UK bank Coutts dropped British politician Nigel Farage as a customer not because his accounts contained insufficient funds but because his social and political views were incompatible with its “values,” according to a 40-page dossier compiled by the bank and seen by the UK Telegraph on Tuesday.
While admitting “there is no evidence of regulator or legal censure of [Farage],” the document concluded Farage was no longer “compatible with Coutts given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organization.”
“This was not a political decision, but one centered around inclusivity and purpose,” the file stated, recommending the UKIP founder be put on a “glide path” to debanking as soon as his mortgage deal concluded – even though he was described as “professional, polite and respectful” in his dealings with Coutts.
While searching for a legitimate reason to drop him, Coutts apparently tried to leverage Farage’s “Russian connections,” only to find he did not have any. The file discussed his appearances on RT, where he was last a guest in 2017, alongside a claim about receiving payment from the Russian network that the bank admitted was bogus, and lamented that his comments about the conflict in Ukraine “fall short of endorsement” of the Russian position.
The bank ultimately settled on reputational risk. Farage “presents a material and ongoing reputational risk to the bank” as he is “regularly (almost constantly) the subject of adverse media,” the document explained, citing dozens of unfavorable news articles, including many from partisan sources like Hope Not Hate and Labour Movement for Europe.
The populist “is seen as xenophobic and racist” and a “disingenuous grifter” who promotes values that “do not align with the bank’s,” the dossier stated, referring to comments that were “distasteful and appear increasingly out of touch with wider society,” reportedly including tweets expressing his belief that the UK should leave the European Convention on Human Rights. His friendships with former US president Donald Trump and Serbian tennis champion Novak Djokovic were also brought up as liabilities.
When Farage revealed last month that Coutts had closed his account without giving a reason, the bank claimed his balance had fallen below the minimum amount required to maintain an account. The dossier, which he obtained through a subject access request, thoroughly contradicts the bank’s statement, explaining that his “economic contribution is now sufficient to retain on a commercial basis.”
Farage described the file to the Telegraph as a “Stasi-style surveillance report” that “reads rather like a pre-trial brief drawn up by the prosecution in a case against a career criminal,” noting the word “Brexit” appears 86 times and that Coutts found no fault with him before Brexit became an issue in 2016.
Israel’s water company Mekorot has this month reduced the water supply to the occupied West Bank cities of Hebron and Bethlehem, causing severe shortages for Palestinians, Quds Press reported yesterday.
Mohammad Al-Jaabari, a Palestinian from Hebron, said he has to wait for days in queues until he gets his turn to get a tank load of water for his house.
“However,” he told Quds Press while looking at the illegal Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba, “we see the settlers play with water, irrigate their trees and home gardens.”
Al-Jaabari said: “This is unfair, but who can deter the Israeli occupation in order to stop its unfair distribution of water?”
Hebron’s Deputy Mayor, Asmaa Al-Sharabati, said: “The Israeli occupation continues practicing its control of natural resources. This complicates the water problem.”
She said that the amount of water being provided to Hebron each day is “far less than the needs of residents,” adding that some areas that used to receive water once every 18 days are not sent supplies every 28 days. This too during the summer heat.
“We do not have any roles in the water supplies,” she told Quds Press. “All we have is to receive water from the Israeli company and ensure fair distribution among the Palestinian residents of the city.”
Al-Sharabati said everyone needs 100 litres of water a day, and 30 litres during emergencies. “A Palestinian in Hebron receives far less than 30 litres a day,” she said.
A senior figure in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) was placed in pretrial detention. Cleric Metropolitan Pavlo is facing charges for voicing opinions deemed too pro-Russian.
A Kiev court ordered Pavlo to jail on Saturday. The cleric’s bail was nearly $900,000, and he could remain in pretrial detention for a month. The judge claimed Pavlo violated a court order by contacting a witness in his trial. Pavlo, who is also known as Petro Lebid, says he did not know that the person was a witness.
On April 1, Pavlo was placed under house arrest. Though initially only scheduled for a month, his house arrest has been extended several times. The charges against Pavlo include inciting hatred and justifying the Russian war in Ukraine.
