Yoel Roth did an about-face and informed the team that “official state propaganda is DEFINITELY A THING ON TWITTER.”

propaganda twitter

How Media Have Been Weaponized to Provide False Evidence

The FBI’s tactic appears to be a variation of what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls the “wrap-up smear,” where they leak a lie to the media, and then they use that media report as “evidence” that the lie is true, and it just goes in circles from there.

Here, the FBI used reports — which were based on leaked information from anonymous intelligence agents5 — to pressure Twitter into making something up to further support the fiction the FBI itself invented and leaked to the sources they cited.

As noted by Childers, this variant on the political wrap-up smear is also being used by U.S. health agencies:6

“It’s a nifty trick … The NIH or CDC needs evidence to support some guidance they want to issue, like masking. So they fund some studies intended to show masks work. The pay-for-play scientists publish cartoonish, anti-scientific clown studies ‘proving’ cotton masks can somehow magically filter nanoscale virus particles.

Then the NIH and CDC cite those same studies — the same ones they procured — to ‘recommend’ unconstitutional mask mandates, or even outright order mandates, like for air travel and on cruise ships. Ditto vaccines … It’s a closed loop.”

Twitter-FBI Exercise: Managing the Hunter Biden Laptop Story

We now also have evidence showing it was the FBI that quenched the Hunter Biden laptop story. They, in collaboration with Twitter, Facebook and the Aspen Institute, even held a tabletop exercise in October 2020 to practice the shaping of the media’s coverage of a potential “hack and dump” operation involving Hunter Biden material.7,8 National security reporters from The New York Times and The Washington Post were also in attendance.9 As reported by the New York Post :10

“The exercise by the ‘Aspen Digital Hack-and-Dump Working Group’ involved an 11-day scenario in October 2020 that began with the imaginary release of falsified records related to Hunter Biden’s controversial employment by the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which paid him as much as $1 million a year to serve on its board when his father was vice president.

‘The goal was to shape how the media covered it — and how social media carried it,’ Shellenberger wrote. But the drill was put into practical use weeks later, when The Post broke the news about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop — which was either ignored or downplayed by most mainstream news outlets and suppressed by both Twitter and Facebook.”

michael shellenberger

In the video below, independent journalist Matt Taibbi speaks with Russell Brand about the Twitter files and the kinds of censorship tactics Twitter secretly engaged in on the government’s behalf.

However, it turns out the FBI didn’t just attempt to sideline the Hunter Biden story a month in advance. No. They’ve been shielding it and working with social media to shield it for them, since 2018. As reported by Childers:11

“In December 2020, Twitter’s former censorship head Yoel Roth explained in a sworn statement that for almost two years leading up to the leak, the FBI told him, over and over, to expect a Russian leak about Hunter Biden in October 2020:

‘During these weekly meetings [since 2018], the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October.

I was told in these meetings that … those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter … [and] that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.’ Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, made comments on a podcast suggesting he’d had similar conversations with the FBI.”

FBI Agents Assigned to Twitter Censorship Duty

As reported by attorney Jeff Childers,12 FBI field agent Elvis Chan was one of the agents assigned to work with Twitter. He was recently deposed in the Missouri v. Biden case about his role in Twitter’s censoring of Americans. Below is just one of Chan’s emails to Twitter in which he directs them to ban specific accounts for imagined “crimes.”

elvis chan

As noted by Childers:13

“Note that Chan only provided a list of accounts. He didn’t bother to say WHICH terms of service were violated. He didn’t say anybody broke the law. He didn’t even say WHICH tweets were problematic.”

Still, within 48 hours, Twitter had obliged, and the accounts listed by Chan had either been suspended or banned. Below is Twitter censorship employee Patrick Conlon’s reply to Chan. As you can see, a long list of other FBI employees were also carbon copied.

patrick conlon

Another FBI “plant” is Jim Baker.14 Before becoming Twitter’s head lawyer, he spent three decades with the FBI, most recently as its Deputy General Counsel. He too used his authority at Twitter to censor the Hunter Biden story. While his comment (see email below) may seem innocuous enough — just a polite suggestion — it’s clear, with facts in hand, that Baker was trying to influence the situation.

jim baker

Intelligence Agencies Have Weaponized Social Media

For the record, Facebook also employs no less than 115 “former” employees of the FBI, CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies.15 Most of them now work in Facebook’s content moderation department, which seems like a massive career slide, if you ask me, but what do I know? As noted by Childers:16

“The inescapable conclusion of what we’re seeing from the Twitter Files is that our country’s intelligence agencies, by and through the FBI, now control all the large social media outlets … and are using them to manipulate American public opinion and change the outcome of domestic elections. But for whom?”

