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Free Speech on Trial

By Jeffrey Tucker | Brownstone Institute | March 1, 2024

In a lifetime of observing policy controversies and court cases, we’ve never witnessed anything as crucial to the future of the idea of freedom itself compared with what will transpire on March 18, 2024. On that day, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Murthy v. Missouri concerning whether the government can force or nudge private companies to censor users on behalf of regime priorities.

The evidence that they have been doing so is overwhelming. That’s why the 5th Circuit issued an emergency injunction to stop the practice on grounds that it is inconsistent with the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The censorship industrial complex is working right now and hourly to delete free speech in America. That injunction was stayed pending a review by the highest court.

The case itself hasn’t even gone to court. This decision is only about the injunction itself, which was issued based on the alarming results of discovery alone. Essentially, the lower court is screaming “This must stop.” The Supreme Court is trying to assess whether the violations of liberty are extreme enough to justify a pre-trial intervention now.

A positive ruling for the plaintiffs doesn’t solve every problem but at least it will mean that freedom still stands a chance in this country. A ruling for the defense, which is essentially the government itself, will give license to every federal agency – including those that operate in secret like the FBI and CIA – to threaten every social media and media company in this country to delete any and all content that runs contrary to the approved narrative.

There will be celebration in Washington if this happens. On the other hand, there will be tears if the court decides for the defense. It could be that the court will take an in-between position, refusing to let the injunction go ahead and promising some possible decision at a later date pending trial. That would be a disaster because it could mean three or more years of full censorship pending an appeal of whatever the outcome of the trial is.

Free speech is everything. If we don’t have that, we have nothing and freedom is toast. All other problems pale in comparison. There are plenty of them, from healthcare to immigration but if we don’t have free speech, we cannot get the truth out about any of them. The censorship industrial complex is wholly dedicated to making sure that we have no debates at all and that dissident voices are not even heard.

As it is, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook – and many more besides – already heavily restrict speech. They work in cooperation with government and those tasked by government to do elite bidding. We know this for a fact.

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he discovered a vast censorship machine operating on behalf of the FBI and other agencies. Millions of posts were being taken down along with users. He has done his best to rip out the guts of this borg. Doing so entirely changed the character of the site. It became useful again.

Not even the scale of the problem is widely understood. Usually people say that free speech is necessary to protect minority opinions. In this case, the numbers don’t matter to the censors. You could have 90% of users trying to advance an idea and still have it censored. This is what the old Twitter did. It was daily and hourly attacking the company’s user base. This was their job, no matter how much it contradicts the whole point of social media.

Brownstone is predictably throttled by all these companies but it is not just about us. It is about everyone who disagrees with the Davos “Great Reset” agenda. This could pertain to EVs, gender transitions, lockdowns, immigration, or anything else. Even now, the Google Artificial Intelligence engine extols the glories of lockdowns, masking, and mass injections while completely ignoring contrary science. This is how they want things to be. Google’s search engine is no better. It might as well be a federal agency.

The Justices hearing the case will be in an awkward position. My guess is that none of them even know that this was going on to the extent it is. They will likely be shocked when they look at the evidence proving that there is a trillion-dollar industry in full operation that has massively distorted the public mind. Every federal agency is involved, deeply embedded in the operations of all media companies and digital technology, which in turn requires universal surveillance and persecution of contrary voices.

Until just a few years ago, this entire industry – which involves federal agencies, universities, nonprofits, shadow companies, bogus fact-checks, and every manner of spook-operated front companies – was not known to exist. Now that we know, we are shocked by the extent of it. It has invaded the whole of our lives to the point that we cannot tell the real news from that which is fed to us by intelligence agencies. Even worse, we’ve come to expect that most of what passes for approved opinion is flat-out false.

The Justices will discover this truth. They will likely be astonished. But they will also be taken aback by how integral to our lives it has become. As it turns out, the federal government for nearly a decade has placed a very high priority on curating the public mind, lying at every turn for its own benefit and that of its industrial partners.

Everyone in the old Soviet Union knew for sure that Pravda spoke for the Communist Party. But do people understand that their Google search results and Facebook timelines are no better? It’s not clear whether and to what extent people do understand this but it is our reality.

Will the Justices really be willing to pull the plug on the entire machinery? Doing that would be more disruptive of an established interest group than anything the court has done in many years or even ever. It would fundamentally change the way our technologies work. It would be devastating to federal agencies. Policing such a new system called free speech would be another matter entirely. It would mean that thousands of people would suddenly have nothing to do. That would be wonderful, but would it happen?

As I say, censorship is now an entire global industry. It involves the world’s most powerful foundations, governments, universities, and influencers. It seems like everyone wants a part in crushing what they called “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and “malinformation,” which is true information that they don’t want out. We are surrounded by this machinery of control and yet most people have no clue.

Every federal agency at this point has taken it upon themselves to cajole every information provider into rigging the system so that only one perspective gets out. This has a massive impact on public opinions.

As an example, four years ago, I wrote an article that accidentally made it through the censors and I watched as millions read my piece. Even now, I hear about it at cocktail parties coming from total strangers who don’t know that I’m the author. Nothing like that has happened since that magical day. Most of my writing goes into a dark hole, and this is despite writing daily for the 4th largest newspaper and having access to a huge public forum at Brownstone. People without such access do not stand a chance. Their posts on Facebook are disappeared the instant they post, while YouTube slams their content as contrary to community standards, with no other explanation.

Self-censorship has become the habitual practice of the intellectual class. Otherwise you only beat your head up against the wall and make yourself a target. Minute-by-minute in real time, public opinion is being shaped by this wicked industry, which dramatically distorts political outcomes.