On Saturday, Moscow demanded Kiev release Pavlo. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria said, “We demand strict compliance by the Kiev regime with its international legal obligations, the immediate release of Metropolitan Pavlo, who is suffering from a serious illness, and the provision of proper medical care for him.” She added that the arrest was “yet another manifestation of political arbitrariness and lawlessness [by Kiev.]”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has waged a culture war. The UOC has been a primary target of the “derussification” campaign. On December 1, Zelensky announced that Kiev would attempt to expel all religious institutions with ties to Russia, arguing the move would make “it impossible for religious organizations affiliated with centers of influence in the Russian Federation to operate in Ukraine.”
Kiev further ratcheted up the campaign to erase the UOC by seizing the assets and placing travel bans on several of the church’s top officials. Additionally, a series of raids by Ukrainian police targeted the UOC.
Zelensky’s derussification campaign has extended far beyond the UOC. Kiev has nationalized the media, renamed public places named for Russian historical figures, banned books printed in Russian and outlawed political parties representing Ukraine’s ethnic Russians.
Australian Communications Minister Michelle Rowland is trying to push back against claims by Coalition MPs that the proposed upcoming legislation would lead to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.”
The newly proposed legislation aims to strengthen the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s (ACMA) abilities to manage digital platforms that are seen to propagate “misinformation and disinformation.” However, critics rightly know that the move will threaten the very essence of free speech.
Despite these assurances, skeptics like Coalition communication spokesman David Coleman argue that the regulator will inevitably need to form an opinion on what constitutes misinformation to ensure platforms comply with the new legislation.
“For government to start defining what can and cannot be said in a democracy is hugely concerning. This bill would allow that to happen,” Coleman said, to the Sydney Morning Herald.
The proposed bill gives ACMA the authority to collect information from digital platforms about how they adhere to existing codes.
Moreover, ACMA will have the power to introduce a new “code” for companies that repeatedly fail to address so-called misinformation and disinformation or establish an industry-wide “standard” requiring the removal of harmful content.
Failing to adhere to these standards will carry significant penalties. These include substantial fines, either $6.88 million or 5% of a company’s global turnover, whichever amount is higher.
This policy approach is not without its opponents. Critics argue the broad definitions of misinformation and disinformation as material that is “false, misleading or deceptive” and “reasonably likely to cause serious harm” could be abused by political subjectivity, potentially stifling legitimate views.
Coleman expresses concern over potential self-censorship by digital platforms due to fear of incurring hefty fines. The proposed legislation, in his view, could lead to the suppression of Australians’ authentic opinions. The exemptions within the bill for professional news content, authorized electoral content, and satirical material do little to assuage such fears.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, also expressed apprehensions about the bill’s potential to chill legitimate political expression online, due to the potential for imposing “binding standards” with severe penalties.
Despite previous attempts to increase ACMA powers by the former Morrison government in March 2022, draft legislation was never released. Rowland asserts the Albanese government’s openness to “constructive suggestions” to enhance the bill and is holding public consultations for feedback. However, the opposition has yet to take a formal stance on the legislation.
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Presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, in a conversation with former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, vehemently argued against the possible introduction of a digital dollar by the Federal Reserve. The discourse took place at an event spearheaded by the right-leaning Family Policy Alliance lobby group.
DeSantis, who has a long-standing aversion to Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) emphasized that any move towards the creation of a digital dollar would necessitate congressional authorization.
Despite this, he warned that the Fed might endeavor to push this financial innovation unilaterally – an act he contends is at odds with constitutional principles.
“If I’m the President, on day one, we will nix central bank digital currency,” DeSantis affirmed, expressing his hostility towards CBDCs.
The underlying cause of DeSantis’s staunch opposition is rooted in his belief that the Federal Reserve will exploit CBDCs to advocate an anti-cash, anti-crypto policy. The Florida Governor predicts a future where CBDCs usurp all other forms of legal tender, effectively granting the Fed the power to restrict purchases they deem unfavorable, such as fuel and ammunition.