My answer would be they’re doing it on behalf of the Deep State, the same unelected globalists that so doggedly push for a Great Reset and Fourth Industrial Revolution (i.e., eugenics rebranded as transhumanism). Childers continues:17

“If Elon Musk hadn’t spent $44 BILLION DOLLARS to buy Twitter, nobody would have ever believed the extent to which the intelligence community has absorbed private social media platforms in this country and turned them against the people. It’s literally unbelievable.

Exposure will probably be fatal. The Constitution does not provide for any internal security service in the United States. The agencies are WAY off the reservation, well into criminal territory, no matter how clever their lawyers are …

Of course, we still have the teensy-weensy little problem of ‘who’ will charge and arrest these people, since they’re in control of the entire federal law enforcement apparatus. Don’t worry, there ARE answers. But let’s wait a little bit and see how things play out.”

FBI Paid Twitter Millions

As mentioned, the FBI was also using taxpayer dollars to pay Twitter for their censorship services — $3,415,323 to be exact, between October 2019 and February 2021 alone.18

fbi using taxpayer dollars to pay twitter

FBI and other intelligence agencies were also trying to gain even greater and more direct influence over Twitter. In a January 2020 email, Carlos Monje wrote to Roth, warning that a “sustained effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more information and change our API policies.” Apparently, the FBI wanted direct access into Twitter’s database.19

carlos monje

Lies and More Damn Lies

Investigative journalist Lee Fang with The Intercept 20 has also provided us with some real bombshells. While Twitter has publicly insisted that it was cracking down on ALL covert government propaganda accounts, that was only partially true.

In reality, Twitter worked with the U.S. Department of Defense to promote and protect American propaganda accounts, and aided U.S. intelligence agencies in their efforts to influence foreign governments using fake news, computerized deepfake videos and bots.21 They only hunted down the foreign government-affiliated propaganda accounts. As reported by Fang:22

“Behind the scenes, Twitter gave approval and special protection to the U.S. military’s online psychological ops. Despite knowledge that Pentagon propaganda accounts used overt identities, Twitter did not suspend many for around two years or more. Some remain active …

In 2017 a U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) official sent Twitter a list of 52 Arab language accounts ‘we use to amplify certain messages.’ The official asked for priority service for six accounts, verification for one and ‘whitelist’ abilities for the others.”

whitelisted accounts

Whitelisted accounts have a “validated” status similar to that of the blue check mark, which ensures they are promoted in searches. These accounts also don’t get shadow-banned or limited by other means. In closing, I think Childers makes an excellent and accurate observation:23

“Combine all this Twitter censorship, influence peddling, and pure propaganda with the vast budget for pushing vaccines by buying scientists and influencers during the pandemic, and we can begin to see the outlines of a vast private market for censorship and fake news created by the deep state, which then became its biggest customer.”

As for the FBI, it released a single-sentence “rebuttal” on December 21, 2022 — on Twitter — to the mountain of scandalous evidence presented against it.24

Sources and References

January 2, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Video | , , , | 1 Comment

U.S. Government Has Been Planning to ‘Lockdown and Wait for a Vaccine’ Since 2007

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 13, 2022

More and more evidence is coming to light that the ‘lockdown and wait for a vaccine’ strategy unleashed in 2020 was being cooked up inside the U.S. Government for decades before COVID-19 appeared and gave too many people an excuse to put the dreadful plan into action.

Recently the role of CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) in producing key lockdown guidance for America in March 2020 came to light.

Now, a pandemic plan from 2007 produced by the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) and currently hosted on the CISA website has emerged.

The plan contains the original list of pandemic ‘essential businesses’ that was used by CISA in 2020 to lock down America. The 2007 plan (which was itself based on a Department of Homeland Security plan from the previous year) clearly states the intention to ban large gatherings “indefinitely”, close schools and non-essential businesses, institute work-from-home, and quarantine exposed and not just sick individuals. The aim is simple and clear: to slow the spread to wait for a vaccine.

During a pandemic, the goal will be to slow the virus’ transmission; delaying the spread of the virus will provide more time for vaccine development while reducing the stress on an already burdened healthcare system.

Here’s the relevant section of the 2007 NIAC plan in full.

2006 and 2007 were a turning point in U.S. biodefence planning. Prior to 2006, such planning had been focused on biological attacks, but after that point major mission creep set in and the new draconian ideas were applied wholesale to general pandemic planning. This controversial switch in focus so riled leading U.S. disease expert D.A. Henderson, who had been involved with the project up to that point, that he issued his famous riposte objecting in the strongest terms to the new ideas. He and his fellow dissenters wrote, presciently:

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.

I’m told by someone who was involved with the programme in the early days that the original biodefence planning in 2002-2003 assumed a targeted biological weapons attack with smallpox as the viral case and anthrax as the bacterial case – both considered worst case scenarios. It was recognised that the old smallpox vaccine was too risky to try to use on a wider population to protect them if such an attack occurred, thus the effort for a new vaccine. But very quickly, within a year or two (not least due to the SARS outbreak in 2003), there was a massive expansion of the original mission and suddenly every infectious agent, whether dangerous or not, was cast into the web of biodefence.