As I say, this is surely the most important issue we face. A decision by the Supreme Court to let this go on – seeing no real issue here – will lead straight to our doom and the death of freedom itself.

There’s an additional problem that is very serious. These days, there is a massive race on to program censorship into the algorithms themselves so that no one is actually doing it, so that there cannot be any real defendants in a case against them. AI will soon be running everything so that Google and Facebook etc can simply say that their machine learning is doing the dirty work.

Perhaps one of the reasons AI has hit us with such a rush is precisely because of this case before the court. The deep state and its industrial partners are not going to give up easily. Everything depends on their victory over free speech, so far as they are concerned.

This is very worrisome, which is why one should hope for a sweeping statement by the Supreme Court that reaffirms the fundamental American commitment to have government completely out of the business of manipulating public opinion through curating what information you see and read and what you do not see and read.

It’s tragic that such a fundamental human right should so heavily depend on the majority decision of this one body. It’s not supposed to work this way. The First Amendment is supposed to be law but these days, the government has built an entire empire around the idea that it simply does not matter. The job of the Supreme Court is to remind our overlords that the people are not merely putty in the hands of deep state agents. We have fundamental rights that cannot be abridged.

There is a rally scheduled outside the court on March 18th, with many speakers making themselves available to the press. Note the sponsoring organizations: these are the freedom fighters in America today. You are welcome to join us.

It won’t sway the court, of course. And the crowds will surely be thinner than they otherwise would be given how much success the censorship industry already enjoys. Still, it is worth a shot.

Truly, we should all shudder to think of the future of American freedom in absence of a decisive statement by the court on behalf of the basic liberty the Framers intended be protected for everyone.

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute.

March 4, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

Epstein victims sue FBI

RT | February 15, 2024

A dozen victims of Jeffrey Epstein have sued the FBI, alleging that the agency failed to properly investigate the notorious sex offender. They claim that the FBI sat on reports about Epstein’s activities for two decades, allowing the victims to be “trafficked, abused, raped, tortured and threatened.”

The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in New York on Wednesday by 12 women, all of whom are referred to in the document as anonymous Jane Does.

“For over two decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation permitted Jeffrey Epstein to sex traffic and sexually abuse scores of children and young women by failing to do the job the American people expected of it,” the complaint alleges. “As a result of the continued failures of the FBI, Jane Does 1-12 bring this lawsuit to get to the bottom – once and for all – of the FBI’s role in Epstein’s criminal sex trafficking ring.”

According to the lawsuit, the FBI began receiving tips, reports, and complaints about Epstein’s alleged trafficking and abuse of minors in 1996, but failed to open a case or share this information with other law enforcement agencies. The FBI eventually opened a case in 2006, two years before Epstein pleaded guilty to a child prostitution charge in Florida.

A controversial plea deal saw Epstein register as a sex offender and serve 13 months on supervised release in lieu of a possible life sentence. Despite the fact that he had been convicted for one offense and dodged a litany of other sex-trafficking charges, the FBI continued to ignore tips that flowed in over the next decade, the lawsuit claims.

“As a direct and proximate cause of the FBI’s negligence, plaintiffs would not have been continued to be sex trafficked, abused, raped, tortured and threatened,” the complaint said.

Epstein was eventually arrested in 2019 and charged with the trafficking of dozens of minors. He died awaiting trial in a Manhattan jail cell a month later, with his death officially ruled a suicide. Epstein’s girlfriend and “madam,” Ghislaine Maxwell, was sentenced to 20 years behind bars for child sex trafficking in 2022.

According to testimony from victims, Epstein and Maxwell recruited girls to perform sexual acts on themselves and their rich and powerful associates, and instructed these girls to recruit additional victims. Among the powerful men accused of abusing the girls was Britain’s Prince Andrew, who settled out of court with an accuser in 2022.

The plaintiffs behind the latest lawsuit are seeking an unspecified amount in compensation and damages from the US government.

The FBI has already been accused of negligence in its handling of the Epstein case. In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in December, agency Director Christopher Wray was asked why the FBI didn’t do more to stop the notorious pedophile. Wray promised to conduct an internal investigation to “figure out if there is more information we can provide.”

February 15, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , | Leave a comment

US spies behind ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy – report

US President Barack Obama and CIA Director John Brennan, December 14, 2012 in Washington, DC. ©  Pete Souza / The White House via Getty Images
RT | February 14, 2024

The US intelligence community inappropriately used foreign allies to target Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign to set up the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy ahead of the 2016 election, according to a trio of investigative journalists.

Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag – of ‘Twitter Files’ fame – published the first part of an investigation on Tuesday, in which they claim the so-called ‘Five Eyes’ were operationalized against Trump staffers, citing anonymous sources close to the House Intelligence Committee.

According to their report, President Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, had sent America’s partners – the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – a list of 26 Trump associates to target with data collection, misinformation and manipulation.

The Russiagate conspiracy involved multiple failures across western media networks to critically assess US intelligence claims that Russia had interfered in the 2016 US presidential election. A 2018 Pulitzer prize was awarded to Washington Post and New York Times journalists for their reporting on what was later to exposed as a false story.

“They were making contacts and bumping Trump people going back to March 2016,” said a committee source. “They were sending people around the UK, Australia, Italy — the Mossad in Italy. MI6 was working at an intelligence school they had set up,” the journalists claim.

Officially, the FBI only started looking into the Trump campaign that summer, after an Australian diplomat reportedly overheard an aide mention Russia. If confirmed, these findings would demonstrate that the US intelligence community had worked for months before that to set up just such a pretext.