The controversial issue of CBDCs has taken center stage as the 2024 electoral race intensifies. Many, especially within libertarian sections of the Republican Party, are apprehensive that such currencies might encroach upon the sacrosanct privacy rights of American citizens. There’s a growing chorus arguing that CBDCs could bestow governments with an unprecedented level of control over individual expenditure.
In his critique, DeSantis harnessed the emblematic values of America. He insinuated that proponents of CBDCs aim to establish a “social credit system” in the US, emphatically referring to CBDCs as a “threat to American liberty.”
DeSantis is not the lone voice in the wilderness expressing discontent with CBDCs. Republican contender Vivek Ramaswamy also shared similar sentiments. “Just like ESG [Environmental, Social, and Governance] came out of the 2008 financial crisis, central bank digital currencies are what is going to come out of this next one… This is likely where this is heading. It is a longer-term game to a disaster,” Ramaswamy said.
DeSantis’s skepticism towards CBDCs has been consistent. In his capacity as the Florida governor, he ratified a law in May barring CBDCs from achieving legal tender status. The aspiring president is pushing Republican-led states to adopt similar deterrents against CBDCs. As part of this mission, he has reached out to a coalition of 20 states to counteract federal endorsement of CBDCs.
Tucker: Are you concerned about Central Bank Digital Currencies?
DeSantis: "They want to get rid of cash. They want no cryptocurrency. They want this to be the sole form of legal tender. It will allow them to prohibit undesirable purchases like fuel and ammunition. So, the… pic.twitter.com/Lmv5OzerlF
The Israeli military’s deadly raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank fits into the parameters of war crimes under the Geneva Conventions, legal experts argue.
Susan Akram, a clinical professor at Boston University’s School of Law, said the raid, which killed at least 12 Palestinians and wounded dozens more, clearly amounts to a war crime for a number of reasons, including intentionally attacking a civilian population and attacking medical units.
“The Geneva Conventions include as war crimes during occupation, willful killings, willfully causing great suffering to an occupied population and extensive destruction of property not justified by military necessity,” Akram said during a webinar hosted earlier this week by the Arab Center Washington, DC.
There’s no doubt, she declared, that what Israel carried out in Jenin constitutes a war crime.
Daniel Levy of the US/Middle East Project and journalist Dalia Hatuqa, the other panelists on the webinar, also agreed that Israel’s actions in the West Bank amount to a war crime.
Akram said the narrative used by Israel that the raids on Jenin and other Palestinian cities like Nablus are an attempt to root out resistance groups does not stop its actions from being illegal under international law.
Pointing out that the West Bank is an occupied territory, she said, “Israel’s attacks on an occupied population are criminal in and of themselves because occupation law forbids the occupier to use military attacks against civilian targets in the territory it occupies.”
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), some 900 Palestinian houses were damaged and many of them became uninhabitable in the wake of the Israeli military’s raid on the Jenin refugee camp.
Adnan Abu Hasna, the spokesman for the UN agency, said on Tuesday that his fellow colleagues are still documenting the damage caused inside the camp during the onslaught.
The UNRWA’s priority is to help restore some sense of normality by resuming its services like education, healthcare and sanitation, he added.
“The other urgent priority is to provide cash assistance to families who were displaced from their homes, and help them pay for rent and rehabilitate their residences,” Abu Hasna noted.
Last week, a group of UN experts said Israel’s military raids targeting the Jenin refugee camp “may prima facie constitute a war crime.”
“Israeli forces’ operations in the occupied West Bank, killing and seriously injuring the occupied population, destroying their homes and infrastructure, and arbitrarily displacing thousands, amount to egregious violations of international law and standards on the use of force and may constitute a war crime,” the experts said in a statement.