Outside the U.S. there was more resistance to this kind of totalitarian nonsense. However, even the 2019 World Health Organisation pandemic guidance bears many of its marks. While this guidance commendably did not recommend “in any circumstances” contact tracing, border closures, entry and exit screening and quarantine of exposed individuals, it did make conditional recommendations for use of face masks by the public, school and workplace closures and “avoiding crowding” i.e., social distancing.

The purpose was also the same: to ‘flatten the curve’ to wait for a vaccine, as illustrated in the diagram below. The WHO guidance states: “NPIs are often the most accessible interventions, because of the time it takes to make specific vaccines available”; “specific vaccines may not be available for the first six months”; NPIs are “used to delay the peak of the epidemic… allowing time for vaccines to be distributed”.

These untested ideas, which the WHO’s own guidance rightly admitted had no good quality evidence to support them, have now become a terrible orthodoxy for global pandemic response. This is despite them utterly failing to achieve any of their goals – a point that no one who backs them seems to have noticed.

Somehow, the world must learn the right lessons from this debacle. Yet it keeps threatening to learn all the wrong ones.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Did Federal Censors Swing the 2020 Election?

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | November 14, 2022

Did the Russiagate conspiracy entitle the federal government to censor Americans forever? Did federal shenanigans swing the 2020 election? A new report reveals how a new federal agency and federal grantees exploited a 2016 scam to launch the greatest covert censorship campaign in U.S. history.

In 2016, top FBI officials and the Obama administration fueled a conspiracy that the Trump presidential campaign was colluding with the Russian government. Numerous false FBI claims spurred a massive wiretapping operation approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The allegations led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who spent two years investigating before admitting that there was nothing to prosecute for his primary charge. But by that point, Trump had been irredeemably tainted and the Democrats had exploited the controversy to capture control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018.

Thanks to Russiagate, Congress created a new federal agency in 2018—the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). CISA was purportedly intended to fight foreign threats to election security and U.S. infrastructure. But the agency quickly shifted its target to American citizens. As a report last week from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) revealed, “Any U.S. citizen posting what DHS considered misinformation’ online was suddenly conducting a cyber attack against US critical infrastructure.”

CISA and DHS realized that they could not directly muzzle Americans so they colluded with a number of federal grantees who comprised the Election Integrity Project, a coalition formed in mid-2020. The result was “censorship by proxy,” as law professor Jonathan Turley observed, bludgeoning social media companies into submission. The DHS-spurred crackdown in 2020 resulted in the suppression of “22 million tweets labeled ‘misinformation’ on Twitter” and “hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted” thanks to changes that would not have occurred without “‘huge regulatory pressure’ from government,” FFO reported.

Once the government claims a prerogative to censor “misinformation,” the definition of misinformation mushrooms to serve political purposes. The Election Integrity Partnership bragged about how social media posts were targeted that were merely purportedly guilty of offenses such as “exaggerate issue,” “misleading stats” and “out of context.” Many of those alleged factual infractions were piddling compared to the sweeping falsehoods continually uncorked by presidential candidates Trump and Biden.

Prior to the 2020 election, “the censorship focus was always and consistently foremost targeted at speech casting doubt on mail-in ballots,” FFO reported. Democrats exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to push through electoral changes that opened the floodgates to unverified mail-in ballots. Some states like Michigan sent absentee ballots to all voters, violating the Election Clause of the Constitution (which specifies that state legislatures make the rules for federal elections).

Election regimes that scrutinized mail-in ballots routinely had a high rejection rate.  New York City relied on mail-in ballots for a June 2020 primary that the New York Daily News derided as a “dumpster fire.” Up to 20% of ballots “were declared invalid before even being opened, based on mistakes with their exterior envelopes,” The Washington Post noted, thanks largely to missing postmarks or signatures. Trump claimed that the shift to mail-in ballots could result in “the most corrupt vote in our nation’s history.”

But federal string-pulling minimized controversies. FFO noted, “Pre-censoring U.S. citizen debate about mail-in ballots five months before an election has the impact of devastating the ability of concerned citizens to pressure their state representatives to take legal action on changing voting procedures.” Rather than the traditional scrutiny for mail-in ballots, many locales defaulted to accepting practically any piece of paper with a mark. Mail-in ballots determined the outcome of the 2020 election. Trump received more votes on Election Day but 43,000 mail-in ballots in three states sealed Biden’s victory—a minuscule portion of the tens of millions of mail-in votes he received.