In a statement to the investigative journalists, the FBI said it had made “missteps” in the 2016 and 2017 investigation of the Trump campaign, but has since implemented reforms to prevent it from happening again.

“The allegations that GCHQ was asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense,” a spokesman for the British surveillance agency said. “They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.” Shellenberger, Taibbi and Gutentag said they had never asked the GCHQ about “wiretapping.”

According to Shellenberger, there is a “10-inch binder” containing previously unknown documents about the intelligence community’s surveillance of the Trump campaign. The 45th US president had ordered these documents declassified, but they went missing instead. In a Fox News appearance on Tuesday evening, Shellenberger suggested the FBI’s August 2022 raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort may have been related to the missing binder.

After the US intelligence community created a pretext for investigating Trump for ‘ties to Russia,’ they spied on his campaign – and then his presidency – using a falsely obtained FISA warrant. The warrant was based on the ‘Steele dossier,’ a file compiled by a British spy in the pay of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, through several intermediaries. The FBI knew the dossier was false as early as January 2017, but continued using the FISA warrant for almost a year thereafter.

The FBI lawyer who altered evidence to obtain the warrant, Kevin Clinesmith, ended up sentenced to probation and his law license has since been restored.

February 14, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

CIA Had Foreign Allies Spy On Trump Team, Triggering Russia Collusion Hoax, Sources Say

By Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag | Public | February 13, 2024

Last year, John Durham, a special prosecutor for the Department of Justice (DOJ), concluded that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) should never have opened its investigation of alleged collusion by then-presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and Russia in late July of 2016.

Now, multiple credible sources tell Public and Racket that the United States Intelligence Community (IC), including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), illegally mobilized foreign intelligence agencies to target Trump advisors long before the summer of 2016.

The new information fills many gaps in our understanding of the Russia collusion hoax and is supported by testimony already in the public record.

Until now, the official story has been that the FBI’s investigation began after Australian intelligence officials told US officials that a Trump aide had boasted to an Australian diplomat that Russia had damning material about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

In truth, the US IC asked the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance to surveil Trump’s associates and share the intelligence they acquired with US agencies, say sources close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) investigation. The Five Eyes nations are the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

After Public and Racket had been told that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, had identified 26 Trump associates for the Five Eyes to target, a source confirmed that the IC had “identified [them] as people to ‘bump,’ or make contact with or manipulate. They were targets of our own IC and law enforcement — targets for collection and misinformation.”

Unknown details about the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign and raw intelligence related to the IC’s surveillance of the Trump campaign are in a 10-inch binder that Trump ordered to be declassified at the very end of his term, sources told Public and Racket.

If the top-secret documents exist proving these charges, they are potentially proof that multiple US intelligence officials broke laws against spying and election interference.

“They were making contacts and bumping Trump people going back to March 2016,” a source close to the investigation said. “They were sending people around the UK, Australia, Italy — the Mossad in Italy. The MI6 was working at an intelligence school they had set up.”

The IC, a source said, considered the 26 Trump campaign people identified to “bump” or “reverse target,” or manipulate through confidential human sources (CHSs), to be easy marks because of their relative inexperience.

Doing so was illegal, both because US law prohibits such intelligence gathering unless authorized by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant and because the weaponization of the IC for political purposes constitutes election interference.

…

Subscribers to Public substack can read the full report here…

February 14, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

ADL defines genocide and civil disobedience within the FBI

The looming threat to Middle East peace activism

By Grant F. Smith | IRmep | February 2, 2024 

As politicians and the Anti-Defamation League call for crackdowns on Middle East peace protesters, the ADL’s undue influence within the FBI as a trainer is finally exposed.

Basic Field Training Course

The Department of Justice released the Anti-Defamation League’s Basic Field Training Course (PDF). The course is mandatory for all FBI New Agent Trainees (NATs) and New Intelligence Analyst Trainees (NIATs). This release follows a decade of Freedom of Information Act requests and denials by the Department of Justice (PDF) and evasion by publicly funded content contributors.

The ADL course is developed and conducted by Anti-Defamation League (ADL) instructors. It selects materials from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. Marcus Appelbaum, Museum Director of Law, Justice and Society Initiatives in 2014 resisted any public review of the curriculum, stating, “Unfortunately we do not randomly send out the curriculum.” Appelbaum also denied that any of the large amounts of U.S. taxpayer funding supporting the museum paid for the curriculum.

Museum Director of Law, Justice and Society Initiatives Marcus Appelbaum denied curriculum release in 2014.

The ADL course facilitates a discussion of the USHMM video The Path to Nazi Genocide by asking trainees to watch and then consider “the challenges that police officers faced, and decisions they made in Germany during the Nazi era.” The video depicts the rise of Nazi Germany from WWI to the final WWII liberation of concentration camps replete with emaciated images of the dead and barely living.

The final question the video puts to agents in training is why the word “genocide” had to be coined in the aftermath. “As the world struggled to understand what had happened, a new word, genocide, was needed for these crimes — crimes committed by ordinary people from a society not unlike our own.”

The ADL training also requires viewing the civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize: No Easy Walk. Supplemental reading exposes new FBI agents to the bureau’s past role undermining Martin Luther King Jr. and documents Bull Connor’s relentless fire hosing and mass arrests of black protesters engaged in civil disobedience. The video ends with the triumphant 1963 March on Washington and JFK’s proposal for a Civil Rights Act.

Taken in context, the entirety of the Basic Field Training Course makes it clear that FBI trainees are ADL subordinates who must strive to meet with its approval. Page 9 of the guide even states, “as a new hire, we would like you….”