Safi Ahmad Mohammad Jawabra, 11, was shot by Israeli forces in the head above his left eye with a rubber-coated metal bullet around 10 a.m. on May 29, 2022 at the entrance to Al-Arroub refugee camp, near Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank, according to documentation collected by Defense for Children International – Palestine. Safi was walking home from school after completing his final exam in math when an Israeli soldier shot him in the head unexpectedly and without warning. While running away, another group of Israeli soldiers around 50 meters (164 feet) away fired tear gas canisters in front of Safi.
Former security state operatives occupy the highest positions at Big Tech internet platforms, and are responsible for censoring political content and limiting public debate, Glenn Greenwald reported on Tuesday.
Americans have been aware of security state efforts to control media narratives since the 1970s, when the Senate’s Church Committee exposed the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, Greenwald told listeners of his podcast, “System Update.”
Under that program, CIA agents covertly infiltrated and influenced the nation’s largest news organizations.
Project Mockingbird’s exposure greatly embarrassed the media and the government, as the CIA is forbidden from targeting the American public, Greenwald said.
Over the past decade, a series of whistleblowers revealed the U.S. security state has again amped up its covert targeting of American citizens, particularly since the start of the post-9/11 War on Terror.
News that intelligence agencies spied on Americans or infiltrated the news media was considered scandalous just over a decade ago.
But today, things have changed, Greenwald said. In fact, it has become common for top news outlets to openly hire former U.S. security state agents to report and comment on the news.
The U.S. government, in part, dictates what content social media platforms ought to allow on their sites, Greenwald said. But, he added:
“There’s another element, another layer to it, which is they’ve infiltrated these Big Tech companies — these ex-CIA agents have — exactly like they’ve infiltrated corporate news outlets. They’re all over these censorship regimes.”
Greenwald said top positions at the tech firms are now held by people coming directly from intelligence agencies.
For example James Baker, who the Twitter Files revealed was involved in most censorship decisions prior to Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform, worked as general counsel for the FBI before he became deputy counsel for Twitter.
“So the FBI sent its top lawyer to go work in the part of Twitter that censored political content,” Greenwald said. “Do you understand? That’s the FBI controlling our domestic political discourse and the limits of it.”
MintPress News profiled a number of former CIA agents who now manage and develop misinformation policies for Facebook in a July 2022 article that Greenwald shared.
According to the article, the problem isn’t that these people are incompetent. “The problem is that having so many former CIA employees running the world’s most important information and news platforms is only one small step removed from the agency itself deciding what you see and what you do not see online — and all with essentially no public oversight.”
Greenwald said this allows the intelligence agencies to maintain significant influence over news and information flows, while maintaining “some veneer of plausible deniability.”
The U.S. government doesn’t need to tell the platforms what to do because the people making the decisions rose in the ranks of the National Security State first — “meaning their outlooks match those of Washington’s,” Greenwald said, quoting MintPress News.
Greenwald said this is evidence of a multi-pronged effort, where on the one side, former security state operatives propagandize the American people on corporate media and on the other side, they control what can be said on the largest Big Tech platforms.
As a result, he said, the entire range of dissenting views is “simply banned.”
The ‘censorship-industrial complex’
The Twitter account @NameRedacted247 tracks the movement of security state operatives into social media corporations where they work on misinformation and disinformation.
The account provided a thread, which Greenwald’s team confirmed, reporting that as of December 2022, Google employed at least 165 people in high-ranking positions from the intelligence community.
Across the company there were 27 former CIA agents, 52 former FBI agents, 30 people who came from the National Security Agency (NSA), 50 from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and six from the Director of National Intelligence.
Facebook had at least 115 former security state operatives in high-ranking positions — 17 from the CIA, 37 from the FBI, 23 from the NSA and 38 from DHS.
Google’s “trust and safety team,” which manages what content is allowed on the platform, is managed by three former CIA agents who control misinformation and hate speech.
One of them, Nick Rossman, referred to “anti-vaxxers” on Twitter as “Nazis” and “Confederates,” Greenwald said, asking:
“Do you think these people are objective arbiters of misinformation? Or do you think they’re using their censorship power inside Big Tech for this in the same way that people inside corporate media are using it to advance the propaganda games of these agencies against their own citizens?”