In a July 28, 2020 article for the American Institute for Economic Research, I warned that the controversies over mail-in ballots could lead to “the death of political legitimacy…Deep State federal agencies are a Godzilla that have established their prerogative to undermine if not overturn election results.”

Until I read the new FFO report, I did not realize that “the biggest category for [2020] censorship was  ‘delegitimization’… defined to mean any speech that ‘casts doubt’ on any kind of election process, outcome or integrity issues [which] made all conservative and populist criticism of the administration of the election pre-banned at the narrative level, five months in advance of Election Day.” Damn, no wonder that article of mine got so little traction on Twitter and Facebook! “Delegitimization” resulted in “72% of its censorship tickets and targeted over 99% of the posts throttled by narrative during the 2020 election.”

The entire process looks like a Monty Python parody of democracy. As Mike Benz, the former State Department official who heads FFO, observed, “The same obscure DHS subagency tasked with election security also gained the power to censor any questions about election security.”

How much impact did federal censorship and suppression have on the most recent elections? The Election Integrity Project browbeat tech companies to accept “that social media posts about the 2022 elections be censorable under a low bar of simply ‘misleading,’” according to FFO. For the midterm elections, “the Election Integrity Project is tightly monitoring and working to censor ‘discussions surrounding the delays in counting ballots’ being ‘framed as fraud,’” FFO reported. Damned convenient considering the debacle in Arizona—which was foreseen if not foreordained. In a Washington speech just before the election, President Biden told listeners that “in some cases we won’t know the winner…until a few days after the election. It takes time to count all legitimate ballots in a legal and orderly manner.” Biden stressed that citizens must be “patient. That’s how this is supposed to work.”

But it never consistently worked that way before in American history. Arizona’s voting machines dismally failed on Election Day and Democrats are vehemently resisting a hand recount of all ballots.

The real goal is to control Americans’ minds—and not just on Election Day. Jen Easterly, the NSA honcho who Biden chose to run CISA, declared that “the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation… is incredibly important.” And the most important cognitive “fix” is to train Americans to never doubt Uncle Sam. In a March 2022 meeting with top Twitter executives, FBI official Laura Dehmlow “warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government,” The Intercept recently reported. The FBI has 80 agents on a task force to curb “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.”

“Disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods. If the feds can censor most if not almost all of their online critics, their cons become almost irrefutable. Perhaps that is the only way that many federal policies can retain any shard of legitimacy. As Mike Benz warns, “DHS is carrying out an official state policy that if public trust is not earned, it must be installed.” That is a recipe for the death of democracy.

Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and other publications. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Department of Homeland Security CISA

US Government Office of Medical Censorship and Propaganda

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | November 11, 2022

The US Department of Homeland Security (HSA) is conducting medical censorship while hiding in plain sight. The website for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has resources to engage vigilante “disinformation” police to assist HSA in their mission of silencing opinions on COVID-19 and pandemic response. The main stated target is disinformation defined as information deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country. Their toolkit allows any user to use “products” and tailor them with official logos to spread the government propagandized message:[i]

“COVID-19 DISINFORMATION TOOLKIT

These Toolkit resources are designed to help State, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT) officials bring awareness to misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories appearing online related to COVID-19’s origin, scale, government response, prevention and treatment. Each product was designed to be tailored with local government websites and logos.

Download and share these resources—talking points, FAQs, outreach graphics, and posters—to help spread awareness.”

The toolkit directs well-intended users to use images, talking points, and documents to deliver a message. There is only ONE source of trusted information — you guessed it — state and local agencies who rely upon the CDC!

So, the picture is becoming more clear on how the US government operationalized a propaganda campaign on its own people from the very beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. They took these steps:

1) establish a single source of truth — the CDC,

2) weaponize CISA to declare “disinformation” their target,

3) enlist a legion of volunteer deputies without any official authority or accountability to operate within social media and all walks of life, giving public service messages telling Americans the CDC is the only trusted source of information. The converse of this assertion–anything else must be considered untrue and up for being nailed as “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.”

Don’t be surprised if FOIA-obtained documents demonstrate CISA and CDC were operating as partners in established campaigns with social media, mainstream television, print media, corporations, schools, and every aspect of life. Nothing can be more dangerous to public health. Directing all trust to a single source of medical information that is not contemporary, has no regular schedule of review or public briefings, is not transparent with data (e.g., the withheld V-Safe dataset), and has woefully lagged on major scientific developments (contagion control, testing, vaccine safety).

It’s a mind-blowing reality that our government agencies, in a planned and coordinated manner, have operationalized a plan to control information and spread propaganda in order to influence behavior. They pitted agencies against citizens and individuals against one another and set social media as the main battleground. The CDC and DHS CISA should be prime targets of US Senate and Congressional Investigations into our disastrous pandemic response.

[i] DHS CISA Publication: “We’re in This Together. Disinformation Stops With You.”

November 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

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