The unstated purpose of the course is positioning Israeli activities in the US and the ADL itself outside the purview of law enforcement and especially FBI counterintelligence. The ADL today is framed as trusted trainers and civil rights partners. That was not always the case. The ADL’s current privileged insider role training all new FBI special agents is the result of a secretive influence campaign that began more than eight decades ago. Internal FBI files about that campaign reveal the ADL’s true reasons for infiltrating the FBI.

In 1940 the ADL launched an intense effort to liaise with the FBI by offering a list of undercover ADL investigators to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI was reluctant to accept the ADL list. One FBI special agent told Hoover he found a proposed investigator resource to be “mentally unbalanced.” Others offered up by ADL, such as longtime political campaign donation bundler Abraham Feinberg, was known to the FBI as a WWII surplus conventional weapons smuggler for Israel and alleged unregistered foreign agent. Feinberg later financed Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons program.

The ADL offered to investigate persons of interest to the FBI. FBI Assistant Director P. E. Foxworth nixed that idea, telling Hoover the ADL was engaged in “shakedowns” of “loyal and innocent” Americans and “interested only in their own material benefit…”

This did not keep the ADL from announcing in 1942 it had conducted “373 investigations” on behalf of the FBI. This prompted Hoover to respond that private investigative agencies had “no excuse for existence” and that the FBI “had never asked the ADL to conduct an investigation.” On June 30, 1943, Luigi S. Crisculo, an American investment banker involved in Italian American causes, reported being baited by Anti-Defamation League operatives who claimed to be “unofficial auxiliaries of the Department of Justice” and were attempting to link him to Nazism.

The ADL also wanted to directly seed its operatives into the FBI. Arnold Forster (AKA Fastenberg) began developing ADL’s legal team in 1938 while simultaneously applying to become an FBI special agent in 1937 and 1939. Forster was formally rejected because in the view of the FBI he “dressed poorly, did not appear resourceful and would probably not develop.” Forster then became ADL’s chief investigator in 1940 and held formal and informal positions until 2003. Another longtime ADL investigator and operative named Frank Prince even campaigned to replace Hoover as FBI director. When caught out in 1942, the ADL offered to “disband within 24 hours.” The FBI did not take the ADL up on this offer since “we [the FBI] are not running the Anti-Defamation League.”

Throughout the 1940s the ADL continuously lobbied FBI field offices for meetings and joint events which befuddled some bureau insiders. One special agent in command reported to Hoover he could not “understand the insistence of the ADL that a representative of this Bureau address this group.” He felt, “there is some ulterior motive that causes them to be so insistent.”

One ADL motive was gaining privileged access to FBI files. In 1944 ADL’s Nissan Gross asked to periodically check FBI files to avoid “duplication of investigation.” Special Agent in Command Drayton rebuffed the ADL because “under the procedure…ADL would have an opportunity to learn of the informants being utilized…and those under investigation.”

In 1968 FBI Director J Edgar Hoover finally dropped his longstanding opposition and ordered field offices “to immediately make certain that you have established liaison with the head of the ADL regional office in your territory…” Such liaisons continue to this day. Since then, joint public events, training sessions and even FBI director “love letters” to the ADL have been ongoing.

Given its insider status at the FBI, growing piles of Palestinian corpses in Gaza and resultant mass protests and civil disobedience in the U.S. may not be a challenge for the ADL which, along with other nodes of the Israel affinity ecosystem, works to censor open debate and protests of concern to Israel. As an FBI trainer, the ADL has finally transcended scrutiny. The FBI previously, acting on credible evidence, investigated ADL for domestic spying before political pressure on former Attorney General Janet Reno quashed the investigation. Such investigations of the ADL today would be unthinkable.

Even before the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel and Israel’s attack on Gaza and settler rampages in the West Bank, the ADL was seeding the FBI with false threat reports conflating peaceful US based Palestinian rights groups with white nationalist movements.

ADL statistics and reports also attempt to reframe pro-Palestinian protests and civil disobedience in the United States as Antisemitism and “hate crimes” rather than anything resembling legitimate Civil Rights era nonviolent action. Under its forced “liaison” with the ADL, the FBI must pay close attention to and respond to all the ADL’s false and misleading allegations lest other nodes of the Israel affinity ecosystem work in concert to threaten its funding, political appointees or mundane issues such as a new headquarters.

The ADL and Israel lobby ecosystem acted quickly to compel Congressional “genocide threat” hearings—focused not on the reality of tens of thousands of dead in Gaza, but rather the discomfort felt by American Zionist students at elite Ivy league universities encountering campus cease fire rallies.

Following the ADL worldview, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently alleged that pro-Palestinian protesters picketing her home were acting on behalf of Russia and China and demanded that the FBI investigate them as foreign agents.

It is ironic that Pelosi, who has benefited all her career from support from AIPAC, an Israeli foreign influence operation set up with $60 million in foreign funds laundered into the US in the 1950s and 1960s, hurls foreign agent accusations at peaceful protesters.

Nancy Pelosi speaking at Israel’s Knesset in 2022Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi speaking at Israel’s Knesset in 2022

However, the threat of looming FBI crackdowns, covert or overt, on protesters calling for Middle East peace should not be discounted given the ADL’s success infiltrating its worldview into the bureau. Although FBI Director Christopher Wray has promised the FBI will not investigate or surveil peaceful pro-Palestine protests, his promise leaves out entrapment operations. The pressure for the bureau to “get results” by seeding plots, weapons and entrap mentally unbalanced individuals in “Palestinian terror plots” may soon become overwhelming. Such “successes” would instantly gain uncritical, widespread mainstream media diffusion and touch off more congressional hearings for further operations and funds to Israel.