Greenwald presented a series of online profiles of people who worked in intelligence for years or decades before recently moving into their new roles in Big Tech.
Since then, a massive “censorship-industrial complex” has grown up, Greenwald said, that includes the U.S. state, philanthropic foundations, “fact-checking” organizations, Big Tech, universities, think tanks, nonprofits and private contractors.
The ‘hallmark of totalitarianism’
But the most amazing part of this story, Greewnald said, is the lack of pushback by liberals, who used to be the primary critics of the security state. “Central to left liberal politics was the view that these agencies are nefarious,” he said. But that all changed with the Trump presidency:
“… in 2015, in 2016, the US Security state aligned itself against Donald Trump and devoted itself to sabotaging first the Trump campaign and then the Trump presidency.
“That’s where Russiagate came from. That’s where all of those scams came from, including the lie in 2020 if the Hunter Biden laptop was misinformation.”
And because there are now very few media outlets reporting critically on these agencies, he said, they are at “the peak of their power, more powerful than ever.”
Because of that, he said they are embedded in the biggest corporations that control information and propaganda in the U.S. — corporate media and Big Tech.
Greenwald concluded:
“This is why they’re so obsessed with destroying the few outposts of independent media, the few places they cannot control, because without those, they really do have a fully closed information system.
“And a fully closed information system is the hallmark of totalitarianism. If you can control how people think and prevent them from hearing dissent, you can control all of their actions because their actions are based in what their thoughts are.
“And if you can control their thoughts, you don’t even need to control their actions. And that is the system that is being created.”
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.
FBI Director Christopher Wray was grilled by lawmakers at a Thursday hearing called by the House Judiciary Committee that demanded answers about the bureau’s coordination with social media companies, its alleged abuse of a secret intelligence court, and use of informants during the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol Building.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has been blasted by US House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) for “weaponization of the government against the American people,” which he said had eroded public confidence in the integrity of the FBI, on Thursday.
Jordan and other GOP lawmakers spent several hours interrogating the federal law enforcement chief about a number of incidents they said proved the FBI was being used as a political bludgeon against conservatives, including the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to spy on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign during the 2016 election, a now-withdrawn memo from the FBI’s office in Richmond, Virginia, that suggested spying on Catholic anti-abortion groups over domestic terrorism fears, and news that some people involved in the breaching of the US Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, were paid FBI informants who acted as provocateurs.
In response, Wray pointed to the fact that he is a registered Republican Party member, telling lawmakers that “the idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background.”
He also rejected the GOP lawmakers’ assertions that the FBI used agent provocateurs to encourage people to commit crimes on January 6 or that the agency was protecting the Biden family by sitting on potentially incriminating information or suppressing a news story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop computer. However, he acknowledged the FBI’s failings in properly using the FISC, in line with previous findings by special counsel John Durham and a DoJ Inspector General’s report.
Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI agent and whistleblower over the bureau’s failure to stop the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said Wray was “evasive” and had to resort to “euphemistic bromides” to defend the FBI’s reputation, because of the demands placed on the bureau by US policies.
Noting that Wray had adopted a “9/11 changed everything” mindset, Rowley pointed out that “it’s one of the few things they don’t lie about: 9/11 did change everything. Between the Vietnam War and the so-called War on Terror, that now has morphed into a war on rival economic nuclear superpowers … has created all of this polarization and power mongering and control of the media through propaganda, which is what we’re talking about with the FBI now serving as liaison – if you want a nice term for it – our liaison telling social media what to censor.”
She noted that in a recent federal court order blocking the Biden administration from much of the coordination over suppressing so-called “disinformation” on social media, the judge noted there are some 80 FBI agents working in that area.
“We talked about all the work on violent crime and the FBI work against child predators, etc. I disagree that those are the priorities. The priority has been supporting the narrative. And you can see this going all the way back to Russiagate with [Peter] Strzok and all the rest, trying to do what they could on election issues, etc., and carrying through to today where 80 FBI agents are in this disinformation component.”