One certainty is that even as the International Court of Justice demands Israel refrain from violations of the Genocide Convention, the ADL will certainly not teach such relevant current day lessons to new generations of special agents.

Review primary sources referenced in this article at the Israel Lobby Archive.

February 2, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Abolish the FBI

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | January 23, 2024

Among the worst mistakes America has ever made is to bring into existence the Federal Bureau of Investigation — the FBI.

A national police force is an essential part of any tyrannical regime. Just look at any tyrannical foreign regime, either right wing and left wing, over the past 100 years. I will guarantee you that you will find a national police force. It serves as a useful adjunct to a big military-intelligence establishment to keep people in line.

Of course, we are all familiar with such things as COINTELPRO and the FBI’s murder of innocent people at Waco and Ruby Ridge. We are also familiar with the FBI’s fierce opposition to Martin Luther King and the civll-rights movement as well as the virtual certainty that the FBI orchestrated King’s murder. We are also familiar with former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s longtime penchant for keeping secret files on people’s personal lives with the aim of blackmailing them into supporting whatever the FBI wants. We are also familiar with the FBI’s ardent support of the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the anti-communist crusade. We are also familiar with the FBI’s active role in America’s political system.

Less familiar is the FBI’s ubiquitous practice of inducing people to commit crimes in order to justify its continued existence and its continued receipt of taxpayer-funded largess. That practice involves entrapping people into committing crimes and then proudly patting itself on the back for “keeping America safe” by supposedly busting dangerous criminals.

An example of this sordid practice is detailed in a January 19, 2024, article in the New York Times that involved four men whose lives were partially destroyed by the FBI as part of its attempt to make itself look good by creating and encouraging a crime supposedly committed by those four men.

The four men — James Cromitie, Laguerre Payen, David Williams and Onta Williams — were from Newburgh, New York, and became known as the “Newburgh Four.” Given the FBI’s history of viewing Martin Luther King and the civil-rights movement as communist agents, it’s not surprising that the FBI targeted four Black men for its entrapment scheme. The fact that they were poor also figured into the FBI’s plot, given that the FBI used the lure of big amounts of taxpayer money to induce the men to commit a crime.

The scheme was part of the FBI’s post-9/11 plot to invent criminal conspiracies to commit terrorist attacks. That’s what the FBI did with the Newburgh Four. The FBI used the services of an informant named Shahed Hussain. The FBI had Hussain infiltrate various mosques and identify poor people who could be induced to engage in acts of terrorism. That would enable the FBI to exclaim, “We’ve busted terrorists! We’re keeping you safe! Give us more taxpayer money!”

Hussain promised the Newburgh Four $250,000 if they would agree to participate in a terrorist plot. After several months of refusing the offer, the four black men, at least one of whom was unemployed and broke, agreed to participate in bomb plots at various synagogues.

The men were busted and given 25-year jail sentences. They had served 14 years in jail until a heroic federal judge recently ordered their release. As reported in the New York Times article, the judge, Colleen McMahon, called the case “notorious.”  She pointed out that “nothing about the crimes of conviction” had been of the “defendants’ own making.” She pointed out that the FBI’s agent in the crime, Shahed Hussain, was a “small time grifter and petty drug dealer.”

Judge McMahon correctly pointed out that the “real lead conspirator was the United States.” She added, “The F.B.I. invented the conspiracy; identified the targets; manufactured the ordnance.” The New York Times pointed out that McMahon added that the FBI “federalized” the charges — ensuring long prison terms — by driving several of the men into Connecticut to view the “bombs.”

After 14 years in jail on FBI-manufactured crimes, the Newburgh Four are free. But the best way to ensure that the FBI doesn’t destroy other people’s lives is to abolish it. Its dismantling would go a long way toward restoring freedom and justice in America. Anyway, criminal justice belongs at the state and local level, not the federal level.

January 25, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Islamophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Jim Jordan Demands Answers After Biden Admin Caught Flagging “MAGA” And “Trump” To Track Political Opponents’ Financial Transactions

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | January 18, 2024

Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Wednesday, announced that it had obtained documents revealing that federal agencies have flagged financial transactions for financial institutions for people using politically sensitive words such as “MAGA” and Trump.”

In a letter to Noah Bishoff – who was a former FinCEN Director (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) – and now an Anti Money Laundering (AML) officer at fintech company Plaid, Inc. Jordan described situations in which Americans buying bibles or shopping at sporting good stores might find their transactions flagged.

New documents obtained by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government reveal that the federal government flagged terms like “MAGA” and “TRUMP” for financial institutions if Americans used those phrases when completing transactions. Individuals who shopped at stores like Cabela’s or Dick’s Sporting Goods, or purchased religious texts like a bible, may also have had their transactions flagged. This kind of pervasive financial surveillance, carried out in coordination with and at the request of federal law enforcement, into Americans’ private transactions is alarming and raises serious concerns about the FBI’s respect for fundamental civil liberties. – Judiciary.house.gov

“The Committee and Select Subcommittee have obtained documents indicating that following January 6, 2021, FinCEN distributed materials to financial institutions that, among other things, outline the ‘typologies’ of various persons of interest and provide financial institutions with suggested search terms and Merchant Category Codes (MCCs) for identifying transactions on behalf of federal law enforcement,” reads the letter.

“These materials included a document recommending the use of generic terms like ‘TRUMP’ and ‘MAGA’ to ‘search Zelle payment messages’ as well as a ‘prior FinCEN analysis’ of ‘Lone Actor/Homegrown Violent Extremism Indicators,” the letter continues. “According to this analysis, FinCEN warned financial institutions of ‘extremism’ indicators that include ‘transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel to areas with no apparent purpose,’ or ‘the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.’ In other words, FinCEN urged large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression.”

The Committee announced that it’s seeking interviews with senior intelligence officials, including Bishoff.

January 18, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

FBI Recruiting, Entrapping Autistic Children Terror Patsies for National Security

By Ben Bartee | Armageddon Prose | January 15, 2024

Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen.

The good folks over at the Department of Justice (Ministry of Love), are spending our hard-earned bucks forked over to the IRS at gunpoint to recruit and entrap autistic adolescents in manufactured terror plots in the name of national security.

The Intercept :

“Humzah Mashkoor had just cleared security at Denver International Airport when the FBI showed up. The agents had come to arrest the 18-year-old, who is diagnosed with a developmental disability, and charge him with terror-related crimes. At the time of the arrest, a relative later said in court, Mashkoor was reading ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid,’ a book written for elementary school children.

Mashkoor had gone to the airport on December 18 to fly to Dubai, and from there to either Syria or Afghanistan, as part of his alleged plot to join the Islamic State. The trip had been spurred by over a year of online exchanges starting when Mashkoor was 16 years old with four people he believed were members of ISIS. According to the Justice Department’s criminal complaint, the four were actually undercover FBI agents. As a result of his conversations with the FBI, Mashkoor could face a lengthy sentence for attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization…

Law enforcement agents first became aware of Mashkoor’s online activities in support of ISIS in November 2021. But instead of alerting his family, Mashkoor’s lawyers told The Intercept, FBI agents posing as ISIS members befriended him a year later and strung him along until he became a legal adult.

‘It is appalling* that the government never once reached out to his parents, even while they were sending undercover agents to befriend him online starting when he was 16 years old,’ said Joshua Herman, a defense attorney representing Mashkoor. ‘Almost all of the conduct he is alleged to have committed took place when he was a juvenile.’”

*Appalling, perhaps, but not shocking. Why would the FBI agents try to prevent crime when they can get a promotion out of egging it on? There’s no money or prestige in quietly extinguishing terror in the womb.

What they need to sell to the masses is spectacle — Bread and Circus.

Anyone who knows anything about how the feds work recognizes this modus operandi:

·       recruit a mentally ill patsy

·       pump them full of cash and bad ideas

·       set up a terror plot on their behalf

·       swoop in to save the day from the threat that they created in the first place

·       Parlay the alleged foiled terror plot into fatter budgets to do more of the same

And around and around we go!

I, for one, feel much safer now that the FBI is capturing autistic minor terrorists for posting naughty stuff online and putting them in prison for life where they belong.

God bless our heroes in law enforcement.

Where would we be without the FBI?

That’s a rhetorical question: inundated with autistic child terrorists, obviously.

They keep us safe. They keep us warm. They give us life. The Lord has sent them down from heaven to calm our flighty hearts.

And, by the way — and this isn’t said these days nearly enough — thank God for Saint George W. Bush, whose handlers pushed the PATRIOT Act through.

It’s called the PATRIOT Act (in capital letters) because it’s patriotic to arrest and prosecute autistic children for their terror. If you disagree, you’re probably a terrorist yourself.

You don’t hate Freedom™, do you?

If you aren’t doing anything wrong, like doing autistic child terrorist the heroes of the FBI entrapped, what do you have to hide?

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist.

Related: More Fake Fed Nazis Show Up in Wisconsin

January 15, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, False Flag Terrorism | , , | Leave a comment

FBI Director Says Public-Private Sector Partnerships Are Important for Guarding Against “Misinformation”

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | January 14, 2024

During an interview with CNBC, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray lauded his agency’s partnerships with the private sector to target “misinformation” and “disinformation,” despite growing scrutiny over the way these types of partnerships have been used to censor the speech of Americans.

Wray complained that social media has escalated misinformation and disinformation and that AI is “taking it to the next level.” He then lauded private sector partnerships as a way to defend against the proliferation of AI misinformation and disinformation.

“I come back to the importance of partnerships to guard against it,” Wray said. “Not just our partnerships, but there’s an important role for the private sector. For example, AI companies, which many of which are very actively engaged in this fight to help detect deepfakes. You know, in some ways, AI is quite good at detecting AI, and so seeing the private sector invest its own time and money into trying to help detect some of the things that you’re describing I think is an important piece of it. Obviously, government partners, research community, etc., is another piece of it.”

After praising these private sector partnerships that target misinformation and disinformation, Wray attempted to downplay censorship concerns and insisted that these efforts only target foreign actors.

“To be clear, our role at the FBI is focused on the role of the foreign actors, as in the source of the information, not the content,” Wray said. “We’re not the truth police. We don’t aspire to be.”

While Wray asserted that these efforts target foreign actors, lawmakers have previously challenged this assertion and pointed to a federal court ruling that stated the FBI had flagged domestic speech as potential misinformation. This federal court ruling is part of a legal case that’s headed to the Supreme Court and alleges several federal agencies, including the FBI, violated the First Amendment by pressuring Big Tech companies to censor the speech of Americans.

Numerous reports have also detailed how the FBI has flagged the speech of Americans to Big Tech companies for censorship.