“He tried to say, ‘no no, it’s not about us declaring what is disinformation to the social media, it’s all about foreign influence’. So he’s trying to steer it in that direction, which makes it more difficult for the Republicans to attack. But in fact, I think it’s been acknowledged that this was a truth ministry. And in fact, that’s the Orwell term: Ministry of Truth. And that’s actually in the judge’s injunction, that the FBI is acting as a Ministry of Truth, deciding what is misinformation or not. And, of course, we’re living in an era where government propaganda has been legalized.”
Rowley turned to the subject of Ray Epps, an Arizona man who has filed a lawsuit against Fox News for pushing a story that Epps was “an undercover FBI agent and was responsible for the mob that violently broke into the Capitol and interfered with the peaceful transition of power for the first time in this country’s history,” according to the filing.
In a short video, Epps can be heard telling demonstrators they need to go into the Capitol but will probably be arrested for doing so, after which someone started chanting “Fed, Fed, Fed!”
“Let me just explain a few additional points about this business of ’undercover agents,’” Rowley told Sputnik. “This was a confusing thing, some of the Congress people didn’t understand: when you ask about an undercover agent, that’s a specific meaning. That means an actual FBI special agent who has gone through the special training that they give, behavioral training, to assume a role. It goes through a whole process. So what they really wanted to ask, Ray Epps was not an undercover agent by the FBI definition. What he was, if anything, was an informant, or they call it now a ‘confidential human source’ or something like that – there’s different categories even of confidential human sources.”
However, the former FBI agent pointed out that “when it comes to a protest, the FBI would have been remiss not to have lots of agents being on the ground. So, even if you go back to 2008 in the Twin Cities, when the Republican National Convention occurred, I was in a library room with 20 people talking about [how] there was going to be a march against the RNC and there was going to be a peace picnic, etc. And we were in this little library room: three of the people in the room were FBI or Joint Terrorism Task Force, okay? There were only 20 people listening and two or three of them were law enforcement. One guy was hiding, he thought I might recognize him, so he was hiding behind someone else.”
Rowley noted that the FBI also designates “special events” where they dispatch agents, which even includes non-political events such as golf tournaments.
“So that’s one thing. Then the other thing is the operation of actual FBI informants. And that, of course, has to be cloaked with complete secrecy. So I don’t know if it has to be in some cases, but that’s the rule, that’s the procedure. So of course, Wray was hedging on this. He would not answer.”
“A lot of the entrapments that we saw in the War on Terror, they were issues of an informant or a source egging on a group of people to pretend that they were, you know, bombing something. And that’s the modus operandi here. And so then, of course, the source has to back out. They what they do is they egg it on and then at the end, they don’t show up at the tail end. So for the actual event, that’s a common profile. That’s what in fact, that’s what they’re trying to do. So Ray Epps actually does fit that profile, whether or not he could have been just a normal person out there and, you know, maybe he got cold feet after a while. Or, he does fit the profile. And therefore, if Tucker Carlson said, ‘What’s the explanation?’ You know, really, that’s a good question. What is the truth? And, of course, the FBI won’t tell you the truth about any informants who commit criminal acts,” Rowley explained. “They’re allowed to do that under the cloak of secrecy.”
The Biden administration, along with mainstream politicians and journalists, are really upset that U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty has forbidden the executive branch of the central government from communicating with social-media platforms for the purpose of censoring or otherwise suppressing constitutionally protected speech. Judge Doughty’s action came in an important free-speech lawsuit filed against the government.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’
So-called respectable government officials, journalists, and pundits — the alleged adults in a room — consider the judge’s temporary injunction the worse thing that could possibly happen. The headline in the “progressive” publication The American Prospect screamed in panic: “Trump Judge Effectively Names Himself President.” (That “Trump judge,” by the way, was confirmed by the Senate 98-0.)
Imagine it: agents from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and other government agencies may not even “suggest” to Facebook, Twitter, etc., that they ought to take down or hide posts that take issue with the government’s official line about … whatever. Of course, when government officials suggest something to a private party, the suggestion may be interpreted as being accompanied by the subtle threat to retaliate legally if the suggestion is ignored. Think of protection racketeer telling a shop owner, “You have a nice place here. It would be a shame if it burned down.” Get the picture?