January 14, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Biden: Vote for Me or Hitler Wins

By James Bovard | January 8, 2023

“Endless hysteria will keep you free,” said none of the Founding Fathers. But President Joe Biden missed that message before his absurdly overheated speech last Friday near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Biden draped himself in Revolutionary War virtue as he demanded that Americans quiver in fear at the prospect of his reign ending. Biden invoked the third anniversary of the January 6 Capitol clash to effectively call for canceling the 2024 presidential election.

At a minimum, Biden wants to turn the November election into a referendum on Adolf Hitler. Biden boasted, “We are still a nation that gives hate no safe harbor.” A few minutes before that uplifting assertion, Biden accused Donald Trump of “echoing the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.” CNN reported last week that Biden campaign aides plan to go “full Hitler” on Trump, making “a direct comparison to the Nazi leader rather than couching their attacks by saying Trump ‘parroted’ him.” A few weeks ago, the Biden campaign posted a graphic on Twitter comparing Trump and Hitler’s rhetoric.

Biden continually equated democracy with freedom. And whatever is good for democracy is “close enough for government work” to freedom. Biden declared, “Democracy means having the freedom to speak your mind.” Unless Team Biden disapproves of your thoughts, of course.

Biden neglected to explain why his vision of democracy justifies the near-total suppression of freedom of speech for his opponents. On July 4, Federal Judge Terry Doughty condemned the Biden administration for potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history,” and a federal appeals court condemned Team Biden for “suppressing millions of protected free-speech postings by American citizens”—mostly by conservatives and Republicans.

“If only Uncle Joe had known about that abuse,” right? Like hell. Biden’s Justice Department is fighting tooth and nail at the Supreme Court to preserve his power to secretly censor anyone the feds claim is spouting disinformation, perhaps including denying that Biden is God’s gift to America.

Another key to Biden’s vision of democracy is that the president is entitled to imprison peaceful protestors who opposed him. Biden proved the villainy of Trump supporters by touting case numbers from January 6: “Since that day more than 1,200 people have been charged for the assault on the capitol, and nearly 900 of them have been convicted and they have been sentenced to more than 840 years in prison.”

Biden neglected to quote the bombshell Washington Post report today revealing that vast numbers of the January 6 charges have been crap cases. Federal judges have rejected Biden Justice Department sentencing demands in almost 90% of the January 6 cases—an astounding record. If those cases were not being tried by juries overstocked with federal employees and NPR devotees, the prosecutions would have crashed and burned long ago.

The Supreme Court may obliterate many of the cases. More than 320 of the convictions against J-6 protestors hinge on a bizarre contortion of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley law enacted after corporations destroyed documents sought by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“The average sentence for those convicted of obstructing an official proceeding has been 39 months,” the Post reported. Former federal prosecutor Gene Rossi warns that the Supreme Court taking that case is a “red flag and a loud gong” because that law was the “North Star” used by prosecutors. If the Supreme Court strikes down the Biden twist of the 2002 law, that will make the January 6 prosecutions look like one of the worst witch hunts in American history.

Yet, according to Team Biden, the real problem is that not enough lives have been ruined for sinful thoughts on January 6. Last Thursday, Matthew Graves, Biden’s chief prosecutor for the District of Columbia, issued a warning of potentially thousands of more January 6 indictments: “If a person knowingly entered a restricted area [near the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021] without authorization, they already committed a federal crime. Make no mistake: Thousands of people occupied that area that they were not authorized to be present in in the first place.” Talking about hounding people who merely were in the general vicinity of the Capitol confirms that for Team Biden, “Trespassing plus thought crimes equals terrorism.”

Actually, Biden’s FBI already classifies all the people arrested for January 6 Capitol clash offenses as domestic terrorists—even people busted for “parading without a permit.” The FBI presumes that any American suspected of supporting the January 6, 2021 protests forfeited his constitutional rights. An FBI whistleblower revealed in congressional testimony in May 2023 that FBI headquarters pressured FBI agents to treat anyone who attended the January 6 protests as a criminal suspect. Roughly 2,000 pro-Trump protestors (including an unknown number of undercover agents and informants) entered the Capitol that day. But an FBI analyst exploited the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to unjustifiably conduct warrantless searches on 23,132 Americans citizens suspected of January 6 offenses “to find evidence of possible foreign influence, although the analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence,” according to FISA Chief Judge Rudolph Contreras.

Biden assured the audience that “we still believe that no one, not even the president, is above the law.” Okay, but what if the president or the vice president uses the names Robert Peters, Robin Ware, and JRB Ware as email aliases to hustle business deals for a family member? Is it OK for them to slip the law then?

The only way to assume that Biden is not “above the law” is to assume that his decrees alone are the law. The Supreme Court struck down his COVID vaccine mandate, his moratorium for evicting deadbeat renters, his $500 billion federal student loan forgiveness scheme, and numerous other Biden policies.

Biden spent half an hour fearmongering and then closed by promising “freedom from fear.” This is the famous Biden two-step—demagoguing to his heart’s content and then closing with a few schmaltzy uplift lines, entitling the media to re-christen him as an idealist.

Biden castigated Trump as the “Election Denier in Chief,” a new offense not yet been codified in the statute book. Biden endlessly warned that Trump posed a deadly threat to both freedom and democracy. Biden campaign masterminds were clever enough to permit an unknown local politician to deliver the “takeaway” from the day’s events. Biden was preceded at the podium by Dauphin County commissioner candidate Justin Douglass, who proclaimed that “Donald Trump represents a clear and present danger” to democracy. Since Trump is the ultimate enemy of the Constitution, anything that Biden and his campaign does to banish Trump from the ballot will be pro-democracy.

Obviously, if Americans value democracy, then the presidential candidate favored by the most voters in recent polls must not be allowed on the ballot. Team Biden favors a version of “Guardian Democracy” where voters are only permitted to cast ballots for candidates that the ruling class approves. This is part and parcel with the Democratic Party’s plan to let all future elections be determined by ballot harvesting and tsunamis of unverified mail-in ballots.

Why should we believe that democracy dies unless Biden gets four more years to violate the Constitution, censor and jail his opponents, and domineer practically every aspect of Americans’ lives (“step away from that gas stove before we have to hurt you”)?  As Thomas Jefferson declared long ago, “An elective despotism is not the government we fought for.”

January 8, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Epstein document dump is ‘coverup’ – plaintiff

RT | January 4, 2024

A much-hyped trove of nearly 1,000 newly-unsealed pages of court documents from a 2015 defamation case filed by a victim of infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein contains “no revelations,” conservative commentator Mike Cernovich claimed on Wednesday in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

Cernovich, working with Epstein defense attorney and accused sex trafficking participant Alan Dershowitz, sued to have Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s defamation lawsuit unsealed in 2017 and has previously claimed credit for the predator’s 2019 arrest.

In his post, he claimed the Southern District of New York (SDNY) had arrested Epstein in 2019 the weekend before the documents were first set to be unsealed as a result of his lawsuit, so as to prevent any of Epstein’s powerful friends, soon to be exposed in the documents, from being criminally charged.

To bolster his argument, he highlighted that the SDNY had the option to bring charges against Epstein, relating to the alleged payment for sex with minors between 2002 and 2005, at any point from 2002 onward. However, they chose to wait until just days before the “previously sealed records involving Jeff Epstein” were set to become public. These records contained the names of numerous influential figures to whom Epstein had allegedly trafficked underage girls.

“The indictment against Epstein does not charge anyone except Epstein, and there’s nothing to indicate that anyone who flew to Epstein’s private island has faced scrutiny,” Cernovich continued, arguing that “SDNY charged the lowest level offenses possible” so that they would be legally unable to raid that island – or even the pedophile’s New Mexico ranch – for weeks, allowing evidence to vanish. At least one safe, said to be in FBI custody, has never been seen again.

Meanwhile, Epstein himself died – allegedly by his own hand – shortly after his arrest while still in pretrial detention, the charges against him never having been aired inside a courtroom.

Acknowledging that “we’ll never know for certain” what was in the vanished safe, Cernovich insisted “we do know that the FBI has Jeffrey Epstein’s blackmail files” and that “very powerful forces have made sure we will never see it.”

Authorities raiding Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in 2019 found and photographed boxes of hard drives, videos, binders full of burned CDs, and other media, all individually labeled by Epstein.

However, it was never entered into evidence because the FBI did not initially have a warrant to remove it, according to a special agent who testified at Maxwell’s trial. When they returned with a warrant, the evidence was supposedly gone.

Epstein’s properties were well-equipped with surveillance equipment, according to several witnesses, and his victims have claimed he would pump them for blackmail material on the powerful men he trafficked them to for sex.

January 4, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , | Leave a comment

Biden accuser Tara Reade sues FBI

The whistleblower says she was targeted for retaliation

RT | December 20, 2023

Former US Senate aide Tara Reade, who has accused US President Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her while serving as a senator, filed a civil rights complaint against the FBI on Wednesday. Reade’s attorney says the federal government sought to intimidate and harass her during and after the 2020 election campaign.

In a complaint sent to the Office of the Inspector General of the US Department of Justice, Reade called for an investigation of FBI practices that “target Biden family whistleblowers for exercise of their First Amendment right to free speech,” according to a press release by Dr. Jonathan Levy, her London-based attorney.

Reade also requested copies of all information about her that the FBI may have obtained “through unconstitutional surveillance, search, and seizure tactics” and to have her FBI file expunged.

In a letter to the DOJ seen by RT, Levy described how the FBI – and, in particular, its Sacramento, California office – allegedly began an “operation” against Reade after April 2019 “in order to silence and surveil her and if possible falsely arrest her for criminal activities.”

At the time that the purported FBI probe began, Reade had just made public that Biden, then a US senator, had allegedly subjected her to a “violent sexual assault” on the Capitol grounds in 1993. Though she had reported the incident through the proper channels, her case was “suppressed by Congressional investigators to protect Senator Biden and the records sealed,” according to Levy.

Reade was not “an agent or associate” of former President Donald Trump, whom Biden challenged in the 2020 election, nor was she sponsored by any political organization or made any monetary demands of Biden, Levy noted. The attorney also pointed out that there was no indication of her involvement in any criminal activity.

According to the complaint, the FBI launched its operation “for the specific purpose of unlawfully intimidating, harassing, surveilling, and discrediting,” as well as potentially arresting Reade. Among those allegedly involved, Levy named Director Christopher Wray, Special Agent Michael Catalano, and NCA1 Supervisory Senior Resident Agent Andrew D. Forristel.

The lawsuit demands “an investigation of FBI practices” that led to a whistleblower becoming the target of a federal grand jury investigation and a criminal probe in California, “even after she requested FBI protection from death threats.” The DOJ IG was also asked to investigate the extent of the FBI’s alleged surveillance of Reade, including her “social media, communications and financial accounts,” and to provide copies of all the records thus obtained before they are expunged from her FBI dossier.

Reade has sought to protect her reputation by writing a book and starting a podcast. She has also contributed a number of articles to RT about the weaponization of sexual misconduct charges and whistleblower retaliation, among other subjects.

Earlier this year, fearing arrest for “an ominous menu of kangaroo-court offenses,” she sought political asylum in Russia while visiting Moscow.

December 20, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

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