As we know, the government has been doing stuff like this for years, whether the matter was related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hunter Biden laptop, the Russia-Ukraine war, Russia’s alleged collusive 2016 election tampering, and who knows what else. According to a congressional committee, the FBI apparently even collaborated with Ukrainian intelligence to censor Americans’ frowned-on discussion of the Ukraine war on social media.
The posts that government agencies wanted suppressed included not only statements that were perhaps provably wrong — incorrect speech per se is constitutionally protected, incidentally — but also accurate information that the government simply found inconvenient, like posts and links that might make people hesitate to get the COVID-19 vaccine, wear masks, accept totalitarian social lockdowns, or trust that the coronavirus came from a Chinese market rather than a U.S.-funded lab in Wuhan, China.
Let’s remember that much of the challenge to the government’s take on the pandemic and other matters — criticism belittled as “tin-foil” conspiracy-mongering — turned out to be true. Contrary to the government’s position, the search for the truth requires the freedom to openly disagree and debate. That search abhors centralization, coercion, and the exclusion of anyone but the politically anointed “experts.” The right to free speech is a practical necessity if we are to pursue our well-being. Any step toward the paternalistic centralization of research and control of communication is not only immoral (by whatever standard you like) but also inimical to health, wealth, and other aspects of a fully human way of life.
In other words, as the judge acknowledged, the central government has gone to extraordinary lengths to control what the public can read and say on social media. It’s as if free speech were not a pillar of liberal philosophy and tradition — liberal in the older and best sense of a presumption of individual liberty in all spheres. Further, it’s as if the first restriction on government power in the Bill of Rights was not the absolute prohibition on the infringement of free speech and press. It’s a well-established principle of American law that the government may not pressure private parties to do what it itself may not constitutionally do. Yet that’s exactly what happened — repeatedly. It’s a disgrace. How can the government be trusted? It never could be.
Since the Biden administration, urged on by the power elite and the insecure establishment media, does not like being told that it may not violate our freedom of speech, it asked Judge Doughty to suspend his temporary injunction while the Justice Department appeals it. Judge Doughty said no. So the action moved to the appellate court. The Washington Post said that “The Justice Department’s filing signaled that it could seek the intervention of the Supreme Court, saying that at a minimum, the 5th Circuit should put the order on pause for 10 days to give the nation’s highest court time to consider an application for a stay.”
I sense desperation. The judge must have done something right. Remember that the injunction, alas, does not bar all government contact with social-media companies: he listed exceptions for actual criminality and national security. Only interference with constitutionally protected expression was included. I don’t remind readers of these exceptions to comfort them — the government will likely abuse the exceptions. I remind readers only to show that the order contains those exceptions. So what is the government so worried about? It says that the judge’s order is hopelessly vague and doesn’t address every possible eventuality. The answer is easy: if the choice is between vagueness in restricting government power and violating individual liberty, I know which I prefer. This is supposed to be America, isn’t it? Rights precede government.
Good people have enough to be concerned about when it comes to social media restricting their expression. Yes, they are private companies, and it’s easy to think of people who are so obnoxious that one wouldn’t want to encounter them online.
On the other hand, no one has reason to be confident that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (Google), etc., will use that right judiciously. That you have a right to do something does not mean you should do it. Can does not imply ought. YouTube reportedly deleted Jordan Peterson’s interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because it contains what it regards as — and well may be — misinformation about vaccines. Kennedy is challenging Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination. One need not agree with Kennedy on vaccines (I’m inclined not to) to be uneasy about YouTube’s decision. We also can’t rule out that YouTube acted in anticipation of the government’s disapproval. Government casts a shadow over everything.
We mustn’t call on the government to manage social media through antitrust or regulation. We should favor real competition. But we should insist on a prohibition of government action, direct and indirect, to suppress speech on those platforms or anywhere else. Judge Doughty understands that. Let’s hope other judges do too.
